Special Editor’s Note

Abstract

Special Editor’s Note SHIRLEY GEOK‐LIN LIM The decision to include the last selection was made by the entire editorial board. In addition to covering border crossings, diasporic studies, and cultural exchange and influences among residents of different nations, one important element of transnational American studies is the comparative view of official state policy. An international, or even continental, view of official policy throughout the Americas can be extremely revealing in terms of fleshing out attitudes within the different countries. This final piece, taken from Greg Robinson’s A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), offers an exemplary model of this approach. It investigates the removal, confinement, and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II throughout North America and distinguishes between official policies governing these actions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. While this history has received close attention from scholars of United States/American studies, it has not, until now, been examined in the broader context of parallel movements in Canada and Mexico. Robinson’s research makes emphatic the transnational forces undergirding seemingly domestic events and argues for the importance of specific historical elements in the formation of apparently separate and discrete, yet related, national policies.