The Rising Tide Of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific ed. by Moon-Ho Jung (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rising Tide Of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific ed. by Moon-Ho Jung S. Ani Mukherji THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific. Moon-Ho Jung. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2014. There is a well-worn narrative of racial progress in America according to which the state is the guarantor of the rights and liberties for people of color. From the Revolutionary War of The Patriot (2000) to the Civil Rights era portrayed in Mississippi Burning (1988), the federal government has been depicted as a magnanimous and trans-historical instrument of social change. This pervasive myth of the benevolent nation-state is, according to the editor of a new collection of historical essays, The Rising Tide of Color, “fatally flawed and horribly distorted” (8). To correct this pernicious fiction, editor Moon-Ho Jung has assembled essays from emergent leading scholars of American racism and radical social movements. The volume is framed by two excellent introductory essays by Jung and historian George Lipsitz. Jung’s “Opening Salvo” will remind some readers of the classic left histories of William Preston and William Appleman Williams. Jung provides a succinct, but critical overview of the forces of racism, empire, radical movements, and repressive violence as they have played out across the trans-Pacific from the “opening” of Asia to the present. It is an edifying primer attuned, in the tradition of Preston and Williams, to connecting our [End Page 136] contemporary crisis to the problems of the past. Lipsitz’s subsequent “Standing at the Crossroads” delves into the dilemmas of engaged radical historical scholarship. Nearly fifty years after the dawn of New Left history, the seasoned practitioner Lipsitz cautions that radical scholarship holds out both rewards and traps, outlining some common pitfalls—presumptions to vanguardism, syndicalist day-dreaming, archival obscurantism, self-aggrandizing academics, and self-indulgent misery. It is useful counsel for the novice and an important reminder for veteran researchers. The following four sections of the book—each comprised of two essays—are grouped thematically and in rough chronological order. As constraints of space preclude the discussion of each contribution, this review will highlight the essays that best capture the rethinking of region, transnationalism, state violence, and the formation of social movements promised by this volume. Denise Khor’s “Dangerous Amusements” imaginatively argues that the film culture of colonial Hawai’i’s plantation society provided an important basis for the making of a creole working-class. Tracing the circulation, manner of exhibition, and reception of early westerns, Japanese silent films, and “wholesome features,” Khor suggests that migrant laborers’ collective experience of going to the cinema paved the way for the making of an interracial labor movement in Hawai’i. Christina Heatherton’s “Relief and Revolution” also explores the formation of a multiracial class struggle on the eve of a wave of labor militancy in Depression-era southern California (and the world). Combining local detail with theoretical sophistication, the author balances political economy, state forces of repression, and internationalist solidarities in an account of workers’ radical confrontations with capitalism. Dan Berger’s analysis of the intellectual work of imprisoned radicals in 1970s California offers readers a number of insights. Especially revelatory is his discussion of the circulation of black radicalisms “from the rural and urban South to urban Los Angeles, and then again from the industrial metropolis to the small towns where the prisons were (and are) located,” and how these movements allowed prisoners to understand incarceration as a form of slavery that implicitly refuted Western claims to multiracial liberalism (231). Simeon Man’s “Radicalizing Currents” demonstrates how antiwar activism after the 1969 “Vietnamization” of the war led to “a short-lived yet remarkable global insurgency” (269). Following the example of the Third World solidarity set by the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba, American activists expanded their radical activities from the Pacific Coast of the US to imperial outposts in the Philippines and Okinawa in the 1970s, linking the struggle against American empire with local labor and anticolonial movements. Transnational in scope and attentive to intricacies of geography and intersectionality, the contributions to Rising Tide represent a promising wave...