Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, Columbia University

[pre-circulated paper]

 

“Uncertain Seas: Mobility, Migration, and Deep History in the Pacific”

Matt Matsuda, Professor of History, Rutgers-New Brunswick

The Pacific is less a space or geographical feature to be described than an overlapping and interlocking set of cultures, local places, and experiences of transit and connection. Broad narratives of the Pacific have long focused on “distance,” “isolation,” and “emptiness.” Yet the deep history of the Pacific is crowded with peoples and movements. These link and embody past and present in understandings of epochal canoe voyages on ancient seas, enslaved captives on ships of empire, stateless refugees afloat, workers from plantations and domestic households taken or seeking new lives and opportunities, and even entire populations threatened with displacement by global environmental change. Sketching some of these cases and showing how they connect and redefine migration and risk over centuries helps us analyze and think about the manifold trans-local histories and experiences that shape the Oceanian world.

 

“The Sea is an Occupation: Asian Seamen and the Tides of Empire”

Jason Oliver Chang, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies, University of Connecticut, Storrs

By the dawn of the twentieth century Asian mariners were a crucial workforce aboard the world’s ocean-going vessels. This was also true of the U.S. navy, merchant marine, and commercial fleets. Due to the convergence of maritime law, racial immigration restrictions, and transportation economics, these Asian mariners became impossible subjects, not immigrants, passengers, or laborers. The mostly Chinese, Filipino, and South Asian seafarers evaded familiar categories of racial exception to national citizenship. These sailors were not accidental participants in U.S. maritime operations, they were there because they were formed as racialized oceanic subjects by the previous four centuries of Asian seafaring culture and their entanglements with competing empires. This presentation uses new and unfinished research to explore the multiple and intersecting meanings of the term occupation as job, pursuit, habitation, and conquest. These four analytical frames help to surmise the ways that regional Asian maritime cultures became enmeshed with different and competing imperial projects. The aim of this approach is to evaluate the various conditions and deliberations that Asian seamen faced in order to interpret their lives at crossroads of the work, subordination, mobility, and belonging. Addressing these concerns alters typical narratives of racial citizenship from denied belonging to other political subjectivities not bound by nation-state norms.

 

“Scholastic Argonauts: Educational Migration and Risk for Chinese Students in the US, 1870-1930”

Emma Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In histories of Chinese migration to the US, educational migration has often been treated separately from other forms of migration and settlement, and generally spoken of in terms of opportunity, achievement, promise, and the emergence of the model minority. The framework of risk allows us to more fully consider other aspects of educational migration eclipsed by this narrative: namely the often-substantial perils involved, especially for the earliest generations of students in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. These perils even extended to potential loss of life. This paper will discuss what made educational migration from China to the US hazardous or risky – including factors such as US state practices of border control under Chinese Exclusion, transportation conditions, cultural and environmental differences, mental health challenges, disease, and other dangers. Based on case studies of young Chinese students who went through Phillips Academy Andover between 1870 and 1930, this paper will also discuss specific strategies that students and their families used to define and manage risk. These strategies reveal the importance of diverse types of networks in facilitating educational migration and reveal parallels with chain migration patterns of Chinese labor and merchant migration of this era. The research thus suggests the need to rethink models of human mobility that draw a sharp divide between educational migration and chain migration.

 

“The Filipino Woman in Early Twentieth Century America”

Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

What would happen if we placed the lives of Filipino women at the center of a narrative about U.S. and Philippine histories? What would they reveal about the about the history of colonialism and migration? This paper explores the impact of U.S. colonial education on Filipino women’s geographic and socioeconomic mobility through the overlapping life histories and contrasting journeys of Encarnacion Alzona and Ines Cayaban. Alzona was the first Filipino woman to earn a doctoral degree and chair the History Department of the University of the Philippines. She became part of a pioneering generation of Philippine women’s historians, documenting Filipino women’s history in her book, The Filipino Woman: Her Social, Economic, and Political Status, 1565-1933. Ines left the Philippines in 1931 to further her nursing education at Columbia University.  However, she settled in Hawai’i, worked as a public health nurse for low-income and immigrant communities, and preserved her history through the publication of her autobiography entitled A Goodly Heritage.

 

“In Search of Our Frontier: American Immigration Exclusion and Transpacific Issei Settler Colonialism”

Eiichiro Azuma, Alan Charles Kors Term Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

This paper unveils the intertwining strains of settler colonialism between pre-World-War-II Japanese America and imperial Japan, which gave rise to the reverse migration of first-generation Japanese Americans (Issei) in search of their “frontier.”  The mobility of these remigrants across the Pacific took place under the constant influence of not only Japan’s borderless colonialism but also American imperialism and its racism.  Initially, inspired by the success of Anglo-Saxon settler colonialism, many prewar Japanese ideologues and practitioners of national expansion embraced a notion of “frontier conquest” with the U.S. West as a key prototype and model.  The first group of self-proclaimed “pioneers” thus congregated in California, turning early Japanese America into an important hub of colonial experts, armed with their firsthand experience in American-style agrarian development and settlement-making.  This forged many points of intersection between imperial Japan’s endeavors to colonize new territories and the effort of former U.S.-based Issei to build a “new Japan” within and without the Asian empire.  As this paper sketches out, U.S. settler colonialism offered self-styled Japanese frontiersmen an inspiration for their original migration to the New World frontier, but its racism posed a major “risk” to convince many Issei to leave for a racism-free frontier under Japan’s control. 

In the existing scholarship, many of these Issei remigrants are presented simply as early leaders/founders of Japanese America, but my paper interrogates the complexity of their identity and migration experience where they also self-consciously acted as builders of Japan’s settler empire.  By examining this neglected remigration circuit, this paper calls into question the prevailing spatially-organized way of scholarly research that has rendered the histories of transpacific Japanese migration and Japan’s colonial mobility almost completely separate and distinct.  Not only have the dichotomized histories reflect the divides between U.S. ethnic studies and Asian area studies, but they have also obfuscated the connections and intersections between the eastern and western halves of the “Pacific World” that Asian Americanists and Asianists have tended to separately look at. 

 

“Celebrating Risk: Turning Pacific Histories into Regional Prestige in Imperial Japan”

Anne Giblin Gedacht, Assistant Professor of History, Seton Hall University

The risks of daily life in Tōhoku region of Japan, an area known for its endemic poverty, natural disasters, and repeated famines, spurred many to strike out to find their fortunes or serve their country far across the Pacific from South America to Canada, Manchuria to the Philippines.  Intriguingly, members of Tōhoku’s pre-Pacific War local history (kyōdoshi) movement, a movement that strove to increase the prestige of northeastern Japan’s regional history within national history, did not shy away from this history of risk.  Rather, they chose to recast these seemingly negative regional push factors into a narrative that underscored the courage and leadership of their mobile Tohoku populations as the pioneers in Japanese-Pacific internationalism.  Focusing on narratives of Tōhoku residents that struggled, survived, and thrived all around the Pacific, these local historians touted their region’s Pacific history as being at the heart of the “indomitable and enduring Tōhoku spirit.” Kyōdoshi writers even went so far as to argue that this willingness to respond to adversity and directly confront risk, to make a new lives across the Pacific, uniquely suited the people of Tōhoku to assume leadership in Japan’s newest international search for fortune: the building of a Greater East Asia through Japanese settlement colonialism in Mongolia and Manchuria.   

This paper will explore the contradictions between internationalism and localism, imperial citizenship and connected Pacific communities.  Analyzing the voices of local intellectuals advocating for their marginalized territory within the Japanese empire, this paper will draw on selections from a 1941 essay contest published by the Sendai branch of the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun titled “What role should Tōhoku play in Greater East Asia?”  For the respondents, the answer was a clarion cry for the nation to “wake up” to their region’s proud history both contending with and rising above the risks of being a “crossroads” of internationalism in the Pacific.  Indeed, it was Tōhoku Japan, according to these winning essays, that held the key to Japanese domination in Greater Asia.  Ultimately, this paper will explore one instance where regional enthusiasts from Tōhoku imbued their local identity with Pacific narratives, marking this part of Japan’s domestic hinterland as the historic meeting place between Japanese civilization and the rest of Asia, the site of a vanguard frontier between international and interethnic expansion.

 

“Moving and Mobilizing East and West”

Moon-Ho Jung, Associate Professor of History, UW Seattle

Focusing on Sen Katayama, M. N. Roy, and others involved in the Third International, my paper will explore how international communism shifted and shaped the course of racial and anticolonial politics after World War I. Communism generated critiques, organizations, and movements that increasingly drew links between struggles against white supremacy in the United States and anticolonial struggles in Asia, a radical politics, I argue, that fueled the US security state’s expansion across the Pacific. 

 

“Consent and Risk: Sex, Labor and the Page Act” 

Grace Peña Delgado, Associate Professor of History, UC Santa Cruz

[abstract missing]

 

“Disputing Communities: ‘Chinese’ Justice in Qing Sichuan, British Weihaiwei, and Dutch Batavia” 

Quinn Javers, Assistant Professor of History, UC Davis

This project examines how ideas and practices of justice spread with Chinese migrants across the Pacific. In these communities, Chinese populations could draw on centuries of legal theory and practice. In comparing legal regimes in Qing Sichuan, the British leasehold of Weihaiwei, and Dutch-controlled Batavia, my study sits at the intersection where these home truths mingled with new social, economic and institutional realities to produce emergent systems of justice. I consider these Chinese legal systems and their interactions with local authorities to probe the legally pluralistic edges of empire. Moreover, my focus on conflict brings into sharp relief the interplay between multiple ethnic communities in colonial settings as well as the class and status ruptures that marked various Chinese diasporas. Shifting agglomerations of authority and interest present in these conflicts, and their resolutions, reveal power dynamics in migrant communities.

 

‘How many have been retched forth from the Australian hell to make a pandemonium of California?’: The Sydney Ducks and the Making of California Gold Rush History

Benjamin Mountford, David Myers Research Fellow in History, La Trobe University

In August 1851, one William T. Reynolds, wrote home from San Francisco to his wife at St Louis. ‘We have had a great deal of excitement in the city’, the lonely prospector, turned vigilante, explained: “We have now several prisoners in our hands, mostly escaped convicts from the English penal colonies, who have been taken from various Sydney ships on their arrival and are to be sent back by the first vessel. Among them are several women.” By the summer of 1851, the Sydney Ducks (as ex-convicts from Australia were styled) had developed into one of the most feared and loathed immigrant groups to have arrived in gold rush California. Implicated in many of the tragedies that beset the golden state, arrivals from Britain’s Australian colonies were everywhere regarded with suspicion and hostility; in San Francisco, they became the primary focus of the city’s infamous 1851 Committee of Vigilance. This paper sets out to explore the history of the Sydney Ducks and their eventual suppression by the San Francisco Committee. In doing so, it seeks to shed fresh light on the significance of trans-Pacific migration from Australia, in shaping California gold rush history.

 

“Break the Cycle!: Korean Chinese Re-Interpretations of the “Korean Dream” in Yanbian, China”

June Hee Kwon, Faculty Fellow, New York University

Since China and South Korea normalized the diplomatic relationship in 1992, Korean Chinese have massively and persistently migrated to South Korea by taking advantage of the large income gap between China and South Korea—in a form of “the Korean Dream.” For the three decades of migration, Korean Chinese have been formulated and formulating themselves as transnational ethnic working class through legal recognitions, social perceptions, and labor market demands. This paper examines new reflections and re-evaluations of the Korean Dream in the wake of the global rise of the Chinese economy. Since the financial crisis of 2008 dramatically altered the terms of the Korean dream by greatly increasing Chinese economic clout, many Korean Chinese have turned their attention to a new “Chinese dream.” My ethnographic focus is on the social imperative that has risen in Yanbian (the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture) that encourages Korean Chinese migrants to transform themselves into entrepreneurs who manage their own money, businesses, and futures. Yet the Korean Chinese, many of whom have grown accustomed to working as physical laborers in South Korea, sometimes for a decade or more, find it quite difficult to compete in the new Chinese socio-economic context. This paper elaborates on the struggles of Korean Chinese migrants caught between two dreams and the futurity that they must constantly reimagine in the midst of a fluctuating and unpredictable global economy.

 

“Deferral and Intimacy: Long-Distance Romance and Thai Migrants Abroad”

Andrew Alan Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University

Aek’s fiancée, Fern, was already married to a European man. Fern sent remittances each month back to Aek so that he could work on a future home for the two of them back in Isan, Northeastern Thailand, to live in after the dissolution of her European marriage. In the meantime, Aek would wait. But, in the time spent waiting, plans and aspirations changed. As Aek and Fern continued to talk about their plans together, this life deferred grew more and more spectral. This article is an ethnographic study of the Thai male romantic partners of Thai women working overseas as sex workers or marriage migrants, and their plans for and anxieties about the future. Via looking at the “work of waiting” (Kwon 2015) of those left behind, I argue here that the waiting grows increasingly in tension with a realization of the impermanence of hopes, selves, and bodies. I ask: what does it mean to ‘wait,’ when what is promised, who promises and the future date when promises are to be realize are each in flux?