Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. x, 275 pp. (Tables, map, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5576-5.
Tectonic political shifts in the present are constantly generating possibilities for reassessing the past. As editor Lon Kurashige asserts in the introduction to Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings, “To historians, the current era of globalization presents an opportunity to reimagine the making of the modern world as not simply a phase of Western civilization or the development of a transatlantic economy based on the exploitation of New World resources and peoples” (1). The chapters in this impressive volume skillfully respond to this clarion call.
In large part, innovative visions of transpacific history require nuanced arguments against narratives of fear. As many of the contributing scholars show, panic about an ascendant China, racist assertions about a “Yellow Peril” lapping at North America’s Pacific shores, and alarm about the diffusion of power in an increasingly integrated world have motivated jingoistic policies and racist popular discourses in the United States for centuries. In crafting a coherent response to such persistent anxieties, the authors featured in this volume prove that strength in diversity is more than a catchphrase. As the book’s preface makes clear, “being part of such a wide-ranging group of scholars has forced us … to surmount the comfortable ‘academic silos’ that limit conceptualization of history as a field and experience” (ix).
The fifteen chapters that comprise Pacific America explore a stunning range of topics. More importantly, a number of them offer correctives to the neglected facets of an already existing scholarly landscape. Kariann Yokota’s insightful reappraisal of Early American History and the myriad “historical connections between Atlantic and Pacific Worlds” (29) begins to fill several of these lacunae. Likewise, Yujin Yaguchi’s assessment of “postwar Japan’s view of Japanese Americans” (97) through his explorations of a 1956 publication featuring photographs of Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i illuminates an overlooked aspect of transpacific history.
Several of the authors make impressive use of Japanese-language materials. Eiichiro Azuma’s examination of efforts to establish a “no Asian” zone across the Americas does so to great effect. Azuma draws from English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-language sources to demonstrate how the “Yellow Peril discourse” and its practical applications in legal and policy realms were truly hemispheric in their extent. Not solely confined to the United States, they often involved Latin American countries in twentieth-century anti-Japanese alliances.
Pacific America is divided into four sections: “Part I. China and Ocean Worlds,” “Part II. Circuits and Diaspora,” “Part III. Racism and Imperialism,” and “Part IV. Islands and the Pacific Rim.” The fourth of these parts takes its inspiration from the late Fijian-Tongan scholar Epeli Hauʻofa, a leading exponent of a “grassroots orientation in Pacific islands studies” (10). The inclusion of this section helps the volume “avoid a common failing in popular perception that characterizes the Asia-Pacific as if it has a gaping hole in the middle” (10). Indeed, the contributions by Greg Dvorak and Keith L. Camacho—addressing Japanese and US imperial occupations of the Marshall Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands—are two of the book’s finest chapters. In Dvorak’s potent phrasing, “Forgetting about Micronesia and erasing it from the Japanese mass-consciousness was a project in which both Japan and the United States have been complicit” (238). As a counterpoint to this institutionalized invisibility, the author invokes the resilient genealogical memories related to him by a Marshallese housekeeper from his childhood in Kwajalein Atoll. Likewise, Camacho vividly documents the changing contours of memory and amnesia that characterize acts of commemoration in the Mariana Islands. This involves a delicate process of unravelling entangled legacies. Camacho perceptively remarks, “While indigenous Chamorro memories, American memories, and Japanese memories have become deeply intertwined over the years, their memories can also be viewed as profoundly divergent in scope and content” (247).
The book could have benefitted from more maps than the single, tiny one that appears in chapter 3. For a vast, transoceanic zone where the material consequences of the cartographic imagination have proved so forceful, this scarcity is an oversight. The distribution of the book’s images is also somewhat odd. All five photographs are clustered in chapter 6. These are very minor shortcomings of an otherwise intellectually capacious, well-conceived, and thoroughly engrossing volume.
One of the many things that the authors do quite well is refer to (and build upon) each other’s work in their respective chapters. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of a collection that began its existence as the proceedings of a symposium; relationships are often inspired by wide-ranging conversations. Whatever the cause, this feature gives Pacific America a coherence that is too often missing from edited volumes on broad topics and immense regions. This book will make a superb addition to the readings for undergraduate and graduate courses on Asian American studies, the Pacific world, and transnational history.
Edward D. Melillo
Amherst College, Amherst, USA