Pacific Formations: Global Relations in Asian and Pacific Perspectives – serie

Long known for its vast geographic and cultural diversity, the Pacific Islands region today is witness to some of the most dramatic histories of decolonization and postcolonial development anywhere in the world. As new nations emerge_and struggle to emerge_political change is everywhere marked by efforts to reconceptualize identities, histories, and futures. In the midst of these transformations, this volume brings together a diverse range of analysis and commentary that challenge tired and simplistic paradigms of Oarea studyO and urge us to rethink the ways we imagine and represent the Pacific. The essays also challenge the conventions of scholarship itself, offering provocative reflections on the politics and ethics of research and writing across disciplines. The authors examine a range of subjects relevant to formations of cultural and regional identity, including the politics and poetics of history, of tradition, and of cultural expressions in literature, film, and the arts. In doing so, their discussions open up new ways of thinking about the Pacific as well as about relations between tradition and modernity, and about processes of Omodernization O and globalization everywhere.

As do other mighty forces such as wars, nationalist aspirations, and the shifting courses of great rivers, globalization changes the world's borders by bending them out of shape and creating new transnational spaces. State political boundaries no longer draw the definitive line in people's lives they once did. Borders continue to contain self-described national populations and national activities, but the penetration of economic globalization via growing cross-border trade, investment, and resurgence of myriad regional ethnic groups is pushing and stretching the limits of borders into both interactive spaces and contested terrains. Indeed, new power centers with their own identities are springing out of once politically trivial and economically marginal landscapes. While the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the SARS outbreak of 2003 prompted states to tighten border controls, their efforts amount to only a temporary reversal of a powerful long-term trend toward more open borders and the interactive transnational spaces that openness fosters.This innovative book examines the complexities of de-bordering and re-bordering through a structured comparison of seven transborder subregions along the western Pacific Rim and an extended comparative analysis of the U.S.-Mexico border and several European border regions. Xiangming Chen offers a synthetic explanation for the complex and diverse processes and outcomes of economic growth, social transformation, infrastructure development, and urban landscapes in the new transnational spaces around the porous and mutated borders on the Pacific Rim and beyond.

In this unique oral history, gay Asian Americans talk frankly about their struggle for self-determination and independence. For the first time, in their own words, pioneers in the Los Angeles movement discuss the gay scene in Southern California and the development of a distinctly Asian American identity. Despite its size, until recently the gay Asian American community in Los Angeles was fragmented and marginalized. Gay Asian men separated into their own ethnic cliques and preferred whites as sexual partners. Eric C. Wat convincingly demonstrates that these patterns are legacies of both a racialized hierarchy of desire and racial exclusion from the mainstream gay community. Using a cultural studies lens to interpret the rich oral narratives he collected, Wat shows how a dominant sexual ideology can influence our desires and contradict our memories. He follows the development of 'specialty' bars that at once reinforced this dominant ideology and highlighted its contradictions. By documenting the founding of the first gay Asian organization in Southern California (Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays [A/PLG]), the author powerfully portrays the ways gay Asian men confronted these contradictions publicly and struggled to reconcile them as they fashioned a coherent identity and community based on both their race and sexuality. Wat's analysis returns gay Asian men to the center of their lives and celebrates the power of individuals working collectively to define their desires and to change what is unjust around them. As living history, their voices are valuable and overdue.

This unique oral history presents the Japanese American saga as told by those who lived through it. Frank Chin details the lives of first and second generation Japanese Americans before World War II with a rich kaleidoscope of images drawn from interviews, popular songs, novels, and newspaper articles. The heart of his story is the tragedy that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Japanese American citizens lost their homes and property and were forced into internment camps. The author deftly weaves interviews and testimony from the Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL) with opposing, in-depth conversations with those who resisted the JACL's support for U.S. policy. This shameful episode in American history resonates deeply today as we witness similar erosions of civil rights in the name of wartime security.

The Chinese in Silicon Valley examines the complex and ever-growing role of Chinese American scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley. Globalization brings workers from many different countries and cultures together, impacting more than just their work environments. The Chinese who settle in Silicon Valley must learn to prosper despite changes in cultural identity, family life, and often citizenship. They learn how to utilize new social networks and make sense of a shifting ethnic identity. The Chinese community in Silicon Valley is being developed with the advantages and constraints of many factors: the new global economy, technology, the Chinese immigrants' traditional culture, and the American host culture. Bernard Wong shows that the formation of Chinese American ethnic identity and community is a result of this globalization and transnationalism. This informative book presents important new knowledge on the connection between Chinese ethnicity and highly-skilled labor and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Secondary statistical data combined with primary personal interview data makes this a detailed and interesting study of globalization, social networks, and ethnic identity.

The Chinese in Silicon Valley examines the complex and ever-growing role of Chinese American scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley. Globalization brings workers from many different countries and cultures together, impacting more than just their work environments. The Chinese who settle in Silicon Valley must learn to prosper despite changes in cultural identity, family life, and often citizenship. They learn how to utilize new social networks and make sense of a shifting ethnic identity. The Chinese community in Silicon Valley is being developed with the advantages and constraints of many factors: the new global economy, technology, the Chinese immigrants' traditional culture, and the American host culture. Bernard Wong shows that the formation of Chinese American ethnic identity and community is a result of this globalization and transnationalism. This informative book presents important new knowledge on the connection between Chinese ethnicity and highly-skilled labor and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Secondary statistical data combined with primary personal interview data makes this a detailed and interesting study of globalization, social networks, and ethnic identity.

This pathbreaking, multidisciplinary work challenges our unthinking acceptance of such terms as 'Asia Pacific' and 'Pacific Rim.' Clarifying the hidden power relationships and hegemonic struggles that are disguised by ideological constructions of the region, the contributors uncover fundamental contradictions_including the human costs and consequences_that underlie the much-celebrated economic boom. In evaluating the idea of 'Asia Pacific,' the book shifts our focus from abstract relationships between capital and commodities to the human interactions that have played a formative part in the region's constitution. The contributors agree that it is these interactions that constitute the region, rather than the physical boundaries of the Pacific. This revised and updated edition brings in additional essays focusing on conceptualizations of the Pacific, considers more fully interactions among countries, and strongly emphasizes peoples within the Pacific, who are routinely ignored in most discussions of the 'Rim.'

Chinese immigrants played a dynamic role in frontier America, yet scholars of Asian America have focused for the most part only on the Pacific Coast, especially California. This reader fills that gap by collecting memoirs, documents, and historical analyses from the other Western states—from the Cascades to the Great Plains—to provide a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in nineteenth-century America. Selecting among a wealth of primary and secondary material, Dirlik has chosen works that enlarge our understanding of the Chinese presence in the West and the development of Chinese cultural formations on the frontier. Providing insights not only into frontier society in the United States, but also into U.S.-Chinese relations of the time, this volume will be invaluable for all readers interested in China, Western history, and the history of Asian America.

This insightful study examines the strategies used by outsiders to usurp Hawaiian lands and undermine indigenous Hawaiian culture. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, Houston Wood investigates the journals of Captain Cook, Hollywood films, commercialized hula, Waikiki development schemes, and the appropriation of Pele and Kilauea by haoles to explore how these diverse productions all displace Native culture. Yet, the author emphasizes the voices that have never been completely silenced and can be heard asserting themselves today through songs, chants, literature, the internet, and the Native nationalist sovereignty movement. This impassioned argument about the linkages between textual and physical displacements of Native Hawaiians will engage all readers interested in Pacific literature and postcolonial studies.

In a time of dynamism and contradiction in Pacific cultural production, a time of 'turning things over' and 'writing from the inside out,' this far-reaching volume provides a comprehensive set of essays and interviews on the emergent literatures of the New Pacific. With its dynamic combination of important position papers, polemics, and decolonizing critiques by noted authors and of analysis by new and established post-colonial scholars, this volume exposes 'the maze and mix of literatures and cultural identities breaking down and building up across the Pacific Ocean.' This pioneering work will be the definitive resource for anyone researching or teaching Pacific literature and will be invaluable for bringing Pacific culture to readers outside the region.

People of Asian descent have lived for centuries in North and South America, where they have been actively involved in the creation of multicultural, multiethnic societies. This groundbreaking anthology explores their experiences among ethnic and cultural groups in a unique collection of works by and about Asian Americans. Utilizing a rich blend of analytical, autobiographical, biographical, and narrative essays, oral histories, fiction, photography, and artwork, the anthology focuses especially on the interactions of Asians with others outside the dominant culture. Contributors range from established scholars, writers and artists to little-known voices heard here for the first time. Scholars of Asian diasporas and all readers interested in Asia in the Americas will find this book an extraordinary resource.Contributions by: Kozy K. Amemiya, Himani Bannerji, Monica Cinco Basurto, Raissa Nina Burns, Jeff Chang, Jay Chaudhari, Kathryn Jeun Cho, Rienzi Crusz, Astrid Hadad, Laura Hall, Muriel H. Hasbun, Tomoyo Hiroishi, Velina Hasu Houston, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Naheed Islam, Feroza Jussawalla, Nguyet Lam, Armando Siu Lau, Stephanie Li, R. Zamora Linmark, Sunaina Maira, Diane Monroe, Ofelia Murrieta, Luis Nishizawa, Dwight Okita, Gary Pak, Monica J. Rainwater, Aly Remtulla, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Ann Suni Shin, Jan Lo Shinebourne, Janet Shirley, Lok C. D. Siu, Rajini Srikanth, Leny Mendoza Strobel, Eileen Tabios, Ayumi Takenaka, Gabriela Kinuyo Torres, Kay Reiko Torres, Takeyuki Tsuda, Usha Welaratna, Bill Woo, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Thomas Sze Leong Yu.