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Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In this first comprehensive history of Asian exclusion repeal, Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration. The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America’s postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.

This book undertakes linguistically informed analyses to examine the various transpacific signifying strategies by which different poets of Chinese descent in the United States have sought to employ or represent elements of a particular cultural tradition in their articulations of an ethnic subjectivity, including writings entirely in Chinese. The study maps a new methodology and an expanded textual arena for Asian American literary studies that can be used and further explored by scholars possessing knowledge of other traditions and different linguistic competencies. In assessing both the dynamics and the politics of poetic expression by writers engaging with a specific cultural tradition or heritage, this study develops a general theory of ethnic literary production that clarifies the significance of “Asian American” literature in relation to both other forms of U.S. “minority discourse,” as well as canonical “American” literature more generally. The book discusses a range of works, including Ezra Pound’s Cathay and the Angel Island poems. Additionally, it examines the careers of four contemporary Chinese/American poets: Ha Jin, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau, each of whom bears a distinctive relationship to the linguistic and cultural tradition he or she seeks to represent. Specifically, the book analyzes the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which these writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and especially language in constructing a cultural or ethnic subjectivity.

As part of the paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific in transnational American studies, this volume not only offers critical ways in which we rethink American exceptionalism, but it also engages the critical visions represented by New American studies, Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Pacific studies. By calling attention to the “oceanic archives” and indigenous epistemologies, the volume addresses colonialism and imperialism at their roots from both sides of the colonizer and the colonized and articulates what has been central to de-colonial thinking—indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, non-Western knowledge production and dissemination. As the transpacific continues to hold the global spotlight as moments of military, cultural, and geopolitical contentions as well as spaces of economic integration, negotiation, and resistance on national and global scales, we develop transpacificAmerican studies as the new cutting-edge in transnational American studies, global studies, and postcolonial studies.The essays collected in the volume recover the early oceanic archives to remap transpacific movements in different directions and at different moments, interrogate the colonial archives to reinvent indigenous ontologies and epistemologies,explore alternative oceanic archives to develop competing visions and forms of the transpacific. Above all, it speculates upon new directions in which transpacific American studies may pursue.

This book uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on “transpacific Buddhist poetics,” while the second maps the less well-known terrain of “transpacific Daoist poetics.” In Chapters 1 and 2, the text explores Ernest Fenollosa's “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo (“New Buddhism”). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of “emptiness” in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose “transpacific Daoist poetics” has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.

Begun as a conversation among scholars of Japanese American studies in Japan and the United States, Transpacific Japanese American Studies is conceived of as an engagement across national archives, literatures, and subject positions to excavate personal investments, epistemologies, and social contexts. Is it possible to achieve a truly equal exchange in a field that defines itself as “Japanese American” studies and in a conversation conducted mainly in the English language? All of the contributors to this volume were asked to consider those foundational questions, and most discussed their subjectivities and work over the course of several years in meetings held in Japan and the US. The outcome, Transpacific Japanese American Studies, is a candid, self-conscious appraisal of scholars and their subject positions and personal and political investments.

The Pacific has long been a space of conquest, exploration, fantasy, and resistance. Pacific Islanders had established civilizations and cultures of travel well before European explorers arrived, initiating centuries of upheaval and transformation. The twentieth century, with wars fought in and over the Pacific, is only the most recent era to witness military strife and economic competition. Recognizing the increasing importance of the transpacific as a word and concept, this anthology proposes a framework for transpacific studies that examines the flows of culture, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific, from Asia to the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. The introduction considers the advantages and limitations of models found in Asian studies, American studies, and Asian American studies for dealing with these flows. The editors argue that Transpacific Studies can draw from all three in order to provide a critical model for considering the geopolitical struggle over the Pacific, with possibilities for inequality and exploitation. Transpacific Studies sheds light on the cultural and political movements, artistic works, and ideas that have arisen to contest state, corporate, and military ambitions. The Transpacific as a concept illuminates how flows across the Pacific can be harnessed for purposes of both domination and resistance.

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific” and used it to reimagine and rebuild their city. Together, they forged San Francisco into a cosmopolitan center celebratory of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar “Gateway to the Pacific” identity is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. The development of the Japanese Center was a multilayered story embedded in transforming transpacific institutions and ideas. During these formative decades, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. With tools including Cold War People-to-People programs, community organizing, and urban redevelopment initiatives, a range of San Franciscans (often with conflicting goals) reshaped their city’s civic identity, institutions, and built environment into one embracing of Asian and especially Japanese Americans and naturally linked with Japan. These newly friendly transpacific relations meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy through the manageable and familiar places of home, neighborhood, and community.

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. When this mass-produced game crossed the Pacific it created waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Mahjong narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women’s culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American pastime. This book also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game for a variety of economic and cultural purposes, including entrepreneurship, self-expression, philanthropy, and ethnic community building. One result was the forging of friendships within mahjong groups that lasted decades. This study unfolds in two parts. The first half is focused on mahjong’s history as related to consumerism, with a close examination of its economic and cultural origins. The second half explores how mahjong interwove with the experiences of racial inclusion and exclusion in the evolving definition of what it means to be American. Mahjong players, promoters, entrepreneurs, and critics tell a broad story of American modernity. The apparent contradictions of the game—as both American and foreign, modern and supposedly ancient, domestic and disruptive of domesticity—reveal the tensions that lie at the heart of modern American culture.

In 1973, Billy Graham, “America’s Pastor,” held his largest ever “crusade.” But he was not, as one might expect, in the American heartland, but in South Korea. Why there? Race for Revival seeks not only to answer that question, but to retell the story of modern American evangelicalism through its relationship with South Korea. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the first “hot” war of the Cold War era, a new generation of white fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals forged networks with South Koreans that helped turn evangelical America into an empire. South Korean Protestants were used to bolster the image of the United States as a nonimperial beacon of democratic hope, in spite of ongoing racial inequalities. At the same time, South Koreans used these racialized transpacific networks for their own purposes, seeking to reimagine their own place in the world order. They envisioned Korea as the “new emerging Christian kingdom,” which would beat the American evangelical empire in a race for revival. Yet these nonstate networks ultimately foreshadowed the rise of the Christian Right in the United States and South Korea in the 1980s and 1990s. Employing a bilingual and binational approach, Race for Revival re-examines the narrative of modern evangelicalism through an innovative transpacific framework, offering a new lens through which to understand evangelical history from the Korean War to the rise of Ronald Reagan.