Between Two Empires Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America

by Azuma, Eiichiro

• ISBN13: 9780195159400
• ISBN10: 0195159403
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780199882809
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The incarceration of Japanese Americans has been discredited as a major blemish in American democratic tradition. Accompanying this view is the assumption that the ethnic group held unqualified allegiance to the United States. Between Two Empires probes the complexities of prewar Japanese America to show how Japanese in America held an in-between space between the United States and the empire of Japan, between American nationality and Japanese racial identity.

Author Biography

Eiichiro Azuma is an Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Note on the Translation and Transliteration of Japanese Names and Words	xiii
Introduction: Immigrant Transnationalism between Two Empires	3	(14)
Part I Multiple Beginnings
Mercantilists, Colonialists, and Laborers: Heterogeneous Origins of Japanese America	17	(18)
Part II Convergences and Divergences
Re-Forming the Immigrant Masses: The Transnational Construction of a Moral Citizenry	35	(26)
Zaibei Doho: Racial Exclusion and the Making of an American Minority	61	(28)
Part III Pioneers and Successors
``Pioneers of Japanese Development'': History Making and Racial Identity	89	(22)
The Problem of Generation: Preparing the Nisei for the Future	111	(24)
Wages of Immigrant Internationalism: Nisei in the Ancestral Land	135	(28)
Part IV Complexities of Immigrant Nationalism
Helping Japan, Helping Ourselves: The Meaning of Issei Patriotism	163	(24)
Ethnic Nationalism and Racial Struggle: Interethnic Relations in the California Delta	187	(21)
Epilogue: Wartime Racisms, State Nationalisms, and the Collapse of Immigrant Transnationalism	208	(9)
Notes	217	(62)
Bibliography	279	(20)
Index	299