Friday, April 5, 2024
On March 22, the University hosted Chris Suh, an assistant professor of history at Emory University, to tell him about his studies and the findings of his 2023 book, “The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion. “”The convention titled “Between the ‘American Century’ and the ‘Asian Century’: Toward a New Paradigm for Understanding Racial Inequality,” with Jenny Factor and Sungkyung Cho co-facilitating the Zoom meeting. Factor and Cho are Ph. D. Philosophy Applicants at Brandeis.
Suh’s e-book covers the first 40 years of the 20th century and combines three subfields of American history. These subfields come with U. S. imperial history, i. e. , the dating of the United States between Japan and its colonies; the history of immigration policy expands on how the United States is an “empire of control” and, finally, the history of Asian Americans. Suh clarified that his studies of Asian American history encompass the history of Asian ancestry in the U. S. In the U. S. and around the world.
“Like all e-books, my book is a product of its time,” Professor Suh said. “I was writing it in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when there was a lot of fear about whether America’s foreign dominance would still end. He explained that the early part of the 20th century was characterized by the U. S. victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and that this victory gave the U. S. the basis for leading a “unipolar global order. “Suh referred to Henry Luce’s essay, “The American Century,” to delve into this era of global dominance that the United States built in the 20th century.
Suh explained that despite the great successes of the United States, the 21st century offers Asian countries the possibility – given their developing economic, military and political strength – to surpass the leadership that the United States has held during the last century. The Biden administration’s existing foreign policy strategy in Asia, saying it is “very much a resurgence” of former President Barack Obama’s administration’s policy, known as “Pivot to Asia” and “Rebalancing to Asia and the Pacific. “Suh said the purpose of those policies was either to ease tensions in the Middle East after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to give the U. S. a way to engage in “strategic alliances” with Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand “in response. “The People’s Republic of China. ] “
Professor Suh explained the history of tensions between the United States and the Pacific, noting that they began long before the administration of former President Donald Trump in 2016. Many other people lost attention in those pre-existing strains in 2020 due to COVID-19. “Not only were we the rise of anti-Asian hatred, but more specifically, racism in East Asia very much related to the idea that the Chinese were carriers of the disease,” Suh recalled.
Suh connected those racial tensions in the United States to the development of fears of a loss of its global prevalence. He said that despite those threats to the U. S. unipolar order, no one is addressing the color line (or racial divide) between predominantly white countries like the U. S. and its allies that also have a white majority, such as Britain and Australia. Instead, the U. S. has drawn a color line between Pacific countries that are not predominantly white, such as Japan and South Korea.
In addition, Suh noted that this racial difference among U. S. allies is a reminder that policymakers in history never saw Asia as a “uniform monolith” and treated other Asian nations according to their laws. He described U. S. political relations with Japan and China to illustrate this dichotomy, beginning with the Russo-Japanese War to make clear that allusions to Japanese exclusion did not begin until the 20th century, while Chinese exclusion began in the 1880s.
“When Japan started beating Russia, it was a challenge to the whole global order,” Suh said. He clarified that the Russo-Japanese War took place before the Russian Political Revolution, meaning that the Russian imperial circle was still connected to the rest. of European rulers through not unusual lineages. Thus, other predominantly white European countries felt threatened by the Japanese.
However, the good fortune of the Japanese army in the face of Russia caused fear among many American intellectuals and politicians, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and former President Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt hoped that Japan’s good luck would continue and that it would occupy a more potent position among the other countries bordering the Yellow Sea, parallel to America’s assertiveness in the Caribbean Sea: its efforts in Latin America.
“Roosevelt is very vocal about what he expects Japan to do,” Suh said. “He hopes that the Japanese will show ‘no more preference for conquering the weak than the United States has in the case of Cuba,'” Suh reiterated Roosevelt’s words. He explained that Cuba was a “protectorate” territory rather than a “colony” because the United States had given Cubans a certain degree of autonomy. Instead of directly ruling Cuba, Suh said the U. S. was acting like a “big brother, a paternalistic empire. “power. ” According to him, Roosevelt sought to get Japan to emulate the same kind of leadership and lift up China.
Suh illustrated American society’s contradictory perspectives on the Japanese and Chinese through two political cartoons by Udo J. Keppler, “The Yellow Peril” and “An Image for Employers”. Why can they live on 40 cents a day, when they can’t?The first cartoon portrays Russia as “a problem” because it “is not able to contain its preference for the weak,” according to Suh. He said Keppler used the cartoon to ask whether Japan has been called a “yellow peril” while Russia persecuted minority groups such as its Jewish and Polish populations.
On the other hand, Suh showed Keppler’s “An Image for Employers. “”Why can they live on 40 cents a day, when they can’t?”to make explicit the American prejudice against Chinese immigrants. This depiction depicts an organization of deficient Chinese immigrants in an opium den, dining on rats alongside a circle of American relatives under “normal domestic conditions,” according to the Library of Congress’ description.
“Keppler definitely even considered the Chinese and Japanese [as] other peoples, even though they’re Asian. “Suh explained the early stages of American society by forming differing opinions about Asian countries, rather than drawing a racial line between them and all Pacific countries. “Keppler, like most members of his generation, began to reconsider Asians in more complicated ways,” he said.
Suh said U. S. geopolitical goals in the early 20th century reflected the nuances U. S. society was finding within those groups, which is why Japanese immigration was treated “very differently” than Chinese immigration. and the Japanese through the school segregation crisis in San Francisco and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907. The San Francisco School Board’s segregation policy already meant that Chinese students were already attending a separate school from that of white students, and it sought out the provisions that applied. It will come with 93 Japanese scholars. According to Suh, this incident sparked an “international crisis,” during which the Japanese government protested for the school board to rescind the ordinance, which it did.
Suh explained that while the U. S. Gentleman’s Agreement is presented as an example of Japanese exclusion, this claim is “factually incorrect. “Suh explained that the first explanation is that President Roosevelt’s administration refused to exclude Japanese immigrants in the same way it did Chinese immigrants, echoing the same sentiments expressed in Keppler’s political cartoons. In addition, the agreement between the United States and Japan provided that Japan would only allow other people considered its “pride and joy” to immigrate. This organization included diplomats, students, and merchants.
After World War I, Japan-U. S. relations were relatively more favorable than U. S. -Western relations. Suh noted that while the U. S. traded peacefully with Japan and China, the Germans attacked U. S. ships on their voyages. President Roosevelt was a strong supporter of Japan’s colonization efforts in Korea. He considered the Japanese separate from other Asian populations because they were “colonizing Asians” who were “as smart as Americans” at colonization.
Suh asked when the attitude of American society went from being a “Japanese-American privilege” to being treated the same as other Asians. It shifted the convention’s focus from describing the context of the government’s inconsistent immigration policy to the root of dwindling failure. difference between populations.
“We see, from 1919 to 1924, a very serious collaboration between white supremacists who hate Japanese immigrants and existing immigrants who hate the Japanese empire,” he replied.
To demonstrate this connection between white supremacists and existing immigrants, Suh cited Valentine S. McClatchy was a newspaper editor and anti-Japanese activist who feared in particular that Japanese Americans would become “more powerful” than white settlers in the American West. For Suh, McClatchy made an argument that makes him “seem less racist than he is” because he was the first to bring Korea’s Declaration of Independence to the United States and presented it to nationalists seeking to end Japanese colonialism.
Since many Korean-Americans intended to return to Korea and resettle there, they “had no qualms” about engaging with Asian anti-immigration activists like McClatchy. McClatchy argued that Japan had a restrictive immigration policy, just like the United States, and attempted to justify discrimination against Japanese immigrants because of this policy. In doing so, McClatchy “embellished the truth” because Japan’s immigration policy differed from that of the United States in terms of “method and scale. “These ordinances differed in that they were passed to allow the local Japanese government to determine whether Chinese immigrants can land at their respective ports, and they gave the government the right to factor passports into Korea because its population was colonized through Japan. Despite McClatchy’s erroneous inflations, his arguments gained traction with other figures. such as journalist Lothrop Stoddard.
This later influenced the U. S. resolution to authorize the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924, in which the “West Coast Senators” linked the exclusion of Japanese immigration to their pre-existing policies.
However, Suh argued that the “Japanese appeal” did not fade until the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, when “images of Japanese racial and sexual violence opposed to the Chinese reshaped the way Americans understand the Japanese empire. “It wasn’t until the late 1930s and early 1940s that the U. S. government as a whole followed the discriminatory policies that the “West Coast racists” had been hoping for.
“It’s vital to understand that just as the U. S. is passing all those racist laws and policies against other people of Japanese descent, they are absolutely changing their stance against those of Chinese descent,” Suh said. with the fact that the U. S. is constantly looking for and looking for allies who are not targeted, especially in the Pacific world. “
Suh said continued U. S. efforts to create allies in the Pacific resulted in the repeal of anti-Asian immigration legislation in the 1940s and 1950s. He said that many Asians who were not Japanese — though victims of Japanese imperialism — had the idea that the United States was a “more inclusive” empire than Britain, France and Russia. This belief, Suh argues, is why informed Asians and Asian-Americans in the U. S. “play a very vital role in securing U. S. relations with its Asian allies. “Suh believes that many Asians are more likely to “tolerate the American empire” because they have different perspectives on the role of the People’s Republic of China in Asia.
“This edition of interracial collaboration is about dismantling racial inequality,” Suh said. “It’s about converting racial inequalities so that there are Asian partners of the U. S. empire in both geopolitics and Asian life. “
This lecture is the penultimate installment in the series of discussions through the University’s Mandel Center for the Humanities and the Department of English, Challenging Racial Knowledge. This lecture series, according to its website, “seeks to foster broad interdisciplinary conversations around race, with a specific focus on concentrating on original and unique clinical methodologies. “
The final event in the series is “Translating Dancing” and will be presented on April 19 with Rachana Vajjhala, assistant professor of musicology at Boston University.
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