Over the Pacific: post-World War II Asian American internationalism

2015-09-30This dissertation examines the ways in which Asian American internationalism developed in the post-World War II Pacific Rim. Defining Asian American internationalism as the agendas advanced by Asian Americans regarding foreign affairs, countries, and peoples in the Pacific Rim, I attempt to understand Asian Americans' ideas and activities in various occasions and ways, such as: organizing demonstrations on the street; interacting with peoples in Asia; producing art work; expressing opinions in various media outlets; and intervening in foreign policy making. My dissertation investigates the ways in which Japanese and Chinese Americans viewed, imagined, connected themselves with, and worked on the affairs, countries, and peoples of East Asia as well as U.S. foreign policies in the post-World War II period. ❧ Drawing on the concept of identity formation, I use two ideal types of internationalism in my analysis. The first type of internationalism emerges out of the diaspora's social field which connects the homeland to place(s) of settlement through such forms as political commitment, imagination, memory, travel and cultural production. The second type is Third World internationalism which was forged in the Asian American movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By utilizing these two types of internationalism, I discuss significant cases in developments of postwar Asian American internationalism, such as: Japanese Americans' political stakes in Cold War politics in the late 1950s; Asian American movement activists' intervention into U.S. foreign policy on the cusp of the 1960s and 1970s; and Asian Americans' commitment to the politics of memory of World War II in the 1990s and 2000s. ❧ In its examination of the trajectory of post-World War II Asian American internationalism in both the domestic and international arenas, my dissertation contributes to the development of both U.S. history and Asian American studies. While many U.S. historians have emphasized the importance of placing U.S. history in global contexts and grasping historical phenomena from a relational viewpoint, Asian Americanists also have turned in the same direction with emphasis on the trans-Pacific movement of people, ideas, goods, and money, particularly in light of the large number of immigrants from Asia that has vastly increased since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. As the first investigation of developments of post-World War II Asian American internationalism, my dissertation contributes to critical discussions that are currently taking place across multiple academic fields