Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 (The Lamar Series in Western History) - Hardcover

Geiger, Andrea

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300169639 ISBN 13: 9780300169638

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2011

Synopsis

The Japanese immigrants who arrived in the North American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included people with historical ties to Japan's outcaste communities. In the only English-language book on the subject, Andrea Geiger examines the history of these and other Japanese immigrants in the United States and Canada and their encounters with two separate cultures of exclusion, one based in caste and the other in race.

Geiger reveals that the experiences of Japanese immigrants in North America were shaped in part by attitudes rooted in Japan's formal status system, mibunsei, decades after it was formally abolished. In the North American West, however, the immigrants' understanding of social status as caste-based collided with American and Canadian perceptions of status as primarily race-based. Geiger shows how the lingering influence of Japan's strict status system affected immigrants' perceptions and understandings of race in North America and informed their strategic responses to two increasingly complex systems of race-based exclusionary law and policy.

About this title

About the Author

Andrea Geiger is associate professor of history at Simon Fraser University.

Review

“Examining the tangled convergence between North American racial prejudice and the Japanese denigration of outcastes, this book is strikingly innovative and intensely thought-provoking. Andrea Geiger’s work sets a model of historical research and analysis practiced as an extraordinary—and courageous—art.”—Patty Limerick, author of The Legacy of Conquest

(Patty Limerick)

“Refusing historiographical silences and caricatures of homogeneity and stasis, Subverting Exclusion insists upon the diversity and movement of Japanese migrants in a trans-Pacific, transnational world. In the process, this superbly conceived study succeeds in rendering its subjects as emphatically human.”— Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones

(Gary Y. Okihiro)

“Elegantly written and deeply insightful, Geiger deftly combines an understanding of the law and racial formation and has offered a truly transnational history that blends Asian, Asian American, and broader issues of American immigration history."—K. Scott Wong, Williams College (K. Scott Wong)

“Andrea Geiger’s beautifully written narrative deftly describes how Japanese emigrants escaped the stigma of lower-caste status in Tokugawa Japan, only to encounter an even more malignant form of exclusion in the North American West based solely on one’s race. An important and absolutely fascinating read.”—Neil Foley, author of Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity

(Neil Foley)

Winner of the 2012 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award sponsored by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. (Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Immigration and Ethnic History Society 2012-03-13)

Winner of the 2011 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in the History category, given by the Association for Asian American Studies.
(2011 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in the History category Association for Asian American Studies 2013-02-27)

“A particular strength of the book is Geiger’s analysis of the development of legal structures motivated by exclusionist sentiment as well as their response to immigrant strategies to “subvert exclusion” and the ramifications of the legal structures developed in neighboring jurisdictions for the same purpose.”—Joel Legassie, University of Victoria (Joel Legassie)

"[T]his book is altogether a welcome addition to the expanding field of Japanese migration and transnational American Studies. The book invites readers to think more critically across the national borders and class boundaries that have tended to confine the field of our study until recently."—Yukari Takai, Histoire Sociale/Social History (Yukari Takai Histoire Sociale/Social History)

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0300169639
• ISBN 13: 9780300169638
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304