Paul Spickard

Japanese Americans : the formation and transformations of an ethnic group

In this concise history, Paul R. Spickard traces the struggles and achievements of Japanese Americans in claiming their place in American society. He outlines three forces shaping ethnic groups in general: shared interests, shared institutions, and shared culture, and chronicles the Japanese American experience within this framework, showing how these factors created and nurtured solidarity.

Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement. This collection begins with an introduction to how Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and colonialism. The first section of the book describes the founding of racial thinking in the United States along the racial binary of Black and White, and compares that system to the quite different system that developed in Jamaica. Section two describes anomalies in the racial binary, such as the experiences of people of mixed race, and of states such as Texas, California, and Hawaii, where large groups of non-Black and White racial groups co-exist. Part three analyzes five monoracial challenges to racial hierarchy.

Ethnic relations in the People’s Republic of China: Images and social distance between Han Chinese and minority and foreign nationalities

Han people make up 93 percent of the Chinese population, but little is known in a systematic way about how they view Chinese minority nationalities or foreign peoples. This is a social scientific study of the images that Han Chinese have of nine Chinese ethnic groups and eight foreign nationalities, as well as the social distance they feel from those groups. Based on a survey of 169 Tianjin university students, it employs the Bogardus Social Distance Scale and an adjectival test. It finds that Han Chinese feel affinity for some groups, such as Overseas Chinese, Uygurs, and Americans, while they feel extreme distance from and repulsion toward others, such as Tibetans and Africans.

The Nisei Assume Power: The Japanese Citizens League, 1941-1942

ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes bombed the American Navy at Pearl Harbor and the United States joined a world at war. Four months later, in April 1942, the U.S. Army undertook to remove every American of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast. At first they herded Japanese Americans into temporary assembly centers. Later, during the summer and fall of 1942, the army took them to prison camps located mainly in remote parts of the mountains and deserts of the West. There Japanese Americans waited out the war behind barbed wire.

Mapping race: Multiracial people and racial category construction in the United States and Britain

The social construction of what are often called ‘racial’ categories has proceeded differently in different places. The bases of ascription and group identity, the placement of the boundaries between groups, and the power dynamics between groups have changed dramatically over time and social and political circumstance in each place. This article is a meditation and speculation on the ways that racial categories have been constructed and have changed in the United States and Britain over the course of the twentieth century.’ It uses the identity situations of people of multiple ancestries ‐ Black and White, Asian and African and so on ‐ as a tool to deconstruct the meanings assigned to racial categories and the power dynamics that underly those categories. The article lays out some things that the situation of multiracial people ‐ people some of whose ancestors were Africans and some of whose ancestors came from somewhere else ‐ tells us about the ways racial categories and meanings have evolved over the c...

Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai’iRohrerJudyStaking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai’i. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

opening chapter that provides a sense of the people, history, and debates that frame the nation. People at times fall out of Shilliam’s urgent and conceptual message for connection through his temporal doubling back to a time of connection and identification. Rooting arguments in the specifics of conversations, meetings, and exchanges is necessary for the reader to travel with the author on his explorations of the political implications of these exchanges as a celebration of Black and Brown grounding. The Black Pacific is an important contribution to a growing area of studies named, with some controversy, the “Black Pacific”—what Shilliam considers “both a provocation and a problem” (p. 9). First, it focuses on Pacific Island peoples, whereas so much work on the Pacific Rim flies over and across the Pacific (as if it were devoid of places and people) to Asia. Second, much of the existing work on Black people in the Pacific provides important historical context, but Shilliam charts out more contemporary political intersections and negotiations that took place in especially the 1970s and 1980s. Black Power ideologies from the continental United States traveled across the Pacific to influence Māori moves to reclaim cultural connection and to fight Pakeha racism. While focusing on Black and Brown, The Black Pacific illustrates the complex self-reflexivity and contributions, too, of some Pakeha who were processing and attempting to overcome their role in settler colonialism at “home,” often refracted through their analysis of apartheid South Africa and other settler nations. This important and readable theoretical book speaks to the relations of formerly enslaved peoples and peoples dispossessed of land, of natives and nonwhite settlers. Robbie Shilliam’s The Black Pacific is a compelling scholarly and politically informed work that recognizes empathetic ties across formerly colonized people.

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ment with a growing extra-national reach. Athique traces the combination of factors that shattered the self-contained world of the Indian media: the financial crisis and the liberalisation of the 1990s that prised India open to global forces, and a more surreptitious process whereby pirated satellite television was distributed through local cable entrepreneurs to the urban middle classes. This process led to the collapse of the state monopoly on television broadcasting and led to the creation of a television industry whose products are shaped by, and shape, the culture of globalisation and liberalisation. Perhaps one of the strongest chapters in the book deals with the rise of Bollywood as a manifestation of Indian “soft power”. Athique examines Brian Larkin’s notion that Bollywood films act as bearers of a “parallel modernity” that finds an echo in non-western societies where similar encounters between the traditional and the global occur. At the same time, Bollywood has extended its sphere of circulation in the West beyond the confines of the Indian ethnic and western art house audiences to a new crossover audience and the rebranding of Indian films as postmodern pop art. Athique observes that this process is actually a continuation of earlier orientalism, with Bollywood products regarded as ethnic chic within a liberal, multicultural world view. Amidst the buzz that surrounds Bollywood and the rise of a global Indian cultural industry, Athique does well to point out that rural India and the smaller towns in India where the bulk of the Indian population lives are still a universe away from the glittering media and cultural industry of contemporary India. India has a two tier leisure (and media) infrastructure, and as Athique observes, it is unlikely that the half a billion Indians living hand to mouth existences are going to consume globalised leisure and consumer oriented Indian media products any time soon. This book provides a useful introduction to the Indian media within the context of globalisation, and will hopefully spur interest in further scholarly work on the media as a shaper of globalisation in India.