Today I will be talking to Carly Buxton about her book Unthinking collaboration: American Nisei in transwar Japan, which came out this year [2022] with the University of Hawaiʹi Press. Unthinking Collaboration uncovers the little-known history of Japanese Americans who spent World War II in Japan. 

Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan during the war, could not leave but also, unlike their compatriots, were not interned. But, to survive many had to serve the Japanese state and act as Japanese during the war. When the war ended these same people were mobilized again, but now in the service of the American occupation. Weaving archival data with oral histories, personal narratives, material culture, and fiction, Unthinking Collaboration emphasizes the heterogeneity of Japanese immigrant experiences, and sheds light on broader issues of identity, race, and performance of individuals growing up in a bicultural or multicultural context. By distancing “collaboration” from its default elision with moral judgment, and by incorporating contemporary findings from psychology and behavioral science about the power of the subconscious mind to influence human behavior, Carly Buxton offers an alternative approach to history—one that posits historical subjects as deeply embedded in the realities of their physical and discursive environment. Walking beside Nisei as they navigate their everyday lives in war time and post war Japan, readers are urged to “un-think” long-held assumptions about the actions and decisions of individuals as represented in history. Unthinking Collaboration is an ambitious historical study that relates to broader questions of race and trust, empire-building, World War II, and its legacy on both the Western and Pacific fronts, as well as the questions of loyalty, treason, assimilation, and collaboration.

Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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During World War II, Elaine Black Yoneda, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, spent eight months in a concentration camp--not in Europe, but in California. She did this voluntarily and in solidarity, insisting on accompanying her husband, Karl, and their son, Tommy, when they were incarcerated at the Manzanar Relocation Center. Surprisingly, while in the camp, Elaine and Karl publicly supported the United States' decision to exclude Japanese Americans from the coast.

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration (Temple UP, 2021) is the first critical biography of this pioneering feminist and activist. Rachel Schreiber deftly traces Yoneda's life as she became invested in radical politics and interracial and interethnic activism. In her work for the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party, Yoneda rose to the rank of vice president. After their incarceration, Elaine and Karl became active in the campaigns to designate Manzanar a federally recognized memorial site, for redress and reparations to Japanese Americans, and in opposition to nuclear weapons.

Schreiber illuminates the ways Yoneda's work challenged dominant discourses and how she reconciled the contradictory political and social forces that shaped both her life and her family's. Highlighting the dangers of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian xenophobia, Elaine Black Yoneda recounts an extraordinary life.

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In this episode, we discuss a special issue of The Journal of Asian American Studies: “Reckoning with the Interdiscipline.” This special issue, first conceived in 2018, reflects on fifty years since the 1968 West Coast institutionalization of ethnic studies as a distinct discipline, and forty years since the establishment of AAAS as an identifiable academic organization in 1979. With seventeen contributions from both established and early career scholars, the issue presents reflections on the trajectory of Asian American Studies as a field of study, and asks, “Is there a reason for Asian American studies? What are its preoccupations, its problems, and its possibilities in our present moment, more than fifty years on from our beginnings, in a time fraught with nativism and racial conflict? What ought Asian American studies be doing as we go forward?”

This episode features interviews with two of the three special issue editors: Lily Anne Welty Tamai and Paul Spickard. The hosts were Donna Anderson and Tandee Wang, PhD Students in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A link to the special issue can be found here.

The JAAS Podcast is a collaboration between the New Books Network and the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS). It is mixed and managed by Christopher B. Patterson, and features music by the band Necking.

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If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses--discourses, specifically, of race.

Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as "other" due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Purported heathens have also contributed to the ongoing significance of the concept, promoting solidarity through their opposition to white American Christianity. Gin Lum looks to figures like Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo and Ihanktonwan Dakota writer Zitkála-Sá, who proudly claimed the label of "heathen" for themselves.

Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans' sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard UP, 2022) thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth.

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The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX.

"Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent-including Michelle and myself-who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink."-President Barack Obama, on posthumously awarding Mink the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014

Patsy Takemoto Mink was the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. Fierce and Fearless is the first biography of this remarkable woman, who first won election to Congress in 1964 and went on to serve in the House for twenty-four years, her final term ending with her death in 2002. Mink was an advocate for girls and women, best known for her work shepherding and defending Title IX, the legislation that changed the face of education in America, making it possible for girls and women to participate in school sports, and in education more broadly, at the same level as boys and men.

Mink's life is wonderfully chronicled by eminent historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, Patsy's daughter, a noted political science scholar and first-hand witness to the many political struggles that her mother had to overcome. Featuring family anecdotes, vignettes, and photographs, Fierce and Fearless offers new insight into who Mink was, and the progressive principles that fueled her mission. Wu and Mink provide readers with an up-close understanding of her life as a third-generation Japanese American from Hawaii-from her childhood on Maui to her decades-long career in the House, working with noted legislators like Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Nancy Pelosi. They follow the evolution of her politics, including her advocacy for race, gender, and class equality and her work to promote peace and environmental justice.

Fierce and Fearless provides vivid details of how Patsy Takemoto Mink changed the future of American politics. Celebrating the life and legacy of a woman, activist, and politician ahead of her time, this book illuminates the life of a trailblazing icon who made history.

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Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts.

Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications.

Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon's Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

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Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press 2018), Dorinne Kondo brings together critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis and her critically keen awareness of the politics and potential of theatre production and reception to ask how theatre ‘makes, unmakes and remakes’ race. Building on over 20 years of experience as an ethnographer, dramaturg and playwriter, Kondo exposes the racial structures that are mutually constitutive of the theatre specifically, and the arts more generally. So doing, she attends to the economic forces and representational practices that have not only enabled the affective violence through which the theatre so often operates; she also draws attention to how these forces and practices can produce the grounds for theatre’s restorative and transformative potential.

Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on cultural theory, performance, aesthetics and politics, cross-racial identification/ multiracial collaboration, modes of embodiment, ethnography and genre, the integration of "creative" and "critical" writing.

She is also the author of About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, and Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace.

Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology form Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017).

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Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou (University of Mississippi Press, 2022) by Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis provides insightful analysis of this paradox and a detailed, thorough history of the industry in Louisiana.

Dried shrimp technology was part of the cultural heritage Pearl River Chinese immigrants introduced into the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century. As early as 1870, Chinese natives built shrimp-drying operations in Louisiana’s wetlands and exported the product to Asia through the port of San Francisco. This trade internationalized the shrimp industry. About three years before Louisiana’s Chinese community began their export endeavors, manufactured ice became available in New Orleans, and the Dunbar family introduced patented canning technology. The convergence of these ancient and modern technologies shaped the evolution of the northern Gulf Coast’s shrimp industry to the present.

Coastal Louisiana’s historic connection to the Pacific Rim endures. Not only does the region continue to export dried shrimp to Asian markets domestically and internationally, but since 2000 the region’s large Vietnamese immigrant population has increasingly dominated Louisiana’s fresh shrimp harvest. Louisiana shrimp constitute the American gold standard of raw seafood excellence. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, cheap imports are forcing the nation’s domestic shrimp industry to rediscover its economic roots. “Fresh off the boat” signs and real-time internet connections with active trawlers are reestablishing the industry’s ties to local consumers. Direct marketing has opened the industry to middle-class customers who meet the boats at the docks. This “right off the boat” paradigm appears to be leading the way to reestablishment of sustainable aquatic resources. All-one-can-eat shrimp buffets are not going to disappear, but the Louisiana shrimp industry’s fate will ultimately be determined by discerning consumers’ palates.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territory’s population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. But this population, so crucial to Montana’s history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational elements—exoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their lived experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana (U of Nebraska Press, 2022) seeks to recover the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words and deepen understanding of Chinese experiences in Montana by using a global lens.

Mark T. Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s through the 1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chinese community faced—from family members back in China and from non-Chinese Montanans—as economic and cultural disturbances complicated acceptance of Chinese residents in the state. Through their own voices Johnson reveals the agency of Chinese Montanans in the history of the American West and China.

Mark T. Johnson is an associate professor in the Institute of Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The opinions expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or Department of Defense.

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Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so central to Samoan communities. For Samoan athletes, football is not just an opportunity for upward mobility; it is a way to contribute to, support, and represent their family, village, and nation.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and media analysis, Dr. Uperesa shows how the Samoan ascendancy in football is underpinned by the legacies of US empire and a set of imperial formations that mark Indigenous Pacific peoples as racialized subjects of US economic aid and development. Samoan players succeed by becoming entrepreneurs: building and commodifying their bodies and brands to enhance their football stock and market value.

Uperesa offers insights into the social and physical costs of pursuing a football career, the structures that compel Pacific Islander youth toward athletic labor, and the possibilities for safeguarding their health and wellbeing in the future.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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