Border Crossings: Anti-Imperialism and Race-Making in Transpacific Movements, 1910-1951

Abstract

“Border Crossings” is a transnational history that examines how Japanese and Korean migrant activists developed anti-imperialist political thought and cultures in Tokyo, Seoul, Chicago, and New York from the 1910s through the 1940s. Using multi-sited archival research in the United States, Korea, and Japan, I argue that interracial and interethnic encounters of the activists, such as their relationships with other Asians, African Americans, and migrant whites, were central to the development of their political thought and cultural production. I primarily focus on six Korean and Japanese migrant socialists, some of whom collaborated with each other. As activists and writers, these migrants drew on their experiences as racialized workers, colonial subjects, and diasporic intellectuals. To challenge empire and racism, these radicals developed ideas that traveled the global circuit of critical theory, namely theories on class and gender. Contributing to transnational, East Asian, and U.S. history, this dissertation illuminates how transpacific migration and intercultural exchanges allowed these activists to imagine broader coalitions.

Based on primary sources in English, Japanese, and Korean such as magazines, newspapers, political pamphlets, fiction, visual materials, and government records, “Border Crossings” shows shared politics and different perspectives of anti-imperialism between Japanese and Korean activists. Japanese colonialism in Korea and its invasion of China, U.S. immigration restrictions and institutional racism, and World War II had a shifting influence on social movements and migrant communities, shaping different political orientations within the activist spheres. While Japanese socialists tended to prioritize class solidarity at the expense of anticolonialism, their Korean counterparts frequently emphasized the importance of decolonization in relation to other forms of social change. For both of these activist groups, contemporary social movements including African American freedom struggles and Chinese nationalist movements became important reference points as they developed their anti-imperialism. Exploring intersecting agendas for radical social transformation, this dissertation shows how transpacific relocations and imaginations of activists advanced anti-imperial coalitions or redefined the boundaries of activism in both East Asia and the United States.

As a transpacific and inter-Asian history, “Border Crossings” intervenes in debates over Japanese imperialism, U.S. and East Asian migrations and racial formations, and global intellectual history and social movements. Whereas historians have examined the mutually constitutive nature of Japan’s imperial metropole and its colonies, the question of how colonial relations shaped East Asian and Asian American migrations and social movements has not received enough attention. Showing that Japanese imperialism deeply affected politics and cultures of migrants and activists, this dissertation contributes to the historiographies of imperial Japan, colonial Korea, and early Asian America. Moreover, although scholars have analyzed flows of people, ideas, and cultures that crossed the Pacific, Asians tend to appear as individual national groups in their narratives. This dissertation emphasizes interracial/-ethnic experiences of migrant socialists in the early to mid-twentieth century and explores how relocations and encounters shaped their imagination and practice of solidarity. In so doing, “Border Crossings” joins the growing body of transpacific studies and Afro-Asian history and sheds a new light on the history of the global left. Centering on under-appreciated stories of migrant radicals within a comparative and connective framework, this dissertation illuminates possibilities and limitations of transnational socialist movements.