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boundary 2 28.1 (2001) 195-219



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The American Asiatic Association and the Imperialist Imaginary of the American Pacific

John Eperjesi

Internationalism, in other words, has been one of the constitutive traditions of the Left, but in this age of late capitalism it is best to recognize that certain kinds of internationalism also arise more or less spontaneously out of the circuits of imperialist capital itself, and the line between the internationalism of the Left and the globalism of capitalist circuits must always be demarcated as rigorously as possible.

—Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory

But the filling out of the Pacific from the sixteenth century on had a more compelling logic to it, whether we speak of geographical discovery or the pursuit of commodities: the logic was the logic of the [End Page 195] capitalist world economy spreading out of Europe to conquer the world.

—Arif Dirlik, What Is in a Rim?

What “ought to be” is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics.

—Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince

New Americanist projects, as put together thus far in texts such as Cultures of United States Imperialism and Thomas Peyser’s Utopia and Cosmopolis, look to disrupt those spatial antinomies—inside/outside, domestic/foreign, center/periphery—that have historically sustained hegemonic narratives of the nation.1 As Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease forcibly argue in their introductions to Cultures of United States Imperialism, the participation of these terms in moments of nationalist euphoria and doctrines of American exceptionalism needs to be replaced by critical, “postnational” terms, which de-link the study of American culture(s) from the reproduction of various systems of domination and exclusion. Global-localism, de-centered cosmopolitanism, globalized space, and the transnational are an emergent set of geopolitical signifiers through which New Americanists have begun to grasp one of the more embattled terms in American political rhetoric—imperialism.

One conception and practice of space that has yet to be fully located by New Americanist remappings of the “field imaginaries” of American literature and American studies—one that mediates relations between the local and the global, the national and the transnational—is that of the region.2 The American Pacific names the regional imaginary through which [End Page 196] capital looked to expand into Asia and the Pacific at the turn of the century.3 David Harvey asks, “What role does geography play in the process of crisis formation and resolution?”4 Capital needs a regional imaginary in order to overcome spatial barriers to expansion. As a metageographical term, American Pacific names those practices of regional articulation through which a heterogeneous or dispersed area is discursively transformed into an abstract unity. Regional imaginaries help capitalist world powers work through moments of “crisis formation and resolution,” and are therefore necessary to the reproduction of capital.5

In 1897, Germany seized Jiaozhou and Qungdao in the Shandong Province of China. That same year, Russia, France, Japan, and Britain also acquired “spheres of influence” or “spheres of interest” in China. This situation created a panic among New York merchants, who, on 6 January 1898, responded by forming the Committee on American Interests in China.6 The committee directed the New York Chamber of Commerce to push the Department of State to act against the potential partitioning of China. Following success in this effort, the committee, renamed as the American Asiatic Association, looked to maintain regular contact with Washington. When organized in 1898, the American Asiatic Association was the only interest [End Page 197] group concerned exclusively with Far East policy.7 Through close contact with John Hay, secretary of state during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations, the association became an effective historical bloc, whose goal, as stated in its constitution, was “to foster and safeguard the trade and commercial interests of the citizens of the United States, and others associated therewith, in the Empires of China, Japan, and Korea, and in the Philippine Islands, and elsewhere in Asia or...

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