History Book Award

Committee: Judy Wu, Ji-Yeon Yuh, and Scott Kurashige (chair)

The committee is pleased to announce that the Association for Asian American Studies History Award will be given to Kornel Chang, author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (University of California Press, 2012).

Pacific Connections examines a central tension in the history of American foreign and domestic relations, namely the push toward globalization and the contradictory demand to protect national borders. Chang examines these dynamics by focusing on the Pacific Northwest, situating this region as a node in a broader transpacific network of migration, trade, and imperial state formation. It is a story of how the U.S.-Canadian borderlands is crucial for understanding American ambitions and fears about the Pacific world. Chang’s work examines a range of historical subjects: entrepreneurs and state officials; labor and anti-imperialism activists; labor recruiters and economic middlemen; whites, Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians. Despite their unequal access to power, all engaged in political debates about labor, migration, trade, and border formation. Chang’s insistence on situating these topics in an extra-local and extra-national framework is part of a broader historiographical turn toward “empire” and “transnationalism” in Asian American studies, American studies, and U.S. history. Rather than framing the dynamics in the Pacific Northwest as a local, regional, or community study, Chang emphasizes how individuals and ideals that cross national borders shaped the formation of class identities, racial ideologies, and national boundaries. We recognize the ambitious scope and comparative nature of his work and congratulate Kornel Chang on his accomplishment.