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Reviewed by:
  • The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific ed. by Moon-Ho Jung
  • John Munro
Moon-Ho Jung, ed., The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2014)

The tide of scholarship on the Pacific Ocean has been rising of late. Matt Matsuda’s impressive survey in Pacific Worlds, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Bruce Cumings’ Westward reorientation of US history in Dominion from Sea to Sea, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Jodi Kim’s Pacific-oriented decentring of the cold war construct in Ends of Empire, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Rudy Guevarra’s transpacifically contextualized study of race and community formation in Becoming Mexipino, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), Seema Sohi’s rich tracings of anticolonial radicalism from Asia to North America and back again in Echoes of Mutiny, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and John Price’s paradigm-shifting study of Canadian foreign relations in Orienting Canada, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011), to take just a few titles from a growing list, collectively remind us of what we might gain by, from an American standpoint, facing west. Moon-Ho Jung’s new edited volume, The Rising Tide of Color, therefore arrives at a good time and in good company, but it also makes several unique contributions of its own.

Beyond setting one Lothrop Stoddard aturn in his grave, Rising Tide’s full title announces these contributions well. The chapters in this collection do have something new to teach us about race, state violence, and radical movements in a US-centred, Pacific analysis. But in addition to demonstrating why these subjects are important, the authors also reveal their interconnection, how each of these three themes has been shaped by the other two. Herein lies the book’s overarching argument: that the elements introduced in the title to this collection are important, and that their importance can be best grasped when considered together.

Rising Tide really has two introductions, both of which are insightful and inspiring. The first, by editor Moon-Ho Jung, and the second, by George Lipsitz, nicely complement each other, in the first instance by offering an outline of US-Pacific imperial history, and in the second by providing an argument for the necessity and the potential pitfalls of studying the relationships between race, state violence, and radical movements. The remaining chapters, which hold to an evenness of high quality, take up more specific issues within the collection’s broad themes. It is tempting to [End Page 321] try to examine the topic and thesis of every chapter here, because it’s not easy to leave aside Rising Tide’s astute work on conflicting constructions of manhood between South Asian revolutionaries and syndicalist radicals in the Pacific Northwest, on how multiracial proletarian audiences in Hawai’i used the cinema to stage worker grievances and aspirations despite the projected ideologies of the amusements on offer, on the complex relationship between anarchist immigrant whiteness and US citizenship, on the entanglement of race and sexuality in the policing of postwar Los Angeles, on the presence of rural Southern radicalism in prison protests in 1970s California, or on transpacific anti-imperialist organizing within labour and the US military during and after the US war against Vietnam. But let me resist that temptation in order to give a little more space to two representative contributions.

Christina Heatherton’s article focuses on Depression-era working-class struggles for relief before and during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in California. In the process of learning about the employed and the unemployed in factory and field who sought to improve their circumstances, we can take lessons, it turns out, in many things. First, Heatherton convincingly demonstrates that relief was multivalent. It functioned as a tool that owners and the state might provide or suspend in order to maintain control. Meanwhile, relief was theorized among Unemployed Councils and agricultural workers not as a moderate stop-gap measure that might merely ameliorate racial capitalism’s direst propensities, but as a prerequisite for revolution that provided the rudiments of enabling...

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