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41 3 Diasporas, Displacements, and the Construction of Transnational Identities K. SCOTT WONG —————————————————————— —————————————————————— In the midst the First World War, the American social critic Randolph S. Bourne (1886–1918) published an essay that went against the grain of the widespread calls for active Americanization and national conformity through the suppression of the articulation of ethnic identities. In the face of that international crisis , Bourne resisted the notion that immigrants were required to cast their lot into the American “melting pot” and to leave behind their cultures of origin. Instead, Bourne sought to broaden Americans’ understanding of their relationship to the rest of the world, advocating that notions of “citizenship” were not necessarily bound by the nation-state but could also be conceived of in a larger, international perspective. In what may be one of the first articulations of what is now commonly called “transnationalism“ and “multiculturalism,” Bourne wrote, “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” (Bourne 1916, 96). His passionate call for a cosmopolitan and pluralistic understanding of American society and the nation’s role in the world came at a time when many Americans questioned the desirability of both immigration and America’s increasing involvement in global issues. For a while, the Great War brought the United States out of its isolationism and into the broader community of nations, but the aftermath of this engagement would also eventually contribute to the near-closing of the “Golden Door” to immigrants in 1924. As broad the vision was that Bourne offered in1916, however, his primary concerns were with how Americans should incorporate immigrants from Europe into the American social landscape and how the United States should respond to a changing European polity. By the time of his writing “Trans-National America,” the United States had already had a long relationship with Asia. Although rarely acknowledged in the literature of the history of American foreign relations, one can argue that Asia has had an influence on the shaping of American culture since before the Colonial period. After all, it was Asia that Christopher Columbus and many of those who followed were seeking, not the land mass they encountered that eventually became known as the New World. This developing relationship with Asia would be fundamental in shaping the labor and trade economy of the colonies and the young republic, and the neighboring colonies of other European nations. The European, and later, American, penetration into Asia and Asian markets contributed to the diasporic movement of people and capital throughout the Pacific and Atlantic cultural spheres. For example, the Spanish colonization of the Philippine Islands in 1521 began a movement bringing Asians to the Americas possibly as early as 1565. In that year the Spanish galleon San Pablo left Cebu for Acapulco, initiating a trade route that would last for nearly three hundred years. From there, Filipinos would migrate from Mexico and settle in Louisiana as early as 1763 (Cordova 1983, 9). As the recent scholarship of John Kuo Wei Tchen (1999), Yong Chen (2000), Madeline Hsu (2000), and Adam McKeown (2001) has demonstrated, Chinese immigrants in New York, San Francisco , Chicago, and Honolulu had established transnational links with China and the Americas by the mid-nineteenth century, expanding long-standing trade and residential patterns. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries , Asians occupied important transnational positions in the Pacific and Atlantic regions, while people from various parts of the Americas would play important roles in reshaping a number of Asian countries and cultures. Of great significance was the American presence in the Pacific region. Although American ships had long plied the Pacific trade routes, the gradual usurpation of power in Hawaii from the 1840s through the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in1893 by American sugarcane plantation owners, with the support of political and military powers, marked the beginning of American imperialism in that area that set the conditions for America’s emergence as a world power (formal annexation would take place in1898).1 Hawaii was “caught in the crosscurrents of global mercantile trade involving Europe, the United States, and China and at the center of the burgeoning Pacific whale fishery,” and it would be these competing economic, legal, and ideological forces that would eventually lead to American domination of Hawaii, including the use of the American legal system to transform the socioeconomic, political, and religious cultures...

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