Réplique / Response

Re: Histoire sociale / Social History, May 2013, pp. 237-239.

I write in response to Yukari Takai’s review of my book Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste and Borders, 1885-1945 (2011), and particularly her suggestion that my book drew to any degree, and without proper attribution, on a paper about steamship companies she presented at a 2009 conference panel in which we both participated or an article that engages the transit privilege that was published later the same year.

The material at pages 113-114 of my book to which Takai refers first appeared in my dissertation in 2006 (see pages 196-202, 212-225 and 241-247 for a detailed discussion of the role of steamship companies and the transit privilege in relation to Japanese migration to Canada and the United States). Sections of this material were also included in an essay submitted to the editors of Bridging National Borders in North America in 2005 and presented in Vancouver, B.C., in 2006 (Bridging National Borders in North America [2010], Introduction, ix). Although the material in question was revised (and condensed) in the process of editing it for inclusion in a book half its length, it is clearly identifiable in my 2006 dissertation. In fact, the underlying research and initial drafts of this material were well underway by 2003 and 2004. Takai’s work in no way influenced my own interpretation of the original sources.