Transpacific Overtures: An Introduction

Gods are crumbling somewhere, Machines are rumbling somewhere, Ways are being found, Watches being wound, Prophets being crowned Somewhere out there, not here. Here we plant rice.

—Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, Pacific Overtures

We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.

—José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

Theatergoers who took their seats in the Winter Garden Theatre on January 11, 1976, to watch the premiere of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Pacific Overtures found themselves in the dawn of a new era, plunged into the geopolitics of an earlier Asian-Pacific arena.¹ The musical dramatizes Commodore Matthew Perry’s mission in 1853 to open trade relations with isolationist Japan, the closed “Floating World,” through good old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy. Constructed as metatheater to reframe this transpacific encounter of how the West forcibly opened the East, Pacific Overtures is a queer mix of Orientalist theatricality and postcolonial critique as Sondheim and Weidman metaphorically turned the gunboats on the audience. While the kabuki-inflected production, directed by Harold Prince, with an all-Asian ensemble and cross-gender casting, provided a familiar exotic spectacle of the Orient, the musical stages a critique of British and U.S. imperialism, by situating audience members with the Japanese. To experience narratively and sonically the inevitability of empire, commerce, and “progress” must have been particularly resonant for that 1976 audience, with Vietnam and other Asian theaters of war (including those formerly colonized by Japan) fresh on their minds. Furthermore, following this staging of the “opening” of Japan’s economic markets, Japan would lead a global acceleration into finance capitalism, threatening to overtake the United States as the most dominant force in the international futures and exchange markets. Even with the waning of Japan’s tiger economy as its Lost Decade extended, by way of ecological disasters (natural and man-made), into a lost generation, and because of China’s rapid ascendance in global capitalism, anxieties over Asian imminence have metastasized. Fast-forward to the longue durée of the 2016 election year, when the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a speculative trade agreement of Pacific Rim countries, excluding China, became a hot-potato/hot-button issue, the very emblem that sutured “the end of the Asian Century” to “make America great again.” We now find ourselves the stunned spectators of another spectacle, on the brink, perhaps, of the “closing” of the United States.

It is the dawn of Trump’s America, a few days after an election that revealed for some, and substantiated for others, that racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, hatred, and fear are alive and well. Knowing that you, our readers, will be reading this special issue during another dawn of Trump’s America, shortly after the inauguration in January 2017, we revisit the draft of this introduction. We revise as many gather in cities and college campuses across the nation to exercise their right to protest. We write as fellow Asian Americanists remind our students and the general populace that waves of fear can and do separate people based upon race and that we have seen this happen before. Even as we turn in on ourselves as a nation, whether to protect broken hearts and bodies inundated by the rise in hate crimes and overt racism, to affirm the divisiveness depicted in the electoral maps, or enact a new nationalist stance over previous centuries of globalisms, we write to you in twilight, about possibility.

Possibility persists, even as projection falters. Yet another moment has come to pass when statistical speculations—even founder of fivethirtyeight.com Nate Silver’s models that showed Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning to be less outright—failed to predict these outcomes. Among the contributing factors to such extrapolative errors may be a lurking, under-reported, and complex cluster of resentments embedded in subcutaneous strata of the American voting populace. White supremacy, antielitism, misogyny, xenophobia: these may very well constitute the most formidable presentations of those frustrations, and they are all variables that belie easy accounting...