Asian American and Pacific Histories

Asian American and Pacific histories examines how migration, empire, and colonialism have shaped the lives, cultures, and identities of Asian and Pacific Islander communities across and beyond national borders. Rather than treating the United States as a self-contained frame, scholars in this area trace the circuits of labor, settlement, and cultural production that connect the Pacific Rim, drawing attention to how race is produced not just domestically but through imperial and transnational processes. Active research is working to recover literary and archival voices that dominant historiographies have marginalized, and to theorize what "the Pacific" itself means as a geographic and conceptual category—whether it functions as a bridge, a boundary, or a site of ongoing colonial contestation. A central open question is how Asian American identity coheres, or fails to, across communities whose relationships to empire, sovereignty, and displacement differ substantially from one another.

Works

163,916

Total citations

242,983

Keywords

Asian AmericanTransnationalRaceColonialismEmpirePacific