Asian American and Pacific Histories

Asian American and Pacific histories examine how migration, colonial rule, and imperial power have shaped the lives, cultures, and identities of communities across and between Asia and the Pacific over the past several centuries. Scholars in this area draw on literature, archival sources, and cultural analysis to trace how race has been constructed and contested in ways that cross national borders, connecting, for example, U.S. immigration policy to Japanese occupation in Micronesia or Filipino labor networks to Hawaiian plantation economies. A central question driving current research is how to recover histories that have been fragmented or suppressed by both Western and Asian imperial projects without flattening the profound differences among the communities involved. Researchers are also actively rethinking what "the Pacific" means as a unit of analysis — pushing back against frameworks that treat it primarily as a space between more powerful regions rather than as a place with its own dense, interconnected histories.

Works

157,931

Total citations

240,137

Keywords

Asian AmericanTransnationalRaceColonialismEmpirePacific