Description

In the early twentieth century, the U.S. and Canadian Immigration Services worked deliberately and collaboratively to suppress South Asian revolutionary nationalism and white labor radicalism in the Pacific Northwest borderlands. This talk examines how these counterinsurgency measures were built upon the foundations of Asian exclusion and a product of intercolonial cooperation and exchange. In doing so, this presentation seeks to reinterpret Asian exclusion from being strictly about national protection (and keeping out undesirable foreigners) to consider how its legal precedents, statutory provisions, and enforcement mechanisms were reworked as a strategy of U.S. and British imperial rule.

Kornel Chang is an Assistant Professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, State University of New Jersey. He is the author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, which is a study of the western U.S.-Canadian borderlands in the Pacific world, examining how the region arose simultaneously from frontier expansion, the globalizing forces of capital and empire, and the territorializing processes of state formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His articles on race and empire and migration and border controls in the Pacific world have been published in the Journal of American History and the American Quarterly. He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the MacMillian Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.