In this compelling critique Rob Wilson explores the creation of the “Pacific Rim” in the American imagination and how the concept has been variously adapted and resisted in Hawai'i, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Reimagining the American Pacific ranges from the nineteenth century to the present and draws on theories of postmodernism, transnationality, and post-Marxist geography to contribute to the ongoing discussion of what constitutes “global” and “local.” Wilson begins by tracing the arrival of American commerce and culture in the Pacific through missionary and imperial forces in the nineteenth century and the parallel development of Asia/Pacific as an idea. Using an impressive range of texts—from works by Herman Melville, James Michener, Maori and Western Samoan novelists, and Bamboo Ridge poets to Baywatch, films and musicals such as South Pacific and Blue Hawaii, and native Hawaiian shark god poetry—Wilson illustrates what it means for a space to be “regionalized.” Claiming that such places become more open to transnational flows of information, labor, finance, media, and global commodities, he explains how they then become isolated, their borders simultaneously crossed and fixed. In the case of Hawai'i, Wilson argues that culturally innovative, risky forms of symbol making and a broader—more global—vision of local plight are needed to counterbalance the racism and increasing imbalance of cultural capital and goods in the emerging postplantation and tourist-centered economy. Reimagining the American Pacific leaves the reader with a new understanding of the complex interactions of global and local economies and cultures in a region that, since the 1970s, has been a leading trading partner of the United States. It is an engaging and provocative contribution to the fields of Asian and American studies, as well as those of cultural studies and theory, literary criticism, and popular culture.
"--David Palumbo-Liu, author of "Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier" "No student or scholar of Asian America can afford to ignore this book.
Conversations and Contestations in and Around the Pacific : Selected Essays Cynthia G. Franklin, Ruth Hsu, Suzanne Kosanke ... see Rob Wilson's " Towards an ' Asia / Pacific Cultural Studies and his Reimagining the American Pacific .
of “native songs” and “haunting melodies from the old country,” along with the display of Razil's picture and poem, ... Rather than a fixation on the past, such “continuous engagement with loss and its remains” has the effect of ...
July 29, 1870 diary, GBGSWM; Harris, “Preserving A Vision,” 79. Io. Grinnell, “Memoirs,” 41–3. II. Ibid., 45–7. See also George Bird Grinnell, Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk Tales (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 273–302.
Uses memoirs, military records, court documents, Hollywood films, and newspaper and magazine articles to demonstrate how the wartime image of the Japanese as fanatics, savages, and subhumans was transformed into one of a valuable ally in ...
A groundbreaking anthology devoted to Asian/Pacific Islander American women and their experiences Asian/Pacific Islander American Women is the first collection devoted to the historical study of A/PI women's diverse experiences in America.
Rather, they aim to present a more nuanced portrait of the involvement of minority populations in processes of liberal state making and tourism than the Hobson's choice of exclusion, resistance, or cooptation.
6For references to Kuhn's influence on such fields as philosophy, psychology, and sociology, see Eugene Lashchyk, "Scientific Revolutions" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1969). 'See James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, ...
Papua and New Guinea was thus popularly regarded as the 'last unknown'—a phrase that was coined in Karl Shapiro's wartime poem and that was later used as the title of a history by Australian Gavin Souter in 1963.38 Consequently, ...
Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco Meredith Oda ... and Cultures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, ...