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Though Japanese migration to Brazil started only at the turn of the twentieth century, Brazil is now the country with the largest ethnic Japanese population outside Japan.
Collaborative Settler Colonialism examines this history as a central chapter of both Brazil's and Japan's processes of nation and empire building, and, crucially, as a convergence of their settler colonial projects. Inspired by American colonialism and the final conquest of the U.S. Western frontier, Brazilian and Japanese empire builders collaborated to bring Japanese migrant workers to Brazil, which had the outcome of simultaneously dispossessing Indigenous Brazilians of their land and furthering the expansion of Japanese land and resource possession abroad. Bringing discourses of Latin American and Japanese settler colonialism into rare dialogue with each other, this book offers new insight into understanding the Japanese empire, the history of immigration in Brazil and Latin America, and the past and present of settler colonialism.
Sidney Xu Lu is Associate Professor and Annette and Hugh Gragg Chair of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University.
"Sidney Xu Lu's riveting account of Japanese emigration to Brazil tells of indigenous dispossession, precarious alliances, fascism and war, and the fates of empires and revolutions. He weaves together multiple threads in this brilliant portrait of two states and their intersecting projects of racialized nationalism and settler colonialism."—Louise Young, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Madison
"This is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Japan's expansionism in Brazil. Tracing migrations and their legacies across the twentieth century, Lu shows how the largest overseas community of Japanese descent came to develop through what he powerfully calls 'collaborative settler colonialism.' An essential resource for students and researchers."—Martin Dusinberre, author of Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories
"Lu's innovative new book brings a fresh understanding to the global dynamics behind Japanese immigration to Brazil through its focus on how state and non-state actors were enmeshed in longer histories of race and racism in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. This book is an important contribution to the study of transnational studies of migration, diaspora, and colonialism."—Jeffrey Lesser, author of Living and Dying in São Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil
"In this impressive follow-up to his outstanding The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism, Lu explores the concepts of 'collaborative settler colonialism' and the 'migration state.' This is an eye-opening comparative study of unintentional collaboration and the intricate connections among migration, the modern concept of racial hierarchy, and settler-colonialist expansion in modern Japan and Brazil."—Ignacio López-Calvo, author of Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production
258 pp.6 x 9Illus: 9 color images, 19 b/w images, 5 maps, 4 tables
9780520404328$34.95|£30.00Paper
Feb 2025