In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.
Eiichiro Azuma is Alan Charles Kors Term Chair Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America and a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History.
"This book underscores the fallacy of 'Asian American' as a historical category in demonstrating the distinctive characteristics of Japanese migration and settlement to the United States as citizens of the only Asian imperial power. It is ambitiously conceived, meticulously researched, and soundly organized, and it will significantly impact the fields of history of empire, migration and critical race studies, Asian American history, Japanese history, and intellectual history."—Madeline Hsu, author of The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
"Taking readers from California to Taiwan, Manchuria, and beyond, this erudite and profound study of settlers, settlement projects, and frontier visions re-charts the landscape of Japanese expansionism. In Search of Our Frontier is a landmark work that reveals the racial politics of Japanese migration and colonialism for the first time in their full complexity."—Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History, Georgetown University
368 pp.6 x 9
9780520304383$34.95|£30.00Hardcover
Oct 2019