Applying a history of knowledge perspective to the study of transpacific migration means thinking about manifold encounters between a wide range of cultures across an enormous region. Whether historical actors experienced such transpacific contacts or modern-day scholars seek to apprehend the same, a lot of translation work is involved. How did people in the past deal with the contradictory logics or competing categories they encountered in their transpacific lives? How do scholars come to terms with the disparate knowledges underlying migration, history writing, or community building in and across the Pacific?

Projects

Manke, Albert. Coping with Exclusion: Chinese Migrant Networks in the Americas and across the Pacific in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century

Urbansky, Sören. Faces of Fear: A Global History of Anti-Chinese Stereotypes.

Interaction and Knowledge in the Pacific Region: Entanglements and Disentanglements. Submodule 1B of the Max Weber Foundation’s Wissen entgrenzen project.

Publications

Manke, Albert. Coping with Discrimination and Exclusion: Experiences of Free Chinese Migrants in the Americas in a Transregional and Diachronic Perspective. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2021.

‐‐‐‐‐. Spanish edition: Haciendo frente a la discriminación y a la exclusión: Las experiencias de migrantes chinos libres en las Américas desde una perspectiva transregional y diacrónica. Bielefeld: Kipu, 2020.  open access

‐‐‐‐‐. “Etnización y revolución: La lucha por el poder entre los inmigrantes chinos en Cuba durante la Guerra Fría.” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas – Anuario de Historia de América Latina 53, no. 1 (December 2016): 353–74.

‐‐‐‐‐. “The Impact of the 1949 Chinese Revolution on a Latin American Chinese Community: Shifting Power Relations in Havana’s Chinatown.” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 61, no. 2 (2018).  open access

Urbansky, Sören. “A Chinese Plague: Sinophobic Discourses in Vladivostok, San Francisco, and Singapore.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 64 (Spring 2019): 75–92.  open access

‐‐‐‐‐. “Fears Abroad, Propaganda at Home: Reflections on the Yellow Peril Discourse in China.” In Yellow Perils: China Narratives in the Contemporary World, edited by Frank Billé and Sören Urbansky, 246–66. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018.

"Confined in the Wooden House." Poem scratched into the walls of the Detention Barracks at Angel Island Immigration Station by an immigrant in the early 20th century. Photograph courtesy of Samid Suliman.

Events

Knowledge on the Move: Information Networks During and After the Holocaust. Workshop at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. April 4–5, 2022.

Mobilities, Exclusion, and Migrants’ Agency in the Pacific Realm in a Transregional and Diachronic Perspective. Conference at GHI PRO, UC Berkeley, June 7-8, 2021.

Migration and Xenophobia across the Pacific in the Time of COVID-19: Current Problems in Their Historical Context. Panel discussion via Zoom, June 11 or 12 (depending on time zone), 2020. See the recorded event on Vimeo.

Transregional Academy: Histories of Migrant Knowledges in and across the Transpacific. Conference at GHI PRO, UC Berkeley, May 28 to June 4, 2019.

Entangling the Pacific and Atlantic Worlds: Past and Present: A Symposium Commemorating Helmut Schmidt. Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, March 25-27, 2019.

Transoceanic American Studies. Conference at GHI Washington, May 17-18, 2018.

Migrant Knowledges: Concepts, Voices, Spaces. Workshop at GHI PRO, UC Berkeley, April 20-21, 2018.

Empires of Knowledge: Expertise and Imperial Power Across the Long Twentieth Century. GHI PRO inaugural workshop at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, September 15-16, 2017.

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