Congratulations to Dr. Courtney Sato, recipient of the NEH Fellowship for her work Pacific Internationalisms: Asian American Mobility, Gender, and Empire in the Interwar Period.
About the work:
The NEH Fellowship will support the research and writing of Dr. Sato’s first book, Pacific Internationalisms: Asian American Mobility, Gender, and Empire in the Interwar Period. Pacific Internationalisms offers the first full-length monograph of Pacific internationalism between World War I and World War II, centered on the networks and participation of Asian American women. To underscore how Pacific internationalism was forged against the backdrop of Asian exclusion, Sato situates the study within broader histories of American immigration history that have traced how exclusion was codified in law and legislation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Analyzing Pacific internationalism as a cardinal ideology helps us to understand the dueling impulses of exclusion and inclusion at work in these decades. U.S. immigration policies, including both the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act and the subsequent 1924 Immigration Act, which established hierarchical immigration quotas by nationality, came down squarely on the side of exclusion. Yet many individuals throughout the US and the Pacific turned to liberal inclusion, founding a proliferation of transnational movements that sought to bring together diverse people and nationalities despite lines of difference. These included international student exchanges, international conferences, goodwill tours, and the rise of people-to-people intercultural diplomacy.
While recent debates in Asian American studies have focused on transnationalism and forms of liberal rights and belonging, Pacific Internationalisms demonstrates that internationalism was a central strand of thought among Asian and American thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century. The histories of Pacific internationalism that constitute this book continued to inform the region, and the United States’ engagement with Asia and the Pacific long after the interwar period. The Pacific remained a site of imperial domination, racial exclusion, and anticolonial resistance—but it was also understood as a place where, with help from new networks and organizations, people could envision and forge alternative modes of belonging.
Congratulations Courtney!
