Traveling Chinatowns: Migration, Proximity, and Violence across the Pacific
When cholera broke out across Japan in the early 1880s, D. B. Simmons, an American medical doctor who chaired the Yokohama Foreign Board of Health, organized a committee for the inspection of Yokohama’s Chinatown. The inspection was partly initiated by “a great deal of temporary anxiety” among European residents on account of “the presence, in the very heart of the Foreign Settlement, of a Chinese quarter.” Decades later, in July 1931, a wave of violence swept over the Korean peninsula, where Chinese houses were singled out for deadly attack. Houses were wrecked, housewares stolen, shops destroyed, residents beaten and stabbed to death—regardless of gender and age. It seemed that “everything Chinese” was to be wiped out. The anxious tone of the medical report from the Japanese port city indicated the fear of epidemic diseases crossing geographical boundaries, especially given the appearance of the networked ports across the Pacific. The anti-Chinese violence in Korea, on the other hand, revealed the presence of “Chinese” as a category founded on sheer hatred against migrants in the colony. Drawn together, these two incidents signaled the age in which particular categories of people and space traversed different continents while carving out new geographies of racial anxiety, proximity, and violence.
Reading across archives in East Asia, North America, and Europe, Traveling Chinatowns situates "Chinatown" as an imaginative and material space within the global history of empire, labor migration, and violence. By analyzing architectural spaces and narratives of Chinese migration after the abolition of slavery—moving ships, treaty ports, shophouses, detective fiction, exposé journalism, police photography—the book traces how Chinatown in East Asia became a space that would both allay and create anxiety about colonial proximity, inextricably entwined with transpacific circuits of racial ideas, imaginings, and hatred. Traveling Chinatowns shows that while “Chinatown” was a malleable space that would entail significant mutations as the idea of it traveled across geographies and landed in different contexts, it did serve as a paradoxical site of imperial formations that required at once both the cross-border circulation of people and restrictive spatial measures to manage that mobility.
Drawing from architectural history, Asian/American studies, and postcolonial theory, the book calls into question how previous scholarship has looked disproportionately at contexts of imperial powers or the cross-imperial transference of racial and spatial knowledge, with little discussion of colonies in this process. Bringing together East Asia’s colonial space and Anglo-American settler colonies across the Pacific, the book delves into the transpacific circuits through which racial knowledge, imaginings, and hatred circulated in spatial forms. With a particular focus on physical interventions into the built environment, from treaty-port city planning and architecture to police surveillance and exposé journalism, the book further seeks to contribute to the historical study of colonial governance of migration by emphasizing the materiality of its constitution and reification in urban space.
Reading across archives in East Asia, North America, and Europe, Traveling Chinatowns situates "Chinatown" as an imaginative and material space within the global history of empire, labor migration, and violence. By analyzing architectural spaces and narratives of Chinese migration after the abolition of slavery—moving ships, treaty ports, shophouses, detective fiction, exposé journalism, police photography—the book traces how Chinatown in East Asia became a space that would both allay and create anxiety about colonial proximity, inextricably entwined with transpacific circuits of racial ideas, imaginings, and hatred. Traveling Chinatowns shows that while “Chinatown” was a malleable space that would entail significant mutations as the idea of it traveled across geographies and landed in different contexts, it did serve as a paradoxical site of imperial formations that required at once both the cross-border circulation of people and restrictive spatial measures to manage that mobility.
Drawing from architectural history, Asian/American studies, and postcolonial theory, the book calls into question how previous scholarship has looked disproportionately at contexts of imperial powers or the cross-imperial transference of racial and spatial knowledge, with little discussion of colonies in this process. Bringing together East Asia’s colonial space and Anglo-American settler colonies across the Pacific, the book delves into the transpacific circuits through which racial knowledge, imaginings, and hatred circulated in spatial forms. With a particular focus on physical interventions into the built environment, from treaty-port city planning and architecture to police surveillance and exposé journalism, the book further seeks to contribute to the historical study of colonial governance of migration by emphasizing the materiality of its constitution and reification in urban space.