Gendering The Trans Pacific World

As the inaugural volume of the new Brill book series Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race, this anthology presents an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology features twenty-one chapters by new and established scholars and writers. They collectively examine the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture. This is an ideal volume to introduce advanced undergraduate and graduate students to Transpacific Studies and gender as a category of analysis. Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race is now available in paperback for individual customers.

Dorothy Fujita-Rony’s The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American History, examines the importance of women's memorykeeping, for two Toba Batak women whose twentieth-century histories span Indonesia and the United States, H.L.Tobing and Minar T. Rony.

Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries presents a critical introduction and nine essays that examine women’s and men’s participation in the art world and gendered visual representations from the premodern through modern eras.

The Mexican Transpacific considers the influence of a Japanese ethnic background or lack thereof in the cultural production of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican authors, performers, and visual artists. Despite Japanese Mexicans’ unquestionable influence on Mexico’s history and culture and the historical studies recently published on this Nikkei community, the study of its cultural production and therefore its self-definition has been, for the most part, overlooked. This book, a continuation of author Ignacio López-Calvo’s previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on literature, theater, and visual arts produced by Japanese immigrants in Mexico and their descendants, rather than on the Japanese community as a mere object of study. With this interdisciplinary project, López-Calvo aims to bring to the fore this silenced community’s voice and agency to historicize its own experience.

Looking at a range of cases from around the Transpacific, the contributors to this book explore the complex formulations of race and racism emerging from transoceanic migrations and encounters in the region. Asia has a history of ceaseless, active, and multidirectional migration, which continues to bear multilayered and complex genetic diversity. The traditional system of rank order between groups of people in Asia consisted of multiple “invisible” differences in variegated entanglements, including descent, birthplace, occupation, and lifestyle. Transpacific migration brought about the formation of multilayered and complex racial relationships, as the physically indistinguishable yet multifacetedly racialized groups encountered the hegemonic racial order deriving from the transatlantic experience of racialization based on “visible” differences. Each chapter in this book examines a different case study, identifying their complexities and particularities while contributing to a broad view of the possibilities for solidarity and human connection in a context of domination and discrimination. These cases include the dispossession of the Ainu people, the experiences of Burakumin emigrants in America, the policing of colonial Singapore, and data governance in India. A fascinating read for sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, especially those with a particular focus on the Asian and Pacific regions.

"Dave King and Richard Ekins are the leading world sociologists in this field. The book brings together a brilliant synthesis of history, case studies, ideas and positions as they have emerged over the past thirty years, and brings together a rich but always grounded account of this field, providing a state of the art of critical concepts and ideas to take this field further during the twenty first century." - Ken Plummer, University of Essex "An outstanding survey of the evolution of trans phenomena, splendidly written, highly informative, scholarly at its best, yet easy to read even for those neither trans nor sociologist. Ekins and King, experts in the field, unroll the panoramas of sex, gender, and transgendering that have evloved during the last decades. For everyone wanting to understand the interaction of women and men and of those who cannot or will not identify with either of these two cataegories, reading this book is a must, and a real pleasure." - Friedmann Pfaefflin, University of ULM This groundbreaking study sets out a framework for exploring transgender diversity for the new millennium. It sets forth an original and comprehensive research and provides a wealth of vivid illustrative material. Based on two decades of fieldwork, life history work, qualitative analysis, archival work and contact with several thousand cross-dressers and sex-changers around the world, the authors distinguish a number of contemporary transgendering ′stories′ to illustrate: The binary male/female divide The interrelations betwen sex, sexuality and gender The interrelations between the main sub-processes of transgendering. Wonderfully insightful, The Transgender Phenomenon develops an original and innovative conceptual framkework for understanding the full range of the transgender experience.

Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, have little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local. Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. This edited volume is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in one such region, the Pacific Islands, are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics that are at once local and global, historical and contemporary. The authors recognize that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but they also acknowledge that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities. Rather than focus on the definition of identities, they engage with the fact that identities do things, that they are performed in everyday life, that they are transformed through events and movements, and that they are constantly negotiated. By addressing the complexities of these questions over time and space, this work provides a model for future endeavors that seek to embed dynamics of gender and sexuality in a broad field of theoretical import.

Volume II of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean focuses on the latest era of Pacific history, examining the period from 1800 to the present day. This volume discusses advances and emerging trends in the historiography of the colonial era, before outlining the main themes of the twentieth century when the idea of a Pacific-centred century emerged. It concludes by exploring how history and the past inform preparations for the emerging challenges of the future. These essays emphasise the importance of understanding how the postcolonial period shaped the modern Pacific and its historians.