Transpacific articulations: Study abroad and the making of Asia/America

This dissertation studies the cultural and political significance of the Chinese study-abroad movement in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. It aims to provide a historical and cultural analysis of this transnational phenomenon in relation to the formation of Asian America. Rather than reiterating the traditional paradigm that understands Asian America within the national history of racial exclusion, labor immigration, and cultural assimilation, it foregrounds the double articulation with Asia and America as a locus of meaning, subject formation, and politics. It considers the transpacific articulations of Chinese students abroad in what is called "overseas student literature," including mostly Chinese-language fiction and essays, including Yung Wing's nineteenth-century autobiography, Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged, Bai Xianyong's "Death in Chicago," and numerous contemporary examples. It includes extended analyses of three socio-political-cultural movements: the Baodiao movement, a diasporic student movement contesting sovereign claims over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the western Pacific; the Taidu movement, a diasporic political campaign for Taiwanese independence; and an early instance of a specifically diasporic, transpacific politics central to the formation of Asian American Studies.; Focusing on the subjectivity of Chinese students abroad in relation to their cultural and political activities in both Asia and America, this dissertation contends that Asian America needs to be reimagined as "Asia/America," which is not only an ethnic formation within U.S. history, but a transpacific terrain for national aspirations, diasporic attachment, and anti-imperialist politics. This focus on the Asia-oriented cultural and political work of overseas students and intellectuals in the U.S. broadens the critical horizon of Asian American studies, allowing identification of a transnational mode of being on the one hand, and a reconfiguration of Asian-American relations on the other. This, in my view, better accords with the spirit of Third World internationalism that first inspired the conception of Asian America in the late 1960s. Furthermore, my focus on the transpacific articulations of the figure of the diasporic intellectual provides a conceptual framework for considering the ambivalent and multivalent Asian/American linkages in the era of globalization.