|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Contested Geographies
Key formulations that would shape the twentieth-century Pacific abound here. In reading Conroy’s first book, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii,4 one presumes he uses the title to play against the American frontier in Hawaii. So, through twenty-first-century eyes we ask, how did Hawaii become anybody’s frontier? Interestingly, we might also ask, to what degree does Conroy anticipate this question. The matter deepens when we get to Hawaii Under the Rising Sun,5 by John Stephan, a student of Professor Conroy’s. Of course, in reality, Hawaii sits under the red, white, and blue, and again a question arises from the margins, what about Hawaii’s negotiating its own definition? This could be in a pure sense, or in a circumscribed sense, that is, surrounded, indeed engulfed, by U.S., Japanese, or a generalized hegemonic power (e.g., “empire,” in the Hardt and Negri sense6) but still negotiating, resisting, and constructing counter flows.
But Hawaii comprises only the anteroom to Conroy’s field of engagement. At the center, with apologies to Korea and Vietnam, lies the huge matter of China: Japan’s China (Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere) or America’s China (Open Door policy). From the twenty-first century, questions emerge: Who appointed the United States the doorman? Which “Co-”? Whose “prosperity”? Sun Yat-sen said China in the early twentieth century seemed “like a sheet of sand. ” So where did this People’s Republic of China (PRC) come from? How unanticipated an idea, as Professor Conroy points out, by standard scholarly studies of East Asia of that era, such as Whitney Griswold’s The Far Eastern Policy of the United States (1938).7 What did it mean that this entity, the PRC, sprang almost literally from the earth (peasant revolution)? And, we can ask now, what has it meant that the PRC turned that sharp corner in the 1990s and early 2000s to open-for-corporations China? Is this a reversion to the open door? But this time, who opens it, to whom, and for what?8