2022 Feinberg Series Panel with Moon-Ho Jung, Nerissa S. Balce and Brian Hioe, moderated by Sigrid Schmalzer

Between 1893 and 1902, the U.S. forcefully annexed Hawai’i and the Philippines and participated in the brutal suppression of the anti-imperialist Boxer Uprising in China. Since that time, the Asia-Pacific region has been a major site for the development and maintenance of U.S. empire, a history rooted in racism, which has engendered numerous, broad-reaching revolutionary struggles, and which continues to have profound consequences for people in Asia, the Pacific, and the U.S. today. This panel explores how despite the oft-repeated goal of promoting democracy, U.S. empire has consistently produced state repression and violence—for people living in Asia and the Pacific, and for AAPI communities in the U.S.

Historian Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington) addresses U.S. empire building in Asia and the Pacific from the Philippine-American War to World War II. He especially highlights anti-colonial solidarity movements in Asian, Pacific Islander, and Asian American communities and the repressive responses from the U.S. state, arguing that these attempts to repress pan-Asian revolutionary movements helped produce the U.S. national security state as we know it, along with current U.S. anti-Asian racism. Asian American studies and cultural studies scholar Nerissa S. Balce (SUNY Stony Brook) considers questions of cultural production and the afterlives of U.S. empire in the Philippines, with a focus on the Philippine police state and its most recent manifestations, including the Duterte drug war and the harassment of Filipino activists. Taipei-based writer, editor, and activist Brian Hioe addresses the paradoxes of U.S. empire for Taiwan in the context of escalating Sino-U.S. tensions, and the enduring challenges for Taiwanese people caught between the hegemonic forces of the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. The panel is moderated by Sigrid Schmalzer, a founding member of the Critical China Scholars and a professor of modern Chinese history in the UMass Amherst History Department.

--

This event is presented by the 2022-2023 Feinberg Series, Confronting Empire. It is co-sponsored by Critical China Scholars, the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program, the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy, and more than three dozen Feinberg Series co-sponsors. The Feinberg Series is a program of the UMass Amherst History Department.

READ MORE ABOUT THIS EVENT AND THE 2022-2023 FEINBERG SERIES: www.umass.edu/feinberg