As both constructed imaginings and materialized geopolitical entities, empires took on various sizes, forms, and colors. In particular, the color “white” played a crucial role in rationalizing subjugation and colonialism through the sanctified “burden” of civilizing “non-whites.” But what happens when a non-white empire emerges to level, challenge, and eventually threaten the domination of Western empires? The color line stretches and shifts to accommodate new collaborations and, more notably, the ambitions of both whites and non-whites, yet it never completely caves in.
Focusing on this very picture, Chris Suh's first book demonstrates the complex and multilayered relationship between two rising empires in the decades preceding the devastating Second World War—America and Japan—and their respective manipulations of “race” in cementing interimperial collaboration in a precarious era. This interimperial relationship was complicated by domestic unfoldings, which Suh elaborates through the changing immigration policies of the United States toward the Japanese. It was...
