Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943

Abstract

“Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943,” interrogates the confluences between United States’ immigration control and overseas territorial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chinese exclusion laws, some of the earliest federal U.S. immigration laws and the first to name and discriminate against a particular migrant group based on their race, informed and moved with U.S. empire to recreate physical, political, and social borders in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The dissertation traces how efforts to control the transnational migrations of Chinese to and between Cuba, Hawai’i, and the United States became a tool for the geographic movement of U.S. state power as American borders expanded for empire and further attempted to control and limit the movements of Chinese migrants. By examining Cuba and Hawai’i together, the dissertation argues that the exclusion laws offered an adaptable system of corporeal control that aided U.S. colonial projects in each place. The spread of the Chinese exclusion laws outside the continental United States by the end of the nineteenth century did not only occur in the context of expanding U.S. empire, but also helped to define and constitute the boundaries of America’s new imperial domain.