The Immigration and Ethnic History Society established this award in memory of Professor Carleton C. Qualey, distinguished historian, newsletter editor, treasurer, and a founder of the Society.
Dr. Eiichiro Azuma
This article makes a major contribution to a global and transimperial history of US immigration, by turning to Nisei’s (second-generation Japanese Americans’) relationship with their homeland, and the lessons they brought with them while experiencing racial discrimination in the United States. In turn, Azuma argues, Nisei performed their loyalty to their home country by contributing to anti-US propaganda during World War II. Azuma proposes that we might find the analytical tools of US immigration and ethnic history prescient beyond American shores. As transpacific migration was not as easy as immigration versus emigration (especially those subject to racial exclusion rather than admission), the piece offers an encouraging set of directions for historians of US immigration to think about those subjects’ own mobilities and politics abroad, rather than subsuming them (or excluding them) from US immigration history just because they travel home. Against the grain of the geopolitical demarcations of both US and Japanese history, Azuma grounds these transpacific subjects not in the field’s concerns for inter-state relations or networks of imperial power, but rather, in the subjects that often gave these inter-imperial relations much anxiety: diasporic populations in the US.
Here is a link to the article: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jaeh/article-abstract/42/2/5/339109/Toward-a-Transnational-History-of-Wartime-Japanese