Jilene Chua
Johns Hopkins University History
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Jilene Chua is a PhD candidate in History at Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the history of U.S. empire in Asia, focusing on legal history and migration through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Her scholarship bridges Southeast Asian and Asian American studies, by bringing together U.S. immigration history, Philippine and Filipinx studies, and scholarship on Chinese migration. Her dissertation, Laws in Translation: U.S. Colonial Legal Culture and Chinese Life in the Philippines (1902-1946), investigates the consequences of Chinese exclusion laws as they expanded overseas beyond the American West into the newly acquired Southeast Asian islands of the Philippines. Unlike earlier U.S. territories, these islands were never intended to become a white settler majority and incorporated into statehood. What became of the relationship between race, law, and property in a place where U.S. law governed, but white people were a ruling minority? With Tagalog (Filipino), Hokkien (Chinese), English, and Spanish-language sources, her work addresses this question.
Bone/Flesh/Land/Bomb: Knowledge Formations and Otherwise Relations in Asia and the Pacific
Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. empire produced and encountered incremental and scaled knowledge about “the other.” As racialized subjects, bodies, places, and plants—the other was made legible across disparate sites through various forms of technological capture. These technologies have included (but are not limited to) botanical plant categorization, border bureaucracy, iconography, photography and scale modeling, and critical nutritional knowledges that shape the citizen-subject. This panel pulls at the threads of colonial governance acted upon bone, flesh, land, bomb through these various scales: the creation of nonnative forests in Hawaiʻi, the drafting of U.S. exclusion laws to bear on Chinese mestizas in the Philippines, the crafting of images of the Marshall Islands as a laboratory for nuclear testing, and the reshaping of the intimate domains of hunger and eating in Asia and its diaspora in the 20th century. In narrating colonial disciplinary formations across the transpacific through legal and borderlands histories of race-making, science and technology studies, and affect and feminist theorizing, we not only identify moments of colonial capture but the vast fractures and fraying of difference that cannot be neatly named. As postcolonial scholars have argued that the very production of difference is what sustains colonial relations, this session attends not just to colonial technologies but also to what exceeds the boundaries of the colonial apparatus.
Jilene Chua
Johns Hopkins University History
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