Skip to main content

FLAS fellow wins awards for New Book, Subverting Exclusion

Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928
Geiger found this photo while conducting research in Canada. The cover photo depicts four Japanese coal miners in Cumberland, B.C., circa 1915. (Cumberland Museum and Archives, C140.66. Hayashi/Kitamura/Matsubuchi Studio.)

August 30, 2012

Andrea Geiger’s just-published book on Japanese-Canadian history was an outcome of her FLAS Fellowship in Japanese from the Center.

Andrea, Assistant Professor, History, Simon Fraser University, was able to conduct some of the research that led to Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 as part of her FLAS Fellowships (1999-2002). “The FLAS Fellowships I received through the Canadian Studies Program, played a big role in making it possible for me to fully develop the U.S.-Canada comparison that is a key element of the book.”

This year Andrea was awarded the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society for her book. “The Japanese immigrants who arrived in the North American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included people with historical ties to Japan’s outcaste communities. In the only English-language book on the subject, Andrea Geiger examines the history of these and other Japanese immigrants in the United States and Canada and their encounters with two separate cultures of exclusion, one based in caste and the other in race” (Yale University Press, retrieved from http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300169638). The prize committee described Subverting Exclusion as “a major contribution to the study of immigration and ethnic history.” (Immigration and Ethnic History Newsletter, May 2012).

Funding for FLAS Fellowships is provided by a Center allocation from International and Foreign Language Education, U.S. Department of Education.