%0 Journal Article %T Excerpt from Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885¨C1928 %A Andrea Geiger %J Journal of Transnational American Studies %D 2011 %I %X The Japanese immigrants who arrived in the North American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included people with historical ties to JapanĄ¯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. Geiger reveals that the experiences of Japanese immigrants in North America were shaped in part by attitudes rooted in JapanĄ¯s formal status system, mibunsei, decades after it was formally abolished. In the North American West, however, the immigrantsĄ¯ understanding of social status as caste-based collided with American and Canadian perceptions of status as primarily race-based. Geiger shows how the lingering influence of JapanĄ¯s strict status system affected immigrantsĄ¯ perceptions and understandings of race in North America and informed their strategic responses to two increasingly complex systems of race-based exclusionary law and policy. %K Japanese %K Immigration %K Caste %K Race %K Outcaste %K United States %K Canada %K Exclusion %K Mibunsei %U https://submit.escholarship.org/ojs/index.php/acgcc_jtas/article/view/11610