Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

United States between 1923 and 1926, and continuing through the formation of the
Institute of Pacific Relations in 1926, a network of American missionaries and social
scientists criss-crossed Asia, America, and Hawaii, producing knowledge about the
relations between people living at each of these locations. In the course of their
explorations of what they labelled the Pacific Rim, they created a body of theories about
the differences between 'Orientals' and 'Occidentals.' 4 Furthermore, the American
missionaries and sociologists would entrench their scholarly discourse within a set of
academic and funding institutions which would disseminate and reproduce their
interesting discussions of the evolution of "whiteness" as a social, legal, and economic
category.
4 The term "Pacific Rim" achieved a currency in the 1980's, due in large part to the rising
awareness of economists and policy experts of the power of Asian economies and the
declining role of American trade with Europe. West coast cities such as Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles were seen to be the economic future of America, connected
to the rising trade centers of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore. The rise in
Asian versus European immigration to the U.S. in the decades since the immigration
reform or 1965 also contributed to an awareness that it would be Asian connections and
culture which would define America's future. The most popular rendition of this shift
from Eurocentrism to Asiacentrism was Frank Gibney's television series and book,The
Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World (New York: Scribner's, 1992).
Though missionaries and sociologists in the 1920's occasionally used the term Pacific
Rim, they also used phrases such as Pacific Basin, with no singular term achieving the
popular usage which Pacific Rim had in the 1980's. See the various essays highly critical
of the recent usage of the term Pacific Rim in Arif Dirlik, editor, What is in a Rim? Critical
Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
4