Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

efore the start of it: “The race relations cycle--contact, competition, accommodation
and eventual assimilation--is apparently progressive and irreversible.” 55
Significantly, Robert Park was not merely talking about ‘Orientals’ in America
becoming assimilated to American culture; he was also making a point that America
was beginning to seep into the Orient itself. “American films, with their realistic and
thrilling pictures of American life, have transmitted to the Orient some of the
restlessness and romanticism of the Occident.” 56 Park was not an American
exceptionalist. He truly believed that the world as a whole was becoming a ‘melting
pot,’ and that the future of the world lay in some Americanized modernity of
movement, of change and exchange between peoples and cultures. “If America was
once in any exclusive sense the melting pot of races, it is so no longer. The melting pot
is the world.” He went on to note that:
The really new factors in international and race relations are the devices like the
cinema and the radio; these, with the rapidly increasing literacy, are steadily
bringing all the peoples of the earth measurably within the limits of a common
culture and a common historical life. 57
Like W.I. Thomas, Robert Park felt that contacts between different peoples were
increasing all over the world, creating a global civilization never seen before. America
had long been the most prominent place where extensive ‘racial’ and ‘cultural’
contacts occurred, but in a modernity where no culture or society could remain
untouched by others, all the world had become America.
55 Park, “Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific,” 192.
56 Park, “Our Racial Frontier,” 195.
57 Park, “Our Racial Frontier,” 196.
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