UC Santa Barbara

Inspired by Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (1947), this dissertation interrogates the relationship between land and Asian American belonging in the context of U.S. continental and imperial expansion. The project rethinks the geopolitical outlooks that reinforce the U.S. interior as “flyover country” by engaging operative provincialism, a term I use to describe the interplay between selective insularity, historical invisibility, and geographic interiority that shapes Asian Americans, and other migrant and racialized populations, experiences in the American heartland. By prioritizing interiority, insularity, and imagined geographies, operative provincialism reveals how the region was perceived, imagined, and employed as a representative body for broader Americanization projects. This framing further contends with U.S. empire- and state-building to demonstrate the intersectional factors that abstract and obscure the contributions of non-white midwestern communities in U.S. history discourse. In other words, it explains how midwestern Asian American histories can simultaneously be central to historical moments in the field (i.e., the Rock Springs Massacre, refugee resettlement, murder of Vincent Chin) and, yet, be removed from their regional contexts. In this way, the U.S. interior, as an imagined geography we call the heartland, operates as a pacifier of difference, which leaves its residents to occupy a literal and figurative in-between space. As a result, I also interpret the interior as refuge, in the way that Asian settlers resided there for protection from the ‘external’ threats found on the coasts. The project currently presents four chapters that cultivate materials from local historical societies, institutional archives, family histories, and community connections built from my twenty-five years living in Nebraska. Pulling from settler-colonial and critical midwestern studies, the first chapter presents a historiography of the development of the Midwest and analyzes how the heartland, as it would later be known, was interpreted by settlers and scholars moving between the coasts. The second chapter analyzes how the borders of land ownership outlined in the 1862 Homestead Act explain how Japanese migrants navigated, benefitted, and were restricted by settler-colonial logics in rural regions. The project’s remaining two chapters employ the interventions of Asian American and critical university studies to reveal of how notions of the heartland were reproduced through the prioritization of agricultural and military education with international students from colonial Korea and relocated Japanese American students at midwestern universities in the early-to-mid 20th century. In short, focusing on the interior, highlights how the process of homogenization and selective insularity creates multiple ‘heartlands’ within the U.S. empire that deem non-white subjects as perpetually “other” to reveal how race operates in rural spaces.