This panel showcases new work emerging in the field of Asian American Studies that tackle the imperial dimensions of belonging and exclusion in the United States. Seminal works in Asian American History, such as those from Erika Lee and Gary Okihiro, articulate the importance of including Asian migration and settlement within histories of the United States, particularly in terms of the United States’s immigration and naturalization policies. This panel builds on these foundational works to investigate how Southeast and West Asian histories provide new perspectives by considering the imperial structures of the United States. More specifically, this panel seeks to explore the relationship between legality, empire, and the carceral state in the twentieth century. We collectively ask: how does U.S. empire complicate our understanding of belonging and exclusion within U.S. borders? What do these shifting perspectives mean for the role of Asian American history within broader histories of the United States?

Each presentation centers on one case study in Asian American history that has not yet been studied, and uses it as a point from which to ask broader questions about the relationship between empire, geopolitics, diaspora, and displacement. Adrian De Leon uses the 1933 Cecelia Navarro murder trial to theorize “heterosovereignty” as a political regime rooted in the Filipino diaspora. Ann Ngoc Tran shows how the 1978 Hai Hong freighter incident was a watershed moment in discourse around Vietnamese boat people as refugees or illegal migrants. Ida Yalzadeh discusses a 1986 case of police assault against an Iranian foreign national—an incident directly tied to the legacy of the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981. Taken together, these papers broadly interrogate the role of U.S. imperial violence along the backdrop of geopolitical change. In so doing, they reflect current trends in Asian American history that engage carcerality in an imperial context, and signify a broader sense of what should be included in histories of the United States.