Nicole De Silva, History UCSB, “Fashioning Chinese America Cultural Citizenship and the Transpacific Boycott of Japanese Silk Stockings, 1937-1940”

The Commerce, Commodities and Material Culture Research Cluster will be hosting its first paper workshop this year to discuss Nicole De Silva’s paper “Fashioning Chinese America Cultural Citizenship and the Transpacific Boycott of Japanese Silk Stockings, 1937-1940.”

The paper positions the Japanese silk stocking boycott of 1937-1941 as a staging ground that fostered the development of a Chinese American cultural and political identity in the midst of the Exclusion Era. It tells a story unbound by US national borders to demonstrate how contact and collaboration between US/ Chinese residents enabled boycott participants to articulate their biculturalism, perform their image of modernity, and find their political voices. By fitting this movement into larger historical disputes around trade, diplomatic policy, labor politics, and US anti-fascism, the project suggests that the debate over the buying and selling of Japanese silk hosiery was more than it might have “seamed.”

Please read the paper before coming to the workshop.  It is available here: NDS Silk Stockings Fall 2017 Revisions