Body and Nation interrogates the connections among the body, the nation, and the world in twentieth-century U.S. history. The idea that bodies and bodily characteristics are heavily freighted with values that are often linked to political and social spheres remains underdeveloped in the histories of America's relations with the rest of the world. Attentive to diverse state and nonstate actors, the contributors provide historically grounded insights into the transnational dimensions of biopolitics. Their subjects range from the regulation of prostitution in the Philippines by the U.S. Army to Cold War ideals of American feminine beauty, and from "body counts" as metrics of military success to cultural representations of Mexican migrants in the United States as public health threats. By considering bodies as complex, fluctuating, and interrelated sites of meaning, the contributors to this collection offer new insights into the workings of both soft and hard power.
Contributors. Frank Costigliola, Janet M. Davis, Shanon Fitzpatrick, Paul A. Kramer, Shirley Jennifer Lim, Mary Ting Yi Lui, Natalia Molina, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Emily S. Rosenberg, Kristina Shull, Annessa C. Stagner, Marilyn B. Young

Emily S. Rosenberg is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 and A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory, both also published by Duke University Press, and the editor of A World Connecting, 1870–1945.

Shanon Fitzpatrick is a Faculty Lecturer in the Department of History at McGill University.
 

Introduction / Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick 1
1. Colonial Crossings: Prostitution, Disease, and the Boundaries of Empire During the Philippine-American War / Paul A. Kramer 17
2. Moral, Purposeful, and Healthful: The World of Child's Play, Bodybuilding, and Nation-Building at the American Circus / Janet M. Davis 42
3. Making Broken Bodies Whole in a Shell-Shocked World / Annessa C. Stagner 61
4. Physical Culture's World of Bodies: Transnational Participatory Pastiche and the Body Politics of America's Globalized Mass Culture / Shanon Fitzpatrick 83
5. "The Most Beautiful Chinese Girl in the World": Anna May Wong's Transnational Racial Modernity / Shirley Jennifer Lim 109
6. Roosevelt's Body and National Power / Frank Costigliola 125
7. Making "Brown Babies": Race and Gender after World War II / Brenda Gayle Plummer 147
8. Regulating Borders and Bodies: U.S. Immigration and Public Health Policy / Natalia Molina 173
9. The American Look: The Nation in the Shape of a Woman / Emily S. Rosenberg 189
10. Sammy Lee: Narratives of Asian American Masculinity and Race in Decolonizing Asia / Mary Tsing Yi Lui 209
11. Counting the Bodies in Vietnam / Marilyn B. Young 230
12. "Nobody Wants These People": Reagan's Immigration Crisis and the Containment of Foreign Bodies / Kristina Shull 241
Epilogue. When the Body Disappears / Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick 264
Bibliography 289
Contributors 317
Index 321