Nisei Politics of Identity and American Popular Music in the 1930s and 1940s

Growing nationalist thinking and anti-immigration legislation in American politics today calls for a critical historicizing of the continuing ambiguities of U.S. citizenry and notions of what it is to be an American. The identity crisis of Nisei-second generation Japanese Americansresulted from the complex intersection of America's racialized ideology toward immigrants, California's virulent anti-Asian agitation, and the economic and political power struggles between the United States and Japan in gaining dominance of the Pacific region.