Event details

In the early 1980s, rising Japanese imports raised alarms across the United States. U.S. business, political, and labor leaders described the United States and Japan as locked in a high-stakes competition for manufacturing prowess, for market share, even for the future of capitalism itself. In this story of imperial reversal, a range of U.S. industries—from color television to cars—had fallen prey to an aggressive and rapacious Japan. By the mid-1980s, leaders of the semiconductor industry feared that they were next. America’s future, Intel co-founder Robert Noyce proclaimed in 1986, was a potential “wasteland…we will have sold them our plants and our lands and our homes…” Examining this moment of competitive obsession, this talk explores how this intellectual and rhetorical frame of “competition” obfuscated the imperial realities of this globalized industry behind a narrative of Japanese predation and American vulnerability.