Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship
Edlie Wong
Abstract
Racial Reconstruction explores how the complex histories of Atlantic slavery and abolition influenced Chinese immigration, especially at the level of representation. The end of the Atlantic slave trade triggered acute labor shortages throughout the West. Labor-strapped planters in the U.S. and Caribbean began experimenting with Chinese and later South Asian indentured laborers or “coolies.” From heated Senate floor debates to test cases that Chinese activists brought before the Supreme Court, major shifts in U.S. law, politics, and society became displaced onto the Chinese labor immigrant, lea ... More
Racial Reconstruction explores how the complex histories of Atlantic slavery and abolition influenced Chinese immigration, especially at the level of representation. The end of the Atlantic slave trade triggered acute labor shortages throughout the West. Labor-strapped planters in the U.S. and Caribbean began experimenting with Chinese and later South Asian indentured laborers or “coolies.” From heated Senate floor debates to test cases that Chinese activists brought before the Supreme Court, major shifts in U.S. law, politics, and society became displaced onto the Chinese labor immigrant, leading to America’s first racialized immigration ban. The Chinese Exclusion Act provided the legal architecture for America’s modern immigration system. By charting the complex circulation of people, property, and print from the Pacific Rim to the Black Atlantic, Racial Reconstruction insists that U.S. racial formations must be studied through comparative and transnational approaches. It uses multiple archives and a range of cultural forms, from political cartoons, “Yellow Peril” propaganda, immigration case files, Confederate memoirs, and Cuban plantation diaries to the Chinese translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Each of the book’s four chapters reveals broader methodological issues that address current theorizations of “comparative racialization” and comparative knowledge productions about race in the making of modern America.
Keywords:
immigration,
race relations,
indentured labor,
slavery,
abolition,
Asian American literature,
African American literature,
comparative racialization,
transnational
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2000 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781479868001 |
| Published to NYU Press Scholarship Online: May 2016 |
DOI:10.18574/nyu/9781479868001.001.0001 |
