Author: Richard Austin Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Author: Madeline Y. Hsu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites—intellectuals, businessmen, and students—who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness. The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act. Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.

Author: William F. Wu
Publisher: Boruma Publishing
ISBN: 1005455635
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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This study examines the way Americans of Chinese descent were portrayed in American literature between 1850 and 1940. Their depictions are compared to historical events that were occurring at the time the works of literature were published. This edition has additions and corrections compared to the original hardback edition published in 1982. ~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~ My purpose in writing this work has been to explore the depiction of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in American fiction, from the mid-nineteenth century entry of the first Chinese immigrants in significant numbers, to the eve of World War II. I consider both the immigrant Chinese and the American-born generations that followed them to be Chinese Americans, but will sometimes identify the groups separately in recognition of the fact that the historical experience and treatment of the immigrants in fiction has been different from that of their descendants. The fiction treated in this study includes short stories and novels both by white Americans and Asian Americans. I am defining the term Yellow Peril as the threat to the United States that some white American authors believed was posed by the people of East Asia. As a literary theme, the fear of this threat focuses on specific issues, including possible military invasion from Asia, perceived competition to the white labor force from Asian workers, the alleged moral degeneracy of Asian people, and the potential genetic mixing of Anglo-Saxons with Asians, who were considered a biologically inferior race by some intellectuals of the nineteenth century. The Chinese immigrants were the first target of this attention, since they were the first Asian immigrants to reach the United States in large numbers. This study will focus on American fiction about Chinese Americans in an attempt to analyze the growth and development of attitudes about them. My thesis is that the Yellow Peril is the overwhelmingly dominant theme in American fiction about Chinese Americans in the years with which this study is concerned. It is expressed through the variety of images of the Chinese Americans that appear, especially in their relation to, and their role as part of, the United States. The historical causes and literary subject matter change, but the theme neither disappears nor abates. Each work of fiction has been studied individually for the images it contains. Prior to the turn of the century, the Yellow Peril is perceived only as stemming from the Chinese. In the twentieth century, especially in the pulps, the Japanese joined the Chinese as a perceived menace to Europe and North America. The overall process of evaluation relies primarily on detailed analyses of the characters under consideration. This has been done with an awareness that the American public as a whole sometimes did not distinguish carefully among Asian ethnic groups, so that events involving one Asian ethnic group often affected the image of another. Some works are obscure and these have been quoted at greater length than more available ones. Relatively few critical sources have been cited; this is due to a dearth of relevant studies. The less important works of fiction have naturally received little critical attention and, often, when such attention was concerned with pertinent stories, the authors had little or nothing to say about the depiction of Chinese Americans. This observation is intended only as an explanation, and not as a value judgement of earlier scholarship with different goals.

Author: Brian Niiya
Publisher: VNR AG
ISBN: 9780816026807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Produced under the auspices of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, this comprehensive reference culls information from primary sources--Japanese-language texts and documents, oral histories, and other previously neglected or obscured materials--to document the history and nature of the Japanese American experience as told by the people who lived it. The volume is divided into three major sections: a chronology with some 800 entries; a 400-entry encyclopedia covering people, events, groups, and cultural terms; and an annotated bibliography of major works on Japanese Americans. Includes about 80 bandw illustrations and photographs. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Craig A. Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Chinese Asianism examines Chinese intellectual discussions of East Asian solidarity, analyzing them in connection with Chinese nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations. Beginning with texts written after the first Sino–Japanese War of 1894 and concluding with Wang Jingwei’s failed government in World War II, Craig Smith engages with a period in which the Chinese empire had crumbled and intellectuals were struggling to adapt to imperialism, new and hegemonic forms of government, and radically different epistemes. He considers a wide range of writings that show the depth of the pre-war discourse on Asianism and the influence it had on the rise of nationalism in China. Asianism was a “call” for Asian unity, Smith finds, but advocates of a united and connected Asia based on racial or civilizational commonalities also utilized the packaging of Asia for their own agendas, to the extent that efforts towards international regionalism spurred the construction of Chinese nationalism. Asianism shaped Chinese ideas of nation and region, often by translating and interpreting Japanese perspectives, and leaving behind a legacy in the concepts and terms that persist in the twenty-first century. As China plays a central role in regional East Asian development, Asianism is once again of great importance today.

Author: Lon Kurashige
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629445
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination. In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, Kurashige argues that exclusion-era policies were more than just enactments of racism; they were also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the twenty-first century's tightly integrated Pacific world.

Author: Marc Andre Matten
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004327150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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This book analyses the historical significance of rivaling concepts of world order in 20th century East Asia. It discusses in detail the relationship of territoriality and political rule, discourses of amity and enmity, and finally the role of hegemoniality in the process of imaging a possible postnational world in twenty-first century East Asia and beyond.

Author: Richard Jaccoma
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780399900075
Category : Adventure stories
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Author: Ariane Knüsel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317133595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Framing China sheds new light on Western relations with and perceptions of China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this ground-breaking book, Ariane Knüsel examines how China was portrayed in political debates and the media in Britain, the USA and Switzerland between 1900 and 1950. By focusing on the political, economic, cultural and social context that led to the construction of the particular images of China in each country, the author demonstrates that national interests, anxieties and issues influenced the way China was framed and resulted in different portrayals of China in each country. The author’s meticulous analysis of a vast amount of newspaper and magazine articles, commentaries, editorials, cartoons and newsreels that have previously not been studied before also focuses on the transnational circulation of images of China. While previous publications have dealt with the occurrence of the Yellow Peril and Red Menace in particular countries, Framing China reveals that these images were interpreted differently in every nation because they both reflected and contributed to the discursive construction of nationhood in each country and were influenced by domestic issues, cultural values, pre-existing stereotypes, pressure groups and geopolitical aspirations.

Author: Mark C. Jerng
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823277771
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named “racial worldmaking” because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?