Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America

by Helen Heran Jun

Overview

Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on ‘inter-racial prejudice,’ Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity.
Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Question’ in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts—the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary—Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814742983
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	02/23/2011
Series:	Nation of Nations , #23
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Helen Heran Jun is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

Part 1

1 The Press for Inclusion: Nineteenth-Century Black Citizenship and the Anti-Chinese Movement 15

2 "When and Where I Enter …": Orientalism in Anna Julia Cooper's Narratives of Modern Black Womanhood 33

Part 2

3 Blackness, Manhood, and the Aftermath of Internment in John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) 51

4 Becoming Korean American: Blackface and Gendered Racialization in Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls (1987) 75

Part 3

5 Black Surplus in the Pacific Century: Ownership and Dispossession in the Hood Film 99

6 Asian Americans in the Age of Neoliberalism: Human Capital and Bad Choices in a.k.a. Don Bonus (1995) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) 123

Afterword 149

Notes 157

Selected Bibliography 185

Index 193

About the Author 198

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Original and compelling. . . . Simultaneously sophisticated and accessible, Race for Citizenship fills a critical lacuna in‘race relations’ studies.”
-Elaine Kim,University of California, Berkeley

Editorial Reviews

Original and compelling. . . . Simultaneously sophisticated and accessible, Race for Citizenship fills a critical lacuna in‘race relations’ studies.”

-Elaine Kim,University of California, Berkeley

From the Publisher

"Original and compelling. . . . Simultaneously sophisticated and accessible, Race for Citizenship fills a critical lacuna in& race relations studies."

Elaine Kim