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

Notes

 Notes introduction 1. Min Hyoung Song, Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 2. For examples of this important work, see such excellent book-length studies as Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams (1994); Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was KungFu Fighting (2001); a special issue of positions (2003) entitled the afro-asian century; Bill Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism (2004); Laura Pulido’s Black, Brown, Yellow, Left (2006); Fred Ho and Bill Mullen’s Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (2008); Scott Kurashige’s The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (2008); and George Lipsitz’s work on black identifications with Japan during World War II in “Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army.” 3. Although W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness has been extended to frame many contexts of racialization, it is important to observe how it captures the particularity of a black American formation. 4. Daniel Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 5. As Daniel Kim writes regarding his analysis of the homosocial articulations of cultural nationalist writers, “The interracialism this study examines, therefore, is not one that is symmetrical. It does not take shape through depictions of black and Asian men standing together in anti-racist homosocial solidarity” (Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow, xvii). 6. See Charles J. McClain’s excellent study, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). A less conventional but highly instructive archive might include An English-Chinese Phrase Book produced by Wong Sam and Assistants (San Francisco: Cubery & Co., 1875), reprinted in The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Jeffrey Paul Chan et al. (New York: Meridian Press, 1991). Part 1 1. Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2008), 7. 2. Ibid.  x Notes to Chapter 1 chaPter 1 1. Chinese Immigration: Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect. Report to the California Senate of Its Special Committee on Chinese Immigration (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1878), 247. 2. Brook Thomas, Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 36–37. 3. The Yick Wo v. Hopkins case determined that the Chinese were Mongolian and not white and thus subject to racial segregation. See Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 115–19. 4. The particular racial tandem that I isolate and track here is clearly not “representative” or exhaustive of the meanings generated when blacks and Chinese immigrants were juxtaposed in nineteenth-century America. See Aarim-Heriot’s outstanding study of the relationship between the “Negro question” and the “Chinese question,” in which she examines the similar degrading traits and characteristics attributed to both groups: Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans , and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 5. On the specificity of U.S. Orientalism, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 178, n. 7; and John Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 6. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 19. 7. Tchen, New York before Chinatown. 8. Tchentermsthis“commercialorientalism”;seeNewYorkbeforeChinatown,63–124. 9. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 5. 10. Chinese Immigration, Report to the California Senate, 247. 11. See David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993); and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 12. For example, we can see this negotiation in Booker T. Washington’s statement that notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. See Booker T. Washington, Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 37. Washington’s striking image of U.S. slavery as a “school” that produced the moral, intellectual...