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 l l Part 1 Citizenship was an unfolding and highly contested political institution in mid-nineteenth-century America as contentious battles were being waged over the place of blacks, Native Americans, Chinese, and white ethnic immigrants. Although there were relatively few Chinese immigrants in the United States, recent studies have elaborated on the specific dynamic between the Chinese and Negro question in terms of how issues of race, labor, and citizenship revolved around a multivalent racial axis. Historians such as Najia Aairm-Heriot and Moon-Ho Jung have documented the ways in which the specter of Chinese “coolie” labor mediated national debates on free labor and citizenship. According to Jung, “Within the major social crises of the 1860s—battles over the legal, political, and social standing of slaves, masters, blacks, and whites in the United States—coolies represented a vexing anomaly whose contested status would reconstruct American identities after emancipation.”1 Even though there was never any legal definition of what constituted a coolie, the imagining of an influx of unfree Asian labor excited antiblack fears of white workers and the capitalist fantasies of plantation growers. Related to national anxieties about black chattel slavery and emancipation, the racialization of Asian migrants as coolies functioned to reify the immigrant as “white” and the U.S. citizen as non-Asian.2 A dimension of the relational nature of black and Asian racialization is evident in the 1870 Naturalization Act, which was ratified to ensure that the alien status of Asian migrants would not be impacted by the Fourteenth Amendment (1868). The Fourteenth Amendment, generally regarded as overturning the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, granted former slaves and all their descendants the rights of U.S. citizenship. Securing the legal status of blacks as U.S. citizens was a specific political implication of the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction that was discontinuous from the racialization of Asians as orientalized aliens. Therefore, the 1870 Naturalization Act acknowledged the shifting legal status of U.S.  x Part 1 blacks after the Civil War while seeking to reinstantiate the exclusion of Asians from the national citizenry by specifying that only “white persons and persons of African descent” were eligible for naturalization. Although the Fourteenth Amendment was unable to fully interrupt the negation of citizenship for Asian immigrants, it recognized the citizenship status of “all persons born . . . in the United States” and therefore secured one possible condition for Asian American citizenship: birthright. Severe restrictions on the immigration of Asian women, combined with antimiscegenation laws, were designed to prevent reproduction and to preserve the disenfranchisement of Asian labor, making citizenship by birth a constrained possibility for persons of Asian ancestry. The first two chapters of this book examine specific dimensions of national discourses of Asian alterity in the nineteenth-century black public sphere. I focus on how distinct yet related discourses of Chinese and black racial difference shaped the emerging parameters of U.S. citizenship and, subsequently, the terms of black political inclusion. In other words, if the specter of coolie labor and the anti-Chinese movement were indeed central to U.S. discourses of freedom and citizenship, how did this affect black claims to citizenship both before and after the Civil War? The black press and the public speeches by Anna Julia Cooper reveal how Western orientalism variously mediated discourses of black political inclusion. Nineteenth-century black citizenship is imagined with different horizons of possibility, and Anna Julia Cooper must reach for a more expansive definition as she constructs a model of modern black womanhood in the United States. As we will see, the gendered meanings of Orientalist discourses had different implications as black disenfranchisement emerged in starkly different terms for black men and women. ...

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