Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship by Edlie L. Wong (review)

Inspired by recent interdisciplinary scholarship on Afro-Asian comparative racialization, Edlie L. Wong's superb new book is a meticulously researched tour de force that examines connections between "the Chinese question" and Reconstruction. More specifically, it traces the relationship between the history of chattel slavery and the treatment of Chinese immigrants in the United States.

Readers of her first book, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (2009), will be familiar with Wong's comparative method. Bringing legislation, precedent-setting legal cases, and other nonfictional materials into conversation with fiction written primarily between the antebellum period and the era of Chinese exclusion, Wong explores how certain texts contributed to or resisted racial formations. In the case of Racial Reconstruction, Wong is interested in postbellum racial formations inspired by the legacy of chattel slavery that were used to authorize the treatment of Chinese immigrants as Other. As she demonstrates, regardless of the goals of Reconstruction, Emancipation did not destroy the constitutive link between whiteness and citizenship in the United States. Indeed, the exclusion of other races from citizenship and naturalization after the Civil War only worked to shore up the category of whiteness further and to enable an enduring legacy of white supremacy. Wong's title puns on the term reconstruction to refer to both the temporal period during which African Americans' rights were extended and the ongoing process through which new forms of racialization emerged and race was constructed and reconstructed. Organized chronologically and addressing texts written from the 1850s to the eve of World War I, Racial Reconstruction explores "the cultural genealogies" of a dialectical configuration of "black inclusion/Chinese exclusion" (3), even as Wong makes clear how limited black inclusion really was after Emancipation.

Racial Reconstruction is historically, geospatially, and generically an extremely ambitious project. Chapter 1, "Cosa de Cuba!" focuses on how the paradoxical figure of the "coolie slave" in the Caribbean is represented in antebellum and postbellum travel literature, first-person accounts of Chinese laborers interviewed by a commission, and one translated "coolie" autobiography. Chapter 2, "From Emancipation to Exclusion," explores how the racial logics that underlie the Afro-Asian analogy and Exclusion policies were challenged by California freedmen journalists James Williams and William H. Newby (who was the San Francisco correspondent for Frederick Douglass's Paper), as well as by East Coast Chinese journalists Wong Chin Foo and Yan Phou Lee in postbellum periodical culture. Chapter 3, "American Futures Past," examines both reactionary and progressive forms of "Chinese invasion fiction" that emerged after the passage of the Exclusion Acts. Chapter 4 attends to how early twentieth-century Chinese American writers and Chinese translators renewed the antebellum mode of sentimental fiction used to promote white empathy for black families. They used this mode to write boycott novels and short stories that cultivated a diasporic Chinese nationalism in opposition to both the inattentiveness of the Qing dynasty to its citizens and the United States' exploitations of Chinese as both immigrant workers and Asian trading partners. The book's conclusion draws attention to contemporary anxieties about Asian immigration that appear to echo some of the paranoid arguments for Chinese Exclusion made over a century ago.

In Racial Reconstruction, Wong takes special care to represent the diverse range of voices who weighed in on the complex debates about free and unfree labor, citizenship, and inclusion over the long nineteenth century: abolitionist and Confederate, slave-owner and "coolie," Christian and Confucian, Chinese and Chinese American, African American and white. Some of these viewpoints are particularly surprising. For example, while many scholars of ethnic literature will be familiar with the pro-Exclusion arguments of Denis Kearney and the Workingmen's Party, whose goal was to defend white labor, most will be less familiar with arguments made by moderate politicians such as James Blaine and other former abolitionists who advocated for Chinese Exclusion as a...