Racism, Egalitarianism, and Asian Exclusion

Though Asian American history is a relatively young field, the study of Asian exclusion is not. Under the auspices of labor history, scholars have long been fascinated with the exclusion of Chinese migrants from the United States in the nineteenth century and, to a lesser extent, the exclusion of Japanese, Koreans, South Asians, and Filipinos in the twentieth. Ever since Mary Roberts Coolidge's Chinese Immigration (1909), scholars have repeatedly asked: Why did the United States close America's gates to Asian immigrants?¹ The study of immigration, law, borders, race, citizenship, labor, diplomacy, and politics in the United States (both past and present) all have heavy stakes in the answer.

In their new books on the history of Asian exclusion, Edlie L. Wong and Lon Kurashige return to the oldest topic in Asian American history and one of the most central. They enter this crowded field in order to revise a scholarly literature that has too often depicted Asian exclusion as sui generis. Landmark books on Asian exclusion and Asian American history have failed to probe the connections between anti-Asian discrimination and the "mainstream" history of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and U.S. imperialism. Wong and Kurashige seek to tie the history of Asian exclusion to other major transformations at the turn of the twentieth century, but in doing so they cast their gaze in different directions. In search of connections, Wong turns toward the South, the contemporaneous racialization of African Americans, and the broader field of domestic race relations. In contrast, Kurashige reorients to the West, the Pacific World, and questions of American geopolitics. Together, these authors point to new directions for the history of Asian exclusion, directions that face the field outward.

Wong and Kurashige are not the only scholars to propose these reorientations, a fact that both authors readily concede. Wong acknowledges previous scholarship on comparative Chinese and African American racialization, including work by Claire Jean Kim, Najia Aarim-Heriot, Devon W. Carbado, and Lisa Lowe.² Her central concern—the dialectical racialization of Black inclusion and Chinese exclusion—has been previously identified and documented by these authors. Similarly, Kurashige builds on the work of Michael Hunt, Delber McKee, Kornel Chang, Paul A. Kramer, and Gordon H. Chang, who have each emphasized how U.S. geopolitical aims pushed against Asian exclusion.³ In fact, Kurashige is so indebted to these works and others that he acknowledges that his book "is neither a monograph nor a work of historical synthesis but a hybrid," a hybrid he terms a "research survey" (p. xii).

Though Wong and Kurashige lean on frameworks proposed by others, they make a more compelling case than their predecessors for the significance of these interventions. Through the careful reading of Chinese and African American authors, Wong reveals that the black inclusion/Chinese exclusion dialectic spread beyond white society and could be used toward multiple ends. Through sustained emphasis on the opponents of exclusion, Kurashige makes a new case for the strength of "egalitarian" politics throughout the Exclusion Era. These authors, each in their own way, reveal that the history of Asian exclusion still needs major revision.

In Racial Reconstruction, Wong insists that we recognize how the racialization of Chinese migrants and African Americans is mutually constituted in late-nineteenth-century America. During Reconstruction, African Americans became nominal members of the American nation and its polity, even as they continued to be deprived of substantive rights. Soon afterwards, immigration law formally excluded Chinese immigrants from the United States and from citizenship, although they continued to be physically present within the nation. Wong argues that these legal processes emerged from and perpetuated a dialectical racial formation of black inclusion and Chinese exclusion. By the...