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New perspectives on making and writing Chinese American history
Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture
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edited by Sucheng Chan and Madeline Y. Hsu
"Covering a wide range of historical and contemporary issues in Chinese American life, this anthology is vastly informed and filled with fresh research drawing on archives or documents that hitherto have not been accessed. The ideas contained in the essays are so original and comprehensive that together, they constitute both a theoretically and empirically engaging challenge to tradition-centric concepts in Chinese American studies I find few existing scholarly works that can match the scope and depth of this volume's broad and thought-provoking coverage of Chinese American history."
—Xiao-huang Yin, author of Chinese American Literature since the 1850s
Sucheng Chan introduces this valuable new anthology with a commanding discussion of the field of Chinese American studies, in which she examines its history and points the way ahead. Here she and Madeline Y. Hsu have brought together leading-edge scholarship from a new generation of thinkers, as useful for scholars as it is for undergraduate readers.
The contributors address a broad range of issues, from the activism of left-wing and Communist Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the 1920s and early 1930s and humanitarian relief during the Sino-Japanese War to the construction of new Chinese regional identities in New York.
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Reviews
"This is a timely, innovative, and very readable anthology that adds to and complicates our existing understandings of Chinese American history and the intertwined aspects of culture and politics in community formation, identity, and even U.S.-China relations. An excellent book for classroom use.."
—Erika Lee, author of At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
"Chan's introductory chapter offers an excellent and comprehensive literature review to demonstrate the synergy in Chinese American History and historiography.... Each chapter in this collection is remarkable for its interesting stories, keen observations, methodical analyses, and intriguing insights. The authors are attentive to detail and examine the complexities of the topics through a transnational or diasporic lens, avoiding ideological assertions and questionable assumptions.... It makes an original contribution to Chinese American history and historiography, a topic that will surely continue to attract attention in the next several decades."
—The Journal of Chinese Overseas
"The essays in this volume are based on themes that the community-based historian Him Mark Lai introduced. Sucheng Chan's introduction provides an up-to-date bibliographical essay on Chinese American historiography from its inception in the 1850s to after the mid-1980s, when Chinese American studies matured and became more objective.... All of the chapters are well written and researched and contribute to our understanding of the Chinese American experience. I highly recommend this book."
—Journal of American History
"This anthology of seven fine essays honor[s] the pathbreaking, prolific, and generous historian Him Mark Lai...The editors have put together a thoughtful, remarkably cohesive collection that spans in chronological scope the late-nineteenth century to the present; nearly all of the contributors are historians.... Taken together, this is a solid, versatile collection ideal for classroom use, or for readers interested in getting a taste of the vibrant state of Chinese American history, whether one calls it social, cultural, or political history."
—Western Historical Quarterly
Contents
Preface
A Note on Transliteration and Chinese Names
Acknowledgements
Introduction Chinese American Historiography: What Difference Has the Asian American Movement Made?
1. History as Law and Life: Tape v. Hurley and the Origins of the Chinese American Middle Class
2. The Activism of Left-Wing and Communist Chinese Immigrants, 1927-1933
3. Filling the Rice Bowls of China: Staging Humanitarian Relief during the Sino-Japanese War
4. From Pariah to Paragon: Shifting Images of Chinese Americans during World War II
5. From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining at the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity during the Cold War Era
6. Searching for Roots in Contemporary China and Chinese America
7. The "Spirit of Changle": Constructing a Chinese Regional Identity in New York
Contributors
Index
About the Author(s)
 | Sucheng Chan is professor emerita of Asian American Studies and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. |
 | Madeline Y. Hsu is Director of the Center for Asian American Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin |
Subject Categories
Asian American Studies
American Studies
Race and Ethnicity
In the series
Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Vő.
The "standard" written histories of Asian immigrants to the United States have been imbued with Western cultural biases. As a critique and corrective to earlier work, Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Vő, aims to develop a history of Asian Americans that is compatible with their own experience, that treats Asian Americans as agents of historical change and as creators of a new culture. In addition, this series intends to focus on the groups that are flourishing in the contemporary U.S.—Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese—about whom little has been written as well as to add to the substantial work done on the Chinese and Japanese in this country.