REVIEWS | CONTENTS | AUTHOR BIO | SUBJECT CATEGORIES
Legal history illuminating Chinese Americans' struggle for civil rights
Entry Denied
Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943
Sucheng Chan
"Entry Denied is essential reading; it greatly enriches our understanding of the life experiences and strategies of those Chinese immigrants who struggled to establish a place and community in an openly hostile and racist society."
—China Review International
In 1882, Congress passed a Chinese exclusion law that barred the entry of Chinese laborers for ten years. The Chinese thus became the first people to be restricted from immigrating into the United States on the basis of race. Exclusion was renewed in 1892 and 1902 and finally made permanent in 1904. Only in 1943 did Congress rescind all the Chinese exclusion laws as a gesture of goodwill towards China, an ally of the United States during World War II. Entry Denied is a collection of essays on how the Chinese exclusion laws were implemented and how the Chinese as individuals and as a community in the U.S. mobilized to mitigate the restrictions imposed upon them. It is the first book in English to rely on Chinese language sources to explore the exclusion era in Chinese American history.
Reviews
"Sucheng Chan has edited a book which...should prove to be an excellent resource for scholars and laypersons alike. Especially interesting and useful is the legal history and analyses of decisions of the lower Federal Courts and the United States Supreme Court, which provide fresh information on the struggle of the Chinese against exclusion laws."
—The Journal of Asian Studies
"This volume is a contribution to the field of Chinese American history and reflects the 'new' scholarship in Asian American Studies.... [E]ach essay, in its own emphasis, reveals how Chinese immigrants were active participants in the making of American history, challenging a repressive system on many fronts.... This volume helps to illuminate Chinese America's place in the struggle for civil rights in the U.S."
—The Western Historical Quarterly
Contents
Preface – Sucheng Chan
Acknowledgments
1. The Chinese Contribution to the Development of American Law – Charles J. McClain and Laurene Wu McClain
2. Due Process, Treaty Rights, and the Efforts to Exclude the Chinese, 1882- 1891 – Christian G. Fritz
3. "Laws Harsh as Tigers": Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, 1891-1924 – Lucy E. Salyer
4. The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870-1943 – Sucheng Chan
5. Chinatown Social Organizations and the Anti-Chinese Movement, 1882-1914 – L. Eve Armentrout Ma
6. The Kuomintang in Chinese American Communities before World War II – Him Mark Lai
7. Chinese Protestants in the San Francisco Bay Area – Wesley Woo
8. The Politics and Poetics of Folksong Reading: Portrayal of Life Under Exclusion – Sau-ling C. Wong
English-Chinese Glossary
About the Contributors
About the Author(s)
Sucheng Chan, Professor and Chair of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is general editor of Temple's Asian American History and Culture Series.
Subject Categories
Asian American Studies
American Studies
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.