Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture

This collection offers multifaceted explorations of how Chinese Americans have shaped their ethnic culture and identities to claim recognition and acceptance as participants in America’s multiracial, multicultural democratic state. In a field that has recently demonstrated its centrality to American processes of racialized nation-state and ideological formations, these articles represent a cutting edge in American, immigration, and ethnic studies. 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.