Race for Citizenship

Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional emphasis on 'inter-racial prejudice,' Jun demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other within Asian American and African American discourses of national identity.
Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as related crises: the 'Negro Problem' and the 'Yellow Question' in the mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race, loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural texts-the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American commercial film and documentary-Jun does not seek to document signs of cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.

Helen Heran Jun is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Contents; Acknowledgments vii; Introduction 1; Part I 18; 1. Debts of Modernity: Nineteenth Century Black Citizenship and the Anti-Chinese Movement 21; 2. "When and Where I Enter...": Orientalism and Anna Julia Cooper's Narratives of Modern Black Womanhood 45; Part II 68; 3. Japanese American Masculinity and Black Social Space in John Okada's No No Boy 71; 4. Becoming Korean American: Consuming Black Culture, Consuming Blackface in the 1940s 105; Part III 134; 5. Atavistic Others of Globalization: Black Surplus in the Pacific Century 137; 6. Neoliberalism and Asian American Racialization: Human Capital and Bad Choices in aka Don Bonus (1995) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) 172; Afterword 207; Notes 218; Bibliography 270; Index; About the Author 284