East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Abstract

The most important books to focus on race relations in the past few years have all presented the United States through a long-standing white/black binary. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) explore how violence and invisibility shape contemporary black subjectivity. However, even as John Hope Franklin proclaimed in “One America in the 21st Century,” President Clinton’s 1997 race initiative, “This country cut its eye teeth on racism in the black/white sphere,” we must still bear in mind Korean American spokeswoman Angela Oh’s hope for a “new language” that will allow discussion “beyond the black-white paradigm.” As she further explained in the well-publicized dispute, “We need to go beyond that because the world is about much more than that, and this is sort of the next horizon” (quoted in Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White [New York: Basic Books, 2002], 34). The contrast between Franklin’s and Oh’s conception of America’s legacy and future still reverberates nearly twenty years later. Their differing approaches highlight how race invariably proliferates contradictions. It is a fiction that instantiates devastating forms of difference. It is a hegemonic tool of division that sows the foundation of glorious communities and cultural legacies. And it is both defined and limited by white/black relations. Franklin and Oh are equally right, and scholars must recognize such complexity in order to understand the nature of racial representation in the twenty-first century.Two recent books, Chong Chon-Smith’s East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights Era and Edlie Wong’s Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship, offer new historical and representational paradigms by which to understand American racial formations from a comparative perspective. They aim to bring greater clarity to the cultural, legal, and popular discourses surrounding African and Asian Americans. These texts affirm the need to understand racial formations as both part of and beyond the white/black binary.Chon-Smith’s book presents itself as the first study of Asian and black masculinities in literature and popular culture. As such, it must balance a host of different disciplinary approaches and vocabularies, a difficult task for any monograph. The result is an uneven series of chapters that do not easily cohere into an argumentative whole. Although the book is primarily concerned with notions of masculinity, the first sustained exploration of gender does not appear until chapter 2’s discussion of Asian athletes Ichiro Suzuki and Yao Ming. The opening chapter on the Asian American writing movement offers keen insights into the ways that many Asian American writers were supported by black authors and publishers. However, there is little historical continuity between this discussion and the chapters that follow, which include a study of turn-of-the-century African American/Asian buddy films and contemporary Asian American hip-hop and spoken-word artists. The title of the book is ultimately misleading, as this is less a study of post–Civil Rights era representations than of twenty-first-century figures. Moreover, Chon-Smith often conflates Asian and Asian American experiences while entirely ignoring South Asian masculinities.His most resonant construction appears in the book’s introduction where he offers the term racial magnetism to describe the binary axes upon which Asian and black men are positioned: “brain/body, hardworking/lazy, nerd/criminal, culture/genetics, acceptability/monstrosity” (3–4). While these opposing conceptions are striking, such dichotomous thinking fails to account for the ways in which the needs of whiteness mediate both sides of these stereotypes. The term magnetism does little to offer new insight into familiar dualistic systems that are embedded in far more complex networks. Chon-Smith offers limited discussion of femininity in all of his chapters and fails to consider how racial magnetism might be applied (or not) to representations of white and Asian women as well as various forms of sexuality. Magnetism operates through opposition and thus Chon-Smith avoids more challenging figures like Tiger Woods or even Barack Obama, who spent many of his formative years in Indonesia and is not just our first black president but our first president with an Asian American sister. These examples of masculinity imbued with both African American and Asian influences expose the limitations of racial magnetism. Chon-Smith’s individual chapters are compelling; his concluding study of underground Asian hip-hop and spoken-word artists suggests a rising artistic movement. The chapters of the book are perhaps best approached as stand-alone explorations rather than part of a cohesive, historicized argument.Where Chon-Smith’s book stumbles in defining a historical period and a particular Asian American identity, Wong’s Racial Reconstruction focuses sharply on a particular immigrant community’s entrance into the American labor and ideological marketplace. Wong notes that the end of slavery led to a wide-scale labor shortage across the United States and the Caribbean. This crisis provides the staging ground for a fascinating examination of two parallel racial discourses: Chinese exclusion occurs just as recently emancipated slaves are coming to terms with the failures of American citizenship. This dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion does not lend itself to neat conclusions for immigration policies, political positions, or ideological arguments, but rather showcases the pitfalls of applying logic to anything as malleable as race.Wong expertly traces the contradictions that proliferate as racist claims against both Chinese and African American subjects are used to advance various positions. In this rigorously researched book, race and gender are understood as inextricably linked formations that shape both legal and cultural discourses. Wong draws on political cartoons, travel accounts, immigration case files, plantation diaries, and sensationalized invasion fiction to explore how black citizens and Chinese immigrants came to occupy distinct racial positions in the post-Reconstruction period. In the first chapter, she traces the development of the Chinese coolie-slave, a figure that bears the marks of both bondage and self-ownership. Such an ambivalent representation undermines a clear delineation between free and slave, white or black, instead demonstrating the uneven process of racial formation. Subsequent chapters examine debates over the “Chinese Question” from a broad range of African American and Chinese American writers as well as the racial posturing at work in Chinese invasion fiction. The book concludes by reading a series of Chinese literary productions, including Lin Shu’s Chinese translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1901), the Chinese boycott novel The Bitter Society (1905), and Edith Maude Eaton’s writings on the Chinese living in North America, against immigration case law and national foreign policy. Racial Reconstruction clarifies the stakes of citizenship in the US racial state, offering important insights into current debates about immigration and the shifting contours of the US labor force. It is a model for the kind of deeply historicized work necessary to elucidate the shifting contours of race in the twenty-first century.