III. From Single-Stranded to Braided Histories of Race and Ethnicity in the Southern California Quarterly

Abstract

This article finds an emphasis on “foreignness” in early SCQ articles on the Asian American experience. Early twentieth-century authors explored changing racial identities. By the 1960s, articles in the Southern California Quarterly were comparing the evolving racial identities of various racial groups and exploring the transnational stigmatization of immigrant race and culture. The “new” social history shifted focus to the powerless and the analysis of racial power structures. By the 1990s authors were utilizing a relational analysis of multiple racial and cultural groups’ experience. Recent scholarship has examined oppressed communities taking agency and challenging power structures in multilayered contexts, pointing the way to the braided interactions of racialized groups.