Racial Citizenship

This book explores the contemporary ethnic experiences of Japanese Americans from the second to the fourth generations and the extent to which they remain connected to their ancestral cultural heritage. As one of the oldest groups of Asian Americans in the United States, most Japanese Americans are culturally assimilated and well-integrated in mainstream American society. However, they continue to be racialized as culturally “Japanese” foreigners simply because of their Asian appearance in a multicultural America where racial minorities are expected to remain ethnically distinct. Different generations of Japanese Americans have responded to such pressures in ways that range from demands that their racial citizenship as bona fide Americans be recognized to a desire to maintain or recover their ethnic heritage and reconnect with their ancestral homeland. This ethnographic study argues that the ethnicity of immigrant-descent minorities does not simply follow a linear trajectory in which increasing assimilation gradually erodes the significance of ethnic heritage and identity over generations. While inheriting the assimilative patterns of previous generations, each new generation of Japanese Americans has also negotiated its own ethnic positionality in response to a confluence of various historical and contemporary factors. In addition, this book analyzes the performance of ethnic heritage through taiko drumming ensembles, as well as placing Japanese Americans in transnational and diasporic contexts.

This chapter turns to African-American writing about Black military service as the presumed means for attaining US citizenship. The failure of this promise is the ground for its readings of African-American convention proceedings, petitions, newspaper reports, as well as important writings by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. It focuses on this writing’s complex engagements with racial citizenship in a time of war and reconstruction. My reading of this literature takes up questions of state-sponsored violence as the grounds for identifying African-American subjectivity. This chapter takes it cue from Lincoln’s rationale for using Black troops as a “force” or “element” to utilize against the Confederacy. This provides a context for reading Douglass’s and Brown’s contrasting and deliberate investments in heroic Black manhood. The chapter concludes by contrasting their rhetorical and political strategies with Harper’s reevaluation of this androcentric model of racial manhood.

IDENTITY AND HISTORY Although Athenian sources have a great deal to say about racial citizenship and the myth of autochthony, this material is conspicuously absent from the works of the major fifth-century Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides. The historians' failure to engage directly with these issures is striking because they both offer accounts of early Athenian history and what might be called ethnogenesis; yet, rather than either endorsing or refuting Athenian racial myths, the historians elide them altogether. In so doing, they are not only denying Athenian chauvinism, but are also refusing the Athenian use of their identity fictions as shorthand explanations for crucial past events. In the Athenian history of Athens, autochthony says it all; it supplies a collective identity that is at once noble and a motivation for behavior. In funeral oratory, a genre that came into being during or after the Persian wars, Athenian speakers appeal to autochthony and the nobility it confers to explain their military achievements, both mythical and real. In some cases, speakers even provide a specific list of innate (and inherited) character virtues that both differentiate the Athenians from other Greeks and account for their successes. The historians' silence on this tradition is, I argue, a constitutive one. That is, although they decline the Athenian identity-based version of the past, they take up the basic proposition that the identity of individuals and groups operates as a causal force in history, explaining why peoples and poleis behave as they do.

This article examines the concepts of citizenship and exclusion in the writings of the nineteenth-century Chinese American figure Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898) and situates his works within the context of Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Against a backdrop of intensifying racial violence and legal and social exclusion, Wong repudiated racial stereotypes that were used to justify Chinese exclusion. He argued that the Chinese were culturally and morally distinctive but assimilable to American society. Central to his argumentative strategy was his critical reappropriation of the idea of the Chinese as unassimilable “heathens.” However, his conception of citizenship as conditional on “character and fitness” exposed the exclusionary nature of American citizenship and reinscribed its boundaries along racial and class lines. In treating Wong as a political thinker in his own right, this essay makes three contributions. First, it offers a historical elucidation of what Gordon Chang has called “the politics of the excluded.” Wong’s works show how central categories of politics and political thinking—like citizenship—are reconfigured by the very people those categories were designed to exclude. Second, this essay offers an alternative interpretive framework for reading texts within Asian American political thought and intellectual history. Finally, this essay forms a theoretical intervention by showing how Wong discloses the peculiarities of Asian American positionality in debates about racial citizenship in America.

“Let Paler Nations Vaunt Themselves”: John Rollin Ridge's “Official Verse” and Racial Citizenship in Gold Rush California

<i>Robert S. Levine</i>, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism<i>Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism</i>. Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. x+322.

Empire, Racial Citizenship, and Liberal Democracy

Acknowledgments Preface 1 Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism Beyond Ellis Island-How Not to Think about Immigration History Not Assimilation But Race Making Words Matter 2. Colliding Peoples in Eastern North America, 1600-1780 In the Beginning There Were Indians There Goes the Neighborhood: European Incursion and Settlement A Mixed Multitude: European Migrants Out of Africa Merging Peoples, Blending Cultures 3 An Anglo-American Republic? Racial Citizenship, 1760-1860 Slavery and Antislavery in the Era of the American Revolution Free White Persons: Defining Membership Playing Indian: White Appropriations of Native American Symbols and Identities European Immigrants Issues in European Migration Nativism Were the Irish Ever Not White? 4 The Border Crossed Us: Euro-Americans Take the Continent, 1830-1900 U.S. Colonial Expansion across North America Taking the Mexican Northlands Racial Replacement East from Asia Slave and Citizen Colonialism and Race Making 5 The Great Wave, 1870-1930 From New Sources and Old, to America and Back Making a Multiethnic Working Class in the West 6 Cementing Hierarchy: Issues and Interpretations, 1870-1930 How They Lived and Worked Gender and Migration Angles of Entry Making Jim Crow in the South Making Racial and Ethnic Hierarchy in the North Empire and Race Making Law, Race, and Immigration Racialist Pseudoscience and Its Offspring Anti-Immigrant Movements Interpretive Issues 7 White People's America, 1924-1965 Recruiting Citizens Recruiting Guest Workers Indians or Citizens? World War II Cracks in White Hegemony Racial Fairness and the Immigration Act of 1965 8 New Migrants from New Places Since 1965 Some Migrants We Know From Asia From the Americas From Europe From Africa Continuing Involvements Abroad 9 Redefining Membership Amid Multiplicity Since 1965 Immigration Reform, Again and Again Panethnic Power Disgruntled White People New Issues in a New Era 10 Epilogue: Future Uncertain Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century Projecting the Future Immigration Issues Reprise Appendices APPENDIX A: Chronology of Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Decisions APPENDIX B: Tables Notes Illustration Permission Acknowledgments Also by Paul Spickard Index

Chapter 4: Empire, Racial Citizenship, and Liberal Democracy

ABSTRACTThis article takes on a rhetorical investigation of the spatial and racial politics at play in the Capitol Building’s National Statuary Hall (NSH) collection. I argue that the material arrangement of the NSH collection enacts a form of what I call commemorative privilege, wherein the Capitol’s most prestigious places valorize those citizens that emulate the nation’s history of ascriptive citizenship ideals while the building’s basement houses those citizens whose voices and bodies have resisted such norms. I unpack both structural and embodied forms of commemorative privilege, underscoring the mutually constitutive relationship between people and places. Thus, the analysis demonstrates that not all space is created equal, and where citizens are placed within a symbolic space has material and ideological implications for racialized citizenship ideals.

This essay explores the recurring figure of the traitor in African-American letters, arguing that literary portrayals of the crime of treason reveal the fundamental tension between black loyalty to the nation and the nation’s betrayal of the race, and indeed demand that we reconsider the terms of treason itself. In three nineteenth-century texts by African American writers—Victor Séjour’s 1837 “The Mulatto,” Frederick Douglass’s 1853 “The Heroic Slave,” and Sutton Griggs’s 1899 Imperium in Imperio—faithful black subjects are inevitably betrayed by racialized law and custom and the refusal to acknowledge the possibility of a black subject fully incorporated into the nation. Asking whether and how blacks writers can navigate the chasm between loyalty to race and loyalty to nation, this essay interrogates the twinned metaphors of patriotism and treason as literary responses to the seeming incommensurability of racial and national citizenship.

This article examines changes in Zimbabwean secondary school history syllabi and textbooks, specifically their treatment of the issue of race; and relates these developments to larger social forces at work after 1980. A nationalist, Africa-centred and Marxist-inspired history syllabus was introduced in 1991; it was revised in 2000 and replaced in 2002 by one that was narrower, less comparative and with less emphasis on the development of critical reading and interpretive skills. In each instance, history was made to ‘play its role’. Drawing on evidence from the syllabi, authors, teachers and schools, this article argues that although the first nationalist syllabi and textbooks were distinct improvements over their Rhodesian-era predecessors, they presented polarising messages along racial lines to a burgeoning school population. In conjunction with the passive ‘live and let live’ style of racial reconciliation in wider society, these educational circumstances contributed to a social avoidance of large-scale racial targeting, while racial identity and citizenship simultaneously came to be seen through the lens of political expediency. Although state-sponsored violence and propaganda certainly spread in the period under review, the article also suggests a possible counter-trend: that the promulgation of ‘patriotic history’ in Zimbabwe might find itself tempered to some extent by the country's educational structures, traditions and conditions.

Cincinnati manufacturers before World War I displayed substantial unity in pursuing the open shop. San Francisco employers were divided, in both their attitudes and their actions, on how to deal with unions. I treat these differences in terms of business class formation. My explanation emphasizes how racial dynamics, class relations, and citizenship practices, acting in cumulative historical sequences, shaped employer solidarity and ideology.

Primitive Drivers: Racial Science and Citizenship in the Motor Age

The ‘Unite the Right’ rally on 11 and 12 August 2017, shook the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, and spurred a national conversation about the long history of racial oppression in the United States and the future of its democracy. This article reviews the Transatlantic Partnership on Memory, Responsibility and Transformation, a collaboration between the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America and the Center for German Studies at the University of Virginia. Launched in response to the violent rally on the university's grounds and in downtown Charlottesville, the partnership adds a transnational dimension to antiracist pedagogy and Holocaust education. Through interdisciplinary projects, it challenges students to translate classroom learnings into hands-on practice of participatory democratic citizenship in local communities. The partnership's aim is to situate the study of memory and history in contemporary discussions of racial justice and responsible citizenship and to animate students to find urgency and relevance in the specific lessons of the Holocaust and in broader, transnational legacies of systemic oppressions. Starting with a discussion of the initiative's origins in the aftermath of far-right violence, this article offers some of the lessons learned through the partnership, as well as recommendations for others who might wish to explore similar pedagogical practices and programing.