Asian Americans

"An informative and well-crafted volume with nearly 800 entries that review the key facts of Asian American and Pacific American history....This work, the first in its field, will be an essential reference for academic and public libraries." Choice

Asian Americans have made significant contributions to American society. This reference work celebrates the contributions of 166 distinguished Asian Americans. Most people profiled are not featured in any other biographical dictionary on noted Asian Americans. The Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans, Korean Americans, South Asian Americans (from India and Pakistan), and Southeast Asian Americans (from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) profiled in this work represent more than 75 fields of endeavor. From historical figures to figure skater Michelle Kwan, this work features both prominent and less familiar individuals who have made significant contributions in their fields. A number of the contemporary subjects have given exclusive interviews for this work.

Drawing from a broad range of articles, speeches, pamphlets, sermons, debates, laws, and resolutions, this documentary collection focuses on support for the rights of Japanese and Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the United States. The book traces a 130-year period, culminating with the governmental redress for survivors of the Japanese evacuation and internment of World War II. Illustrating the scope and types of American dissent against anti-Asian thought, the volume highlights expressions from the clergy, the labor movement, the abolitionists, and figures such as Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, John Stuart Mill, and Carey McWilliams. Citing material never before published, it demonstrates Black support for Asian rights and the consistency of the IWW's solidarity with Chinese and Japanese-American workers. It is also the first work to treat seriously clergymen's efforts against anti-Asian discrimination.

With California's passage of the Save Our State Initiative in 1994, fear of aliens has once again appeared in U.S. legislative history. Since 1790, congressional legislation on federal immigration and naturalization policy has been harsh on Asian immigrants, although less so since 1965. This documentary history covers all major immigration laws passed by Congress since 1790. The volume opens with an overview of the basis on which Congress has restricted Asian immigration. It then includes discussions of particular immigration legislation, showing the significance to Asian Americans and the documents themselves.

This book describes the historical and legal experiences of Americans of Asian ancestry who began to come to the United States in the mid-19th century. Like all immigrants in America, they arrived with hopes of making a better life and home in a free country. Instead, Asian-Americans have been mistreated and discriminated against by their fellow Americans--even by Congress and the Supreme Court, which should have made and judged laws without prejudice. This study examines the way immigration and naturalization laws were unfairly administered against Asian immigrants and throws light on a less than admirable period of American legal history. It will be of great interest to scholars in Asian American studies, legal history, and American history.

Covering the past 150 years, this documentary history critiques major Supreme Court decisions on litigations that Asian Americans brought before the Court. Separate sections written by contributing scholars focus on cases pertaining to the question of the government's right to exclude, expel, or deport persons of Asian ancestry, the constitutional question of U.S. citizenship for persons of Asian ancestry, the alien laws of California and Washington, and Japanese internment. A seventh section casts the problem of denying Asian Americans their constitutional rights within the framework of Asian American "foreignness" as viewed by white America. The final chapter reviews major immigration laws passed by Congress in the 20th century and discusses the implications of the Immigration Act of 1990. The volume concludes with a case, name, and subject index.

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialised economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant - at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation - displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders.In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and trans-nationalism.

Sooner or later every Asian American must deal with the question, "Where do you come from?" It is probably the most familiar if least aggressive form of racism. It is a tip off to the persistent notion that people of Asian ancestry are not real Americans, that "Orientals" never really stop being loyal to a foreign homeland, no matter how long they or their family have been in this country. Confronting the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to Asian Americans over the last 150 years, Robert G. Lee seizes the label "Oriental" and asks where it came from.

Active for more than two decades, the Asian American movement began a middle-class reform effort to achieve racial equality, social justice, and political empowerment. In this first history and in-depth analysis of the Movement, William Wei traces to the late 1960s, the genesis of an Asian American identity, culture, and activism.Wei analyzes the Asian American women's movement, the alternative press, Asian American involvement in electoral politics. Interviews with many key participants in the Movement and photographs of Asian American demonstrations and events enliven this portrayal of the Movement's development, breadth, and conflicts. Author note: William Wei teaches modern Chinese history and Asian American studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Born in Tinghai, China, and raised in New York City, Dr. Wei is also the author of Counterrevolution in China: The Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet Period.