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Part One - Exclusion/Belonging

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2023

Claire Jean Kim
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Summary

Part One: “Exclusion/Belonging,” traces the construction of the nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant laborer as the original Asiatic/Mongolian, a figure who was not-white but above all not-Black, a wage worker who was degraded but nonetheless categorically superior to the slave. If we consider the Chinese immigrant laborer in relation to the white worker, Chinese foreignness was a site of dispossession, persecution, and exclusion. But if we consider the Chinese immigrant laborer in relation to the slave, we discover that Chinese foreignness was also, paradoxically, a site of plenitude, standing, and belonging. The exclusion movement expelled the Chinese immigrant from the nation, but not from the Family of Man. The U.S. state developed its pattern of weaponizing the Asiatic against the Black struggle during this period, as explained here in a new interpretation of Yick Wo v. Hopkins and Plessy v. Ferguson. For their part, Chinese immigrants grasped the value of their not-Blackness and developed strategies to take advantage of it, from displacing freed people on plantations during Reconstruction to refusing to allow their children to attend “colored” schools in the Mississippi Delta in the interwar years.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Exclusion/Belonging
  • Claire Jean Kim, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009222280.002
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  • Exclusion/Belonging
  • Claire Jean Kim, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009222280.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Exclusion/Belonging
  • Claire Jean Kim, University of California, Irvine
  • Book: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009222280.002
Available formats
×