Black orientalism: Nineteenth-century narratives of race and U.S. citizenship

American Quarterly

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 1047-1066

  Jun, Helen H ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650367550     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2007.0010     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. Chinese Immigration: Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect, Report to the California Senate of Its Special Committee on Chinese Immigration (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1978), 247.
2. Brook Thomas, Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 36-37.
3. See Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 115-19.
4. On the specificity of U.S. Orientalism, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 178n7;
5. and John Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999).
6. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 19.
7. Tchen, New York Before Chinatown.
8. Tchen terms this "commercial Orientalism"; see New York Before Chinatown, 63-124.
9. See David Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993);
10. and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
11. Mullen builds on such work as Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994);
12. Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001);
13. and Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
14. Also see Ernest Allen, "When Japan Was 'Champion of the Darker Races': Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism," The Black Scholar 24.1 (1995);
15. and Daniel Widener, "'Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?' Asia, Asian Americans, and the Construction of Black California," in the special issue of positions: the afro-asian century (2003).
16. See Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
17. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 19.
18. Shah, Contagious Divides, 17.
19. and Arnold Shankman, "Black on Yellow: Afro-Americans View Chinese-Americans, 1850-1935," Phylon 49.1 (Spring 1978): 1-17. I regard any press material that was directed at a black readership and that was edited and managed by black workers as a "black newspaper."
20. Southern planters expressed considerable interest in importing Chinese labor to replace black sharecroppers during the Reconstruction period, however their efforts resulted in only a "trickle of migrants" and by 1880, there were only fifty-one Chinese reported in the Mississippi census. See James Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1988), 22-26.
21. The few cases in which Chinese immigrants were used in an attempt to displace black workers in the postbellum South ultimately failed due to a number of factors, including unanticipated transportation costs, poor productivity, and decreased political necessity (Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese, 26).
22. For an account of the paper's history, see Roland Wolseley, The Black Press, U.S.A. (Ames: Iowa State University, 1990), 111.
23. Shankman, Black on Yellow, 10.
24. See Penelope Bullock, The Afro-Americans Periodical Press, 1838-1909 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
25. See Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 100;
26. and Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North California Press, 1996).
27. Also, for discussion of black codes and the convict lease system, see Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 22-39.
28. See W. E. B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995);
29. and Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
30. Ida B. Wells, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, a Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (New York: Arno Press, 1969).
31. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 18.
32. Also see Davis, Women Race and Class, 172-201.
33. Slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the religious discourse of the abolitionist movement, clearly reveal how the enslaved and free black community relied heavily on the discursive terms and narratives of Christianity as a means of repudiating their relegation to property and to critique systematic exploitation. See Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 227-41,
34. and Francis Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), 42. The strong emphasis on the religious formation of the enslaved was crucial to asserting their humanity as "children of God," but also demonstrated their superior fitness as Christian subjects who survived and escaped the barbarism of slavery through divine intervention and salvation.
35. and Eric Lincoln, The Black Experience in Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974).
36. Also see Karen Baker-Fletcher, A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper (New York: Crossroad, 1994).
37. See Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990);
38. and George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Baker-Fletcher also discusses the use of religious discourse to negotiate scientific racism in the work of Anna Julia Cooper.
39. Pacific Appeal, May 17, 1862.
40. Nubia, "Progress of the Colored People of San Francisco," Frederick Douglass' Paper, September 22, 1854.
41. Nubia, "Progress of the Colored People."
42. Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, 85-155.
43. Quoted in Hellwig, The Afro-American and the Immigrant, 105.
44. The Elevator, July 8, 1970.
45. and Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (San Francisco: R&E Research Associates, 1919).
46. also see Herbert Hill, Black Labor and the American Legal System: Race, Work, and the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 13-21.
47. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge Press, 1995).
48. The Elevator, April 26, 1873;
49. See "Opium Eating in Chicago," Topeka Tribune, October 22, 1880;
50. "The Murderous Mafia" in The Age (New York);
51. and "One Blessing of the San Francisco Quake," in Alexander's Magazine (Boston), May 1906.