Common Ground
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A01=Gary Y. Okihiro
Abolitionism
African Americans
Ah Toy
Ambrose Bierce
American frontier
Americans
Asian Americans
Author_Gary Y. Okihiro
Black people
Brain size
Brothel
Category=GTM
Category=GTQ
Category=JBSL1
Category=NHK
Chinese Americans
Chinese Exclusion Act
Chink
Citizenship
Civilization
Class conflict
Courtesy
Culture and Society
Effeminacy
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eugenics
Europe
Exclusion
Femininity
Gender
Gender role
Hatred
Heterosexuality
Homosexuality
Immigration
Imperialism
Indigenous peoples
Latin America
Lesbian
Madama Butterfly
Manifest destiny
Manliness (book)
Masculinity
Midway Plaisance
Miscegenation
Modernity
Mulatto
Multiculturalism
Narrative
Nationality
Native Americans in the United States
New Frontier
North America
Orientalism
Penis
Politics
Promiscuity
Prostitution
Racialism
Racialization
Racism
Scrotum
Sexual intercourse
Sexual inversion (sexology)
Shi Pei Pu
Slavery
Social class
Social Darwinism
United States
Vagina
Wealth
White Americans
White people
White supremacy
Woman's Building
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691070070
- Weight: 255g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2001
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Common Ground, Gary Okihiro uses the experiences of Asian Americans to reconfigure the ways in which American history can be understood. He examines a set of binaries--East and West, black and white, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual--that have structured the telling of our nation's history and shaped our ideas of citizenship since the late nineteenth century. Okihiro not only exposes the artifice of these binaries but also offers a less rigid and more embracing set of stories on which to ground a national history. Influenced by European hierarchical thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo Americans increasingly categorized other newcomers to the United States. Binaries formed in the American imagination, creating a sense of coherence among white citizens during times of rapid and far-reaching social change. Within each binary, however, Asian Americans have proven disruptive: they cannot be fully described as either Eastern or Western; they challenge the racial categories of black and white; and within the gender and sexual binaries of man and woman, straight and gay, they have been repeatedly positioned as neither nor.
Okihiro analyzes how groups of people and numerous major events in American history have generally been depicted, and then offers alternative representations from an Asian-American viewpoint--one that reveals the ways in which binaries have contributed toward simplifying, excluding, and denying differences and convergences. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, from the Chicago Exposition of 1898 to The Wizard of Oz, this book is a provocative response to current debates over immigration and race, multiculturalism and globalization, and questions concerning the nature of America and its peoples. The ideal foil to conventional surveys of American history, Common Ground asks its readers to reimagine our past free of binaries and open to diversity and social justice.
Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He has published several books in American and African history, including Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945; Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture; and A Social History of the Bakwena and Peoples of the Kalahan of Southern Africa, 19th Century. He is a past president of the Association for Asian American Studies and the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the American Studies Association.
