A01=Moon-Ho Jung
African Americans
Asian Americans
Author_Moon-Ho Jung
Caribbean
Category=JHBL
Category=NHK
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Louisiana
Reconstruction
South
United States-19th century
West Indies
Product details
- ISBN 9780801882814
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 May 2006
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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How did thousands of Chinese migrants end up working alongside African Americans in Louisiana after the Civil War? With the stories of these workers, "Coolies and Cane" advances an interpretation of emancipation that moves beyond U.S. borders and the black-white racial dynamic. Tracing American ideas of Asian labor to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Moon-Ho Jung argues that the racial formation of "coolies" in American culture and law played a pivotal role in reconstructing concepts of race, nation, and citizenship in the United States. Jung examines how coolies appeared in major U.S. political debates on race, labor, and immigration between the 1830s and 1880s. He finds that racial notions of coolies were articulated in many, often contradictory, ways. They marked the progress of freedom; they symbolized the barbarism of slavery. Welcomed and rejected as neither black nor white, coolies emerged recurrently as both the salvation of the fracturing and reuniting nation and the scourge of American civilization.
Based on a wealth of archival research, this study makes sense of these contradictions to reveal how American impulses to recruit and exclude coolies enabled and justified a series of historical transitions: from slave-trade laws to racially coded immigration laws, from a slaveholding nation to a "nation of immigrants," and from a continental empire of manifest destiny to a liberating empire across the seas. Combining political, cultural, and social history, "Coolies and Cane" is a compelling study of race, Reconstruction, and Asian American history.
Moon-Ho Jung is an assistant professor of history at the University of Washington.
