Edlie L. Wong. Racial Reconstruction

In Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship, Edlie L. Wong seeks to bring both the Chinese and the West into the narrative of Reconstruction, an era long dominated by examples of racial tensions, discrimination, and violence directed toward African Americans in the South. Although Wong is not the first scholar to argue for a more expansive portrayal of this era, underutilized sources and interdisciplinary methodology make Racial Reconstruction an important addition to the existing literature. Chinese coolie labor in Cuba and Chinese settlement and subsequent calls for Chinese exclusion from white West Coast residents and politicians are not merely additions to the unfolding of Reconstruction, but crucial components of a national story of coming to terms with free labor and shifting notions of race and citizenship. Wong’s focus on the “dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion” (seeking to bring newly freed African Americans into the fold of political, social, and cultural life in the U.S. while simultaneously excluding Chinese from the same institutions) convincingly “link[s] together immigration and citizenship struggles in the long shadow of slavery, abolition, and Reconstruction” (3, 4), challenging historians to think broadly in terms of sources and subjects when writing on and teaching about Reconstruction.

Art · Chinese americans · Citizenship · Dialectic · Expansive · Immigration · Inclusion (mineral) · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Racism · Settlement (finance) · Shadow (psychology) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies