Thinking Orientals Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America

by Yu, Henry

• ISBN13: 9780195116601
• ISBN10: 0195116607
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-02-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Thinking Orientals is a groundbreaking study of Asian Americans and the racial formation of twentieth-century American society. It reveals the influential role Asian Americans played in constructing the understandings of Asian American identity. It examines the unique role played bysociologists, particularly sociologists at the University of Chicago, in the study of the "Oriental Problem" before World War II and also analyzes the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and the subsequent "model minority" profile.

Author Biography

Henry Yu is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Notes on Terms and Translations	xv
An Invocation	3	(2)
Introduction The Locations of History	5	(10)
FIRST MOVEMENT---COMING TO THE WEST
Constructing the Oriental Problem
A Setting	15	(4)
Professions of Faith: Missionaries, Sociologists, and the Survey of Race Relations, 1924--1926	19	(12)
Thinking about Orientals: Chicago Sociologists and the Oriental Problem	31	(16)
Orientalism and the Mapping of Race	47	(25)
The Survey's Ends	72	(21)
SECOND MOVEMENT---COMING TO CHICAGO
Asian Americans and the Oriental Problem
Wanted: Interpreters and Informants---Orientals, Please Apply	93	(18)
Language of Hope: The Oriental as Marginal Man	111	(13)
Language of Discontent: Using the Stranger's Perspective	124	(29)
RETRACINGS---COMING TO AMERICA
The Oriental as an Intellectual/Object
A Final Setting	151	(2)
Performers on Stage	153	(20)
A Scene From Chinatown	171	(2)
American Orientalism as a Theory of Race, Space, and Identity	173	(13)
Legacies and Descendents	186	(29)
An Epitaph	205	(2)
Dramatis Personae	207	(8)
Notes	215	(34)
Bibliography of Primary Sources	249	(8)
Index	257