(Minor Field) Asian American Transnational History 1850-1950

RATIONALE This field acts as a historicizing complement to my major field, American Literature 1850-1950. In it, I focus on the immigration of Chinese and South Asian subjects to the U.S., keeping an eye out for the production of "transnational" culture and community. First, I hope to gain a very solid immigration history background of this period, becoming alert to the most pertinent problems and issues facing scholars today. I also hope to see how this field, with its focus on Asian immigration, complicates the "immigration narrative" I locate in the canonical American literature of my major list. For this field, I tend to focus on European immigration - how does Asian transnationalism problematize this paradigm? I believe this historical reading list will give me a useful lens to re-read European immigration texts, and read the less-accounted for Asian immigration literary texts. Ultimately, I expect that this list will help me generate an idea of Asian American culture, pre-1965, that potentially offers a more nuanced version of the more traditional model advanced by Ronald Takaki, Sau-Ling Wong, and others.

TEXTS Anti Asianists: — Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916) — Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1939) — William Speer, The Oldest and Newest Empire: China and the United States (1870) Liberals, East Asian: — Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California 1850-1880 (1963) — Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (1909) — Roger Daniels, Asian America (1988) — Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy (1971) Liberals, South Asian: — Joan Jenson, Passage From India (1988) — Ranjani Kanta Das, Hindustani Workers on the Pacific Coast (1923) — Krishnalal Shridharani, My India, My America (1941) Asian Americanists, East Asian — Kay Anderson, Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada 1875-1980 (1991) — Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home (2002) — Peter Kwong, Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950 (1979) — L. Eve Armentrout Ma, Revolutionaries, Monarchists, and Chinatowns (1990) — Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects (2003) — Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals (2001) Asian Americanists, South Asian — Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices (1992) — L.P. Mathur, Indian Revolutionary Movement in the United States of America (1970) — Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (2000) — Lavina Dhingra Shankar ed., A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (1998) Asian Americanists, General — Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich eds., Labor Immigration Under Capitalism (1984) — Gary Okihiro, Cane Fires, The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945 (1991) — Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana, Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (1983)