New Books In Asian American Studies

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether coolieism constituted a form of slavery or was indeed, a transition to free labor. In so doing, Racial Reconstruction explores the implications of mutually constitutive African American and Chinese American racialized identity formations, the Chinese Question, and the Negro Problem being coterminous: Chinese exclusion–the exception that proved the rule–helped America define itself as a free nation in the