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Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation

Amazon.com Price:  $20.98 (as of 19/04/2019 21:39 PST- Details)

Description

How did thousands of Chinese migrants finally end up working alongside African Americans in Louisiana after the Civil War? With the stories of those 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 US.

Jung examines how coolies seemed 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, regularly contradictory, ways. They may mark the progress of freedom; They may also symbolize the barbarism of slavery. Welcomed and rejected as neither black nor white, coolies emerged regularly as both the salvation of the fracturing and reuniting nation and the scourge of American civilization.

Based on extensive archival research, this study is smart of those contradictions to expose 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 around the seas.

Combining political, cultural, and social history, Coolies and Cane is a compelling study of race, Reconstruction, and Asian American history.


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