Helen Heran Jun explores how the history of U.S. citizenshiphas
positioned Asian Americans and African Americans in interlocking
socio-political relationships since the mid nineteenth century.
Rejecting the conventional emphasis on 'inter-racial prejudice, ' Jun
demonstrates how a politics of inclusion has constituted a racial Other
within Asian American and African American discourses of national
identity.
Race for Citizenship examines three salient moments when African
American and Asian American citizenship become acutely visible as
related crises: the 'Negro Problem' and the 'Yellow Question' in the
mid- to late 19th century; World War II-era questions around race,
loyalty, and national identity in the context of internment and Jim Crow
segregation; and post-Civil Rights discourses of disenfranchisement and
national belonging under globalization. Taking up a range of cultural
texts--the 19th century black press, the writings of black feminist Anna
Julia Cooper, Asian American novels, African American and Asian American
commercial film and documentary--Jun does not seek to document signs of
cross-racial identification, but instead demonstrates how the logic of
citizenship compels racialized subjects to produce developmental
narratives of inclusion in the effort to achieve political, economic,
and social incorporation. Race for Citizenship provides a new model
of comparative race studies by situating contemporary questions of
differential racial formations within a long genealogy of anti-racist
discourse constrained by liberal notions of inclusion.