Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases - Hardcover

Coulson, Doug

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1438466617 ISBN 13: 9781438466613

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2017

Synopsis

From 1870 to 1940, racial eligibility for naturalization in the United States was limited to "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent," and many interpreted these restrictions to reflect a policy of Asian exclusion based on the conclusion that Asians were neither white nor African. Because the distinction between white and Asian was considerably unstable, however, those charged with the interpretation and implementation of the naturalization act faced difficult racial classification questions. Through archival research and a close reading of the arguments contained in the documents of the US Bureau of Naturalization, especially those documents that discussed challenges to racial eligibility for naturalization, Doug Coulson demonstrates that the strategy of foregrounding shared external threats to the nation as a means of transcending perceived racial divisions was often more important to racial classification than legal doctrine. He argues that this was due to the rapid shifts in the nation's enmities and alliances during the early twentieth century and the close relationship between race, nation, and sovereignty.

About this title

About the Author:

Doug Coulson is Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

About this edition

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1438466617
• ISBN 13: 9781438466613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 318