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Book Displays

Contextualizing Anti-Asian Racism in the United States: Then and Now
On virtual display starting March 2021

The JMU Libraries stands in solidarity with our Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) colleagues, students, neighbors, family members, and friends. We recognize the longstanding, deep roots and harmful impact of anti-Asian rhetoric, discrimination, and misinformation in our country, and are sorrowed by the rise of xenophobic harassment, violence, and fear we have seen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also recognize the ways that Asian and AAPI women face a culture of objectification and violence, as do other women of color.

Members of our Libraries Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion prepared this virtual book display in response to the tragic murders in Atlanta this week and the recent increase in hateful acts against Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Asian people in the US. This resource includes digital media as well as print materials available from the JMU Libraries. Please use these resources to learn more about Asian American cultures, histories, and perseverance in the United States.

New resources added in April 2021, May 2022, May 2023, and June 2023.

Ebooks

America is in the Heart: A personal history

First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.

America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945

What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier. From Progressive efforts to regulate corporate monopoly to New Deal contentions with the crisis of the Great Depression, a particular racial mode of social redress explains why turn-of-the-century radicals and reformers united around Asian exclusion and why Japanese American internment during World War II was a liberal initiative. In Lye's reconstructed archive of Asian American racialization, literary naturalism and its conventions of representing capitalist abstraction provide key historiographical evidence.

Books in print

Alien Nation: Chinese immigration in the Americas from the "coolie" era through World War II

This book traces the pivotal century of Chinese migration to the Americas, beginning with the 1840s at and ending during World War II. Chinese people came as laborers, streaming across borders and working jobs few others wanted, from constructing railroads in California to harvesting sugar cane in Cuba. Though nations were built in part from their labor, Young argues that they were the first group of migrants to bear the stigma of being "alien." Being neither black nor white and existing outside of the nineteenth century Western norms of sexuality and gender, Chinese people were viewed as permanent outsiders, culturally and legally. This book is the first transnational history of Chinese migration to the Americas. By focusing on the fluidity and complexity of border crossings throughout the Western Hemisphere, Young shows us how Chinese migrants constructed alternative communities and identities through these transnational pathways.

America for Americans: A history of xenophobia in the United States

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. This book shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an afterword reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.

Streaming Films

American Experience: The Chinese Exclusion Act

Examine the origin, history and impact of the 1882 law that made it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America and for Chinese nationals already here ever to become U.S. citizens. Running time: 161 minutes.

More resources