Chains of Babylon: the Rise of Asian America

Chains of Babylon: the Rise of Asian America

Asian Americans -- Politics and government -- 20th century. Asian Americans -- Social conditions -- 20th century. Asian Americans -- Ethnic identity. Political activists -- United States -- History -- 20th century. Social movements -- United States -- History -- 20th century. Third World Liberation Front -- History. Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Protest movements -- United States. African Americans -- Relations with Asian Americans. United States -- Race relations -- History -- 20th century. United States -- Social conditions -- 20th century.

In Chains of Babylon, Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of 'Asian American' to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad. As revealed in Maeda's in-depth work, the Asian American movement contended that people of all Asian ethnicities in the United States shared a common relationship to oppression and exploitation with each other and with other nonwhite peoples. In the early stages of the civil rights era, the possibility of assimilation was held out to Asian Americans under a model minority myth. Maeda insists that it was only in the disruption of that myth for both African Americans and Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s that the full Asian American culture and movement he describes could emerge. Maeda challenges accounts of the post-1968 era as hopelessly divisive by examining how racial and cultural identity enabled Asian Americans to see eye-to-eye with and support other groups of color in their campaigns for social justice

Maeda, Daryl J.

University of Minnesota Press

2009

E184 .A75 M34

2003.500.4324