Customer Reviews

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

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Moon-Ho Jung has produced a very interesting work detailing the little known fact of the importation of large numbers of Chinese workers to the plantations in Lousiana. I disagee with the previous reviewer in that this is one of the few works out of the academic presses that is not overly ideological in its tone or presentation. The book quotes extensively from contemporary reports, especially newspapers of the period. It is also, unlike many academic volumes of recent times, a well written narrative.
I have little cause for complaint, but if I could make one it is that the situation in Latin America is not dealt with in sufficient depth. Chinese workers faced better conditions in most times and places there, but could also on some occasions face worse conditions. The same environment was not present there as in the United States, so some explanation is necessary as to why the same treatment was sometimes felt by the Chinese workforce. Also, comparitive work could be done on the position of Japanese workers who were also present in great numbers in both the United States and many different Latin American countries. Perhaps a future edition might cover this.
Moon-Ho Jung is an author new to me, and I hope to read more from him in the future. I would also recommend, as a companion to this book, one of the many fine volumes on the position of Chinese workers in California, as well as their role in the building of the western half of the transcontinental railroad. Most new general histories of the railroad now finaly do cover, at least a little, the position of the Chinese workers and their accomplishments.

This book tells the little-known story of Chinese migrants who labored in the cane fields of Louisiana in the nineteenth century. More than a story of "recovery," however, Jung uses this episode to advocate for a radically different, politically driven interpretation of Asian American history as well as to probe larger enquiries about the formation of U.S. race, nation, and empire in the age of emancipation. Bringing together the studies of emancipation, U.S. nation- and empire-building, and Asian labor migration, Jung's work speaks to heretofore disjointed fields that, when critically examined side-by-side, produces rich new insights about American culture and the U.S. social formation.
The book opens with Jung situating the national push for Chinese exclusion within congressional debates over the meanings of slavery and freedom in the postbellum era. The Chinese Exclusion Act, he argues, rather than a result of anti-Chinese rancor in California, culminated from "U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia and the Caribbean and broader struggles to demarcate the legal boundary between slavery and freedom". An ambiguous figure situated between black and white, enslaved and free, the coolie generated contentious debates in the halls of Congress and in public discourse. Their exclusion, in the end, signaled the nation's rejection of its slavery past and a commitment to "freedom"--in terms of "free labor," "free trade," and European immigration--in the post-emancipation era.
In one of the most profound arguments of the book, Jung contends that the recruitment and exclusion of coolies ultimately recast the U.S. as a white nation of immigrants. Critical of recurrent liberal claims that Asians are just like other immigrants, he demonstrates how congressional proceedings about the Chinese's incapacity for citizenship "concretized America's self image as the `nation of immigrants' and consolidated the `immigrant' as European and white...". Rather than threatening this democratic and pluralistic image of the United States, the movement against the Chinese actually helped to preserve it.
The anti-coolie movement in Louisiana and the nation at large crucially reconstituted whiteness as the central component of U.S. national identity. Not losing sight of the importance of agency and resistance, the last chapter documents the ways in which Chinese workers waged struggles against their status as contracted labor, arguing significantly that it was in their everyday struggles that democracy survived against the reinvigoration of white supremacy. Recasting Asian American history not as a history of "immigration and assimilation, but of labor migrations and resistance", Jung has produced a terrific and much-needed piece of scholarship that has the potential to unsettle and redefine the field.

Typical of recent multicultural efforts it is a book heavy on theory and unsupported assertions. Facts are only given when they support the multicultural agenda of the day. For example, in my reading of Chinese-American and European-American memoirs, I have found that relations are often shown as containing much more mutual respect than any multicultural historian will allow.
This book also uses "whiteness" rhetoric--a substitute for substantive analysis. Every group is tribal to an extent--favoring their religious, ethnic or cultural group. Examples aboud in Asia, for example, but everytime any European-American favors themself it is "whiteness." China and Japan have over their long histories have practiced their own discimination, such as massacres or immigration restrictions on foreigners. We of course don't reduce all of Japan's history to a criticism of "Japaneseness." Euroamericans were worse, of course, but some of the actions called "whiteness" are just the same cultural self-preference everyone else is allowed.