Edlie Wong, “Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship” (NYU Press, 2015)

New Books in African American Studies · Jun 15, 2016 · 1h 11m

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether…