Prof. Kwong will focus his presentation on the current issues affecting Asian American studies, and the need for a new civil rights agenda in the United States. Here is the definitive portrait of Chinese America, charting 150 years of American history from the Chinese frontiersmen of the Wild West to the high-tech transnationals of today’s booming Chinese American ethnoburbs.
Drawing on years of original research and travels across the United States and Asia, Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic have produced a fascinating, panoramic narrative, bringing us inside 19th century gold mining camps, Asian fishing villages, Chinese American nightclubs of the 30s and 40s, and new immigrant enclaves. This book is also a landmark analysis a truly international American history. As one of the oldest immigrant groups and fastest-growing communities in the United States, Chinese Americans have been in the thick of national debates about race, class, immigration, and foreign policy from the settlement of the West to today’s era of globalization. With its unique lens, Chinese America offers a new picture of the country’s development, even as it provides one of the first extensive reports on the new suburban immigrant communities that are transforming present-day America.
Kwong and Miscevic apply new thinking to the simple immigrant story of triumph over adversity. The international trade in illegal immigrants persists, urban ghettos continue to host some of the country’s poorest immigrants, and anti-Asian discrimination lingers, but Chinese Americans also now live in the suburbs in higher proportions than whites. Chinese America gives us a portrait of an ethnic group in the making, including stories of extraordinary hardship, discrimination and success.
Autographed copies of Prof. Kwong’s book ‘Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community’ will be on sale during the lecture.
For more information on Prof. Kwong’s book, please visit http://thenewpress.com/books/chinese-america
Online Notes
