Time: 7PM to 8:30PM
Place: 25 West 43rd Street, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
Free Admission
RSVP Required Via Phone or Email
Presenter: Mae Ngai (Columbia University)
Commentator: Dorothy Wang (Williams College)
If you’re Irish American or African American or Eastern European Jewish American, there’s a rich literature to give you a sense of your family’s arrival-in-America story. Until now, that hasn’t been the case for Chinese Americans.
From noted historian Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones uncovers the three-generational saga of the Tape family. It’s a sweeping story centered on patriarch Jeu Dip’s (Joseph Tape’s) self-invention as an immigration broker in post–gold rush, racially explosive San Francisco, and the extraordinary rise it enables. Ngai’s portrayal of the Tapes as the first of a brand-new social type—middle-class Chinese Americans, with touring cars, hunting dogs, and society weddings to broadcast it—will astonish.
Again and again, Tape family history illuminates American history. Seven-year-old Mamie Tape attempts to integrate California schools, resulting in the landmark 1885 Tape v. Hurley. The family’s intimate involvement in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair reveals how the Chinese American culture brokers essentially invented Chinatown—and so Chinese culture—for American audiences. Finally, Mae Ngai reveals aspects—timely, haunting, and hopeful—of the lasting legacy of the immigrant experience for all Americans.
Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. Shereceived her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. Ngai is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton 2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010).
Professor Ngai has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, NYU Law School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Boston Review. Before becoming a historian Ngai was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now working on Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908, a study of Chinese gold miners in the nineteenth-century North American West, Australia, and South Africa.
Dorothy Wang is an assistant professor in the American Studies Program at Williams College. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Her teaching and research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary American poetry and experimental minority American writing.
Series Organizer: Kyoo Lee, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College, CUNY, and a Resident Mellon Fellow at CUNY Graduate Center.
Details on full schedule of Fall 2010 seminar sessions: www.kyoolee.net/faculty-seminar-in-asian-american-studies.html
