Chains of Babylon
Subtitle: the rise of Asian America
By: Daryl J. Maeda.
Series: Critical American studies series
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press; Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780816648900; 9780816648917
Subjects: Third World Liberation Front -- History; 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; 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
Description: "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"--Back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Before Asian America; title: "Down with Hayakawa!" : assimilation vs. third world solidarity at San Francisco State College; title: Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen : constructing Asian American identity through performing blackness; title: "Are we not also Asians?" : building solidarity through opposition to the Viet Nam war; title: Performing radical culture : a grain of sand and the language of liberty; title: Conclusion : fighting for the heart of Asian America.