Title: Chains of Babylon
Subtitle: the rise of Asian America
First published: 2009
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.
Subjects: Politics and government, Asian Americans, Vietnam War, 1961-1975, Political activists, History, Third World Liberation Front, Protest movements, United States, Ethnic identity, Race relations, Social conditions, Social movements, African Americans, Relations with Asian Americans, Vietnam war, 1961-1975, protest movements, United states, race relations, United states, social conditions
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: E184.A75 M34 2009