Brokering Belonging Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 [Hardcover]

Brokering Belonging traces several generations of Chinese brokers, ethnic leaders who acted as intermediaries between the Chinese and Anglo worlds of Canada. Before World War II, most Chinese could not vote and many were illegal immigrants, so brokers played informal but necessary roles as representatives to the larger society. Lisa Rose Mar's study of Chinatown leaders shows how politics helped establish North America's first major group of illegal immigrants. Drawing on new Chinese language evidence, her dramatic account of political power struggles over representing Chinese Canadians offers a transnational immigrant view of history, centered in a Pacific World that joins Canada, the United States, China, and the British Empire.

Introduction
Ch 1 Negotiating Protection: Illegal Immigration and Party Machines
Ch 2 Arguing Cases: Legal Interpreters, Law, and Society
Ch 3 Popularizing Politics: the Anti-Segregation Movement as Social Revolution
Ch 4 Fixing Knowledge: Pacific Coast Chinese Leaders' Management of the Chicago School of Sociology
Ch 5 Transforming Democracy: Brokerage Politics and the Exclusion Era's Denouement
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography

Highly innovative .This study of politics from the middle will shape the way political, immigration, and ethnic historians view power politics. --American Historical Review

Lisa Mar has written a history from neither above nor below, but from the middle. Her account of Chinese Canadian immigrant brokers during the exclusion era shows an active world of politics taking place 'off stage,' in patronage deals made in the back rooms of political parties, law offices, and in the Chinese-language press. This is a fascinating study that changes the way we think about Chinese immigrant communities and the ways in which power operates. --Mae M. Ngai, Columbia University

Lisa Mar's work uncovers the complex political and social ll3©