Partly Colored Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South [Hardcover]

2012 Honorable mention for the Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies

Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?

By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.

Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras,Partly Coloredtraces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.

Scrutinizing the bipolar axis of power separating black from white under the Jim Crowe system of segregation, Bow tracks the oppression and elision of those who are partly colored —here chiefly Asian Americans but with comparative nods to Native Americans and the binaries characterizing gender and sexuality . . . What she finds is not a third space apart from black or white but an eneven extension of repression of racial differences into which Asian American subjects are shoehorned or erased. -Journal of American History“In a refreshingly wide-ranging study, Bow compares the circumstances of the Lumbee Indians with those of Asians&l›