Thinking Orientals Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America [Paperback]

Thinking Orientalsis a groundbreaking study of Asian Americans and the racial formation of twentieth-century American society. It reveals the influential role Asian Americans played in constructing the understandings of Asian American identity. It examines the unique role played by sociologists, particularly sociologists at the University of Chicago, in the study of the Oriental Problem before World War II and also analyzes the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and the subsequent model minority profile.

First Movement--Coming to the West: Constructing the Oriental Problem
1. Professions of Faith: Missionaries, Sociologists, and the Survey of Race Relations, 1924-1926
2. Thinking about Orientals: Chicago Sociologists and the Oriental Problem
3. Orientalism and the Mapping of Race
4. The Survey's End
Second Movement--Coming to Chicago: Asian Americans and the Oriental Problem
5. Wanted: Interpreters and Informants, Orientals Please Apply
6. Language of Hope: The Oriental as Marginal Man
7. Language of Discontent: Using the Stranger's Perspective
Retracings--Coming to America: The Oriental as an Intellectual/Object
8. Performers on Stage
9. American Orientalism as a Theory of Race, Space, and Identity
10. Epilogue: Legacies and Descendants
An Epitaph

The book challenges the reader to develop an expansive analysis of Asian Americans and their relation to race in the United States. --Educational Researcher

A tour de force. Henry Yu takes us on a dazzling journey through twentieth-century social science and identity politics. There is something new and provocative on every page, from Yu's deep analysis of the construction of the oriental in Chicago School sociology to his finely-drawn biographical vignettes of famous intellectuals and little known immigrants.Thinking Orientalswill find a place on a short shelf olƒ°