Yellow and Gold: Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Pacific-World Settler Colonies, 1848-1910
Mae Ngai will address two transpacific circulations in the late-19th century — the movement of Chinese to the gold rushes of the Pacific world, including the forms of work and social organization that they brought with them from southern China and southeast Asia and their local adaptions; and the circulation and evolution of anti-Chinese racial politics from North America to Australia to South Africa, which led to restrictive and exclusionary measures.
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Overview
Washington History Seminar
Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs
Yellow and Gold: Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Pacific-World Settler Colonies, 1848-1910
Mae Ngai
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
In this Washington History Seminar presentation, Mae Ngai will address two transpacific circulations in the late-19th century — the movement of Chinese to the gold rushes of the Pacific world, including the forms of work and social organization that they brought with them from southern China and southeast Asia and their local adaptions; and the circulation and evolution of anti-Chinese racial politics from North America to Australia to South Africa, which led to restrictive and exclusionary measures. The research is comparative and transnational; and empirical as well as discursive.
Mae Ngai is Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia, and currently a Fellow at the Wilson Center, where she is researching and writing Yellow and Gold. She is author of the award-winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton 2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010 and forthcoming in 2014 in Chinese from Commercial Press, Beijing and National Taiwan Normal Univ. Press, Taipei), and editor of Major Problems in American Immigration History, 2nd ed. (2011).
Report from the Field: To be announced
Monday December 9, 2013
4:00 p.m.
Reservations requested because of limited seating:
mbarber@historians.org or 202-450-3209
This is the last session of 2013. The seminar will resume on January 13, 2014 with a talk by
Risa Goluboff (University of Virginia)
The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center. It meets weekly during the academic year. Seewww.nationalhistorycenter.org for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts and podcasts. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for its support.
Speaker
Mae Ngai
Professor of History & Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, Columbia University
Hosted By
History and Public Policy Program
The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs. Read more
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