Studied by 32 peopleAfong Moy
In the ‘The Chinese Lady’ engraving, where she seems like and object on the stage. Seen as an accessible/contained means for white people to watch and pretend they understand culture and difference. Own name is unknown - ‘Afong’ is not a name, but an informal title. One of the first Chinese women to arrive in the United States. Minimal information about her is known. Used to sensationalise the East.
Asiatic Barred Zone
Restricted immigration area from the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act. Starts to exclude people who weren’t necessarily Asian - included literacy tests that also applied to European immigrants - goal to keep out undesirables.
Asiatic Exclusion League
Renamed Japanese and Korean Exclusion League (1905) in 1907 to include the exclusion of Indians and Chinese immigrants. Advocated for the ‘white man’s country’ and the prohibition of Asian labor immigration. Used violence against Asians and spread false anti-Asian information and to sway legislation towards restricting immigration.
Bayonet Constitution
Constitution that King David Kalakaua signed at gunpoint on July 6, 1887. Undermines the authority of King Kalakaua, takes away Native Hawaiian land rights, and gives the vote to foreign landowners.
Bellingham Riot
September 4th, 1907. 500 white working men in Bellingham, WA attacked the homes of the South Asian Indians (mostly Pubjabi migrants). Rioters broke into the mills and people from work, entered the bunkhouses where they lived, destroyed and stole their property, and drove them to the city limits or to the jail.
Bhagat Singh Thind
Bhagat Singh Thind v. United States; Punjabi Sikh who immigrated to US in 1913, joined US army in 1917, and was honourably discharged in 1918. In 1920 applied for naturalised citizenship which was initially approved, then appealed bc he’s not white. He argued he was “Aryan” because of his high-caste Indian status, and thus Caucasian and white. The court ruled "Aryan” was a linguistic, not a racially stable, classification; “common sense” dictated that Asian Indians were not white. As he’s not white, he’s not eligible for citizenship.
“The Consequences of Coolieism”
Encapsulates racialisation of proletarian labour through creation of coolie labour. Seen in a lithograph that shows a white worker’s family deteriorating (drunk, prostitute, thievery) with a prosperous building with stereotyped names and caricatures of Chinese people. Call to Irish people to join white working class movement against Chinese workers. Concept of what white workers believed the consequences of coolieism were.
Empress of China
First ship that was participating in the US/China trade (a year after the US declared its independence/revolutionary war ended). New country was in a lot of debt, and was trying to compensate by selling to China and collecting customs on trade from China.
Geary Act
1892: extended Chinese exclusion act & required Chinese laborers to register w/ the American govt. Forced to carry around documents w name, age, local residence, occupation, and photo identification. Vulnerable to arrest or deportation if found not carrying documents. Precursor to documents now known as green cards. Geary Act Protests (1892)
Gentlemen’s Agreement
Agreement between President Roosevelt and the Japanese Ambassador to restrict immigration from Japan to America to students, travelers, businessmen, etc. For the purpose of preventing tensions between America and Japan (even though these tensions arose from white Americans).
Ghadar Party
Founded in 1913. Formed by Indian lumber mill workers, students, and scholars in Oregon. Advocated for Indian independence from British rule through armed forces. Organized immigrant migrants to return to India in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the British during WWI. Ghadar translates to “revolt.” Disseminated an anticolonial newspaper. The Ghadar Party’s meetings in Oregon the summer of 1913 were the catalyst for the emergence of a radical anticolonial politics in North America
Herrenvolk Republicanism
This belief holds that the labor performed by white men is more valuable to the nation than the labor of other groups
“Hindu Menace”
U.S. and British officials named Indian anticolonialists as “Hindu menace.” This Western term was an antiradical racial formation that linked “aliens” to “radicals.” In the eyes of U.S. officials, this necessitated Indian exclusion and deportation.
Manila Galleons
Spanish trade with Asia crossed the Philippines and Americas. Filipinos arrived in the Americas aboard Spanish ships beginning in 1580s, as the first Asian immigrants to arrive in America. Landed in Morro Bay, California in 1587. First settlement in 1840s - Filipino fishing village of St. Malo in Louisiana.
Mary Tape
Mother of Mamie Tape. She was a Chinese American woman, and one of the first Asian Americans to challenge school segregation. Her child was excluded from attending a white school in San Francisco. Tape v. Hurley.
National Origins Act
Placed quotas on immigration based on 1890 Census. “America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.” (Calvin Coolidge to Congress in 1923)
Nye-Lea Act
(1935) This act allowed Asian American WWI veterans to naturalize. It provided for the naturalization of alien veterans, but separated this issue from the issue of Asian immigration. Only military service and blood sacrifice had succeeded in eroding the racial barriers to political membership.
Orientalism
Exoticizing the mystical East; The Western perspective on Eastern cultures; Fetishization of Asian women; Oversimplification; Binary between East and West; Display or exhibition (commodification); Exerting power over the East, colonization
Page Act
Barred the immigration of Chinese women based on the assumption they were coming in to be prostitutes (for ‘lewd’ reasons). It was very hard to prove otherwise, so it became extremely hard to immigrate. First restrictive immigration law in the United States (1875).
People v. Hall
A white man was convicted of murder (of a Chinese minor according to wikipedia) based on the testimony of multiple Chinese witnesses. It was appealed, and overruled by the California supreme court in 1854. The court ruled that Chinese immigrants could not testify against white citizens.
Queen Liliuokalani
The queen of Hawaii, deposed in an 1893 coup after she tried to make a new constitution replacing the Bayonet Constitution and restoring political power and votes to native hawaiians. She worked to fight annexation by the U.S., restore the power of the monarchy, and reclaim voting rights for her people using nonviolent forms of resistance such as appealing to the laws of the Bayonet Constitution. Most histories of the annexation focused on the accounts of the perpetrators of the coup and English language newspapers, framing her as incompetent using black steryotypes, and minimizing her resistance.
Takao Ozawa
Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922). Ozawa was a Japanese immigrant who applied for naturalized U.S. citizenship in 1914. He was rejected because he was not “white” or of “African descent.” He argued that he was white, because of his light complexion, the length of his US residency, the fact that his wife was educated in the US, and his Christianity but the court ruled that “white” is “what is popularly known as the Caucaisian race,” and that Japanese immigrants were “clearly of a race which is not Caucaisian” and therefore ineligible for citizenship.
Tripartite Convention
The U.S., Germany and Britain convened and divided the Samoan archipelago in 1899, “Western Samoa” going to Germany and “American Samoa” to America (Britain giving up rights to it and getting some other stuff). Western Samoa gained independence in 1962, but American Samoa is still an unincorporated territory of the U.S. today.
Tydings-McDuffie Act
A 1934 act that declared independence of the Philippines after 10 years of being a U.S. territory. The act made the Philippines an independent country, but also started treating Filipinos as aliens again. All the immigrant exclusion acts now applied to them too, and they were given an immigration quota of 50 a year, although Hawaii could take more immigrants if they wanted more laborers for their economic interests.
Wong Kim Ark
The United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) codified birthright citizenship, even if parents were immigrants. Ark was born in SF to Chinese immigrant parents, who could not be naturalized (1790 Naturalization Act only granted that right to “free white persons” and 1870 extended citizenship to people of African descent). Wong took his case to the Supreme Court when he was returning from a trip to China and was denied entry based on the assumption that he was not a citizen.
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