Chinese American History

This course approaches Chinese migration to the United States as both a historical subject and a methodological challenge. Rather than limiting this history to events and communities only within the borders of the United States, we ask how law, geopolitics, and gendered experiences shaped the transpacific Chinese communities. At the same time, we take up the questions: How do we know what we know about the past? and How can we read against the bias of the archive to recover marginalized voices? Students will work with diplomatic records, petitions, letters, personal essays, memoirs to grapple with these problems of evidence.