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

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

Henry Yuis Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.