War, Race, and Culture - (Asian America) by Gordon H Chang (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Writing history, the systematic effort to understand the human past, is a demanding intellectual endeavor. For historian Gordon H. Chang, it has also been a personal and moral enterprise intimately connected to his commitment to realizing a better world. This career-spanning anthology brings together significant essays, developing conversations across his broad-ranging research interests and personal history and engaging a range of topics, from diplomatic history and Asian American history to art history. The book begins with a preface that reflects on the rise of Asian American studies as a field and the author's own scholarly trajectory. Each essay is accompanied by new headnotes that provide context. Essays examine the many ways that race, especially regarding Asian Americans, connects important historical episodes and social issues. Themes of geopolitical conflict, race, and transnational methods link writing produced over several decades, illustrating the arc of an intellectual career and the development of the field of Asian American studies. Ultimately, this book highlights Chang's abiding interest in providing historical context for issues facing Asian Americans, particularly during a time of rising geopolitical tensions and anti-Asian violence"--

Book Synopsis

Writing history, the systematic effort to understand the human past, is a demanding intellectual endeavor. For historian Gordon H. Chang, it has also been a personal and moral enterprise intimately connected to his commitment to realizing a better world. This career-spanning anthology brings together significant essays, developing conversations across his broad-ranging research interests and personal history and engaging a range of topics, from diplomatic history and Asian American history to art history.

The book begins with a preface that reflects on the rise of Asian American studies as a field and the author's own scholarly trajectory. Each essay is accompanied by new headnotes that provide context. Essays examine the many ways that race, especially regarding Asian Americans, connects important historical episodes and social issues. Themes of geopolitical conflict, race, and transnational methods link writing produced over several decades, illustrating the arc of an intellectual career and the development of the field of Asian American studies. Ultimately, this book highlights Chang's abiding interest in providing historical context for issues facing Asian Americans, particularly during a time of rising geopolitical tensions and anti-Asian violence.

Review Quotes

"War, Race, and Culture is much more than a collection of essays. With new commentary and reflection, Gordon Chang highlights the importance of this body of work to current debates around the history of Asian America and American foreign policy towards Asia. With growing tensions with China, as well as the rise in violence against Asian Americans, re-examination of key historical events and policies is critical to understanding their consequences to Asian Americans and American society of today, and hopefully to avoiding a repeat of past mistakes." --Gary Locke, 21st Governor of Washington State and former U.S. ambassador to China

"Part essay, part memoir, War Race & Culture is packed with hidden histories and the provocative insights of an activist historian who has lived and studied the zig zags of contemporary US-China relations--and disrupts the harmful, false narrative of us vs. them." --Helen Zia, author of Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese who Fled Mao's Revolution

"Gordon Chang has given us a profound gift with this collection of essays written across a distinguished career. His major scholarly pursuits in U.S. diplomatic history, Asian American history, and art history may seem unusual in their diversity, but they are tied together by a lifetime of personal and academic interest in China's impact on America and the Chinese in America. The book is a reminder to some, an introduction to others, to the work of an exemplary humanist." --Mae Ngai, author of The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics

"Gordon Chang's distinguished career places him in the first rank of historians in so many areas. His scholarship is provocative within diplomatic, immigration, Asian American, and labor history, and discerning when it turns to the history of art. One virtue of this sparkling collection of essays is that it suggests how these wide-ranging interests intersect and enrich each other." --David Roediger, author of How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to The Eclipse of Post-Racialism

"In this wide-ranging and beautifully-written collection, Gordon H. Chang makes a powerful case for the intersectionality of War, Race, and Culture, particularly as they impact Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). With invigorating curiosity and brilliant analysis, Chang blends autobiography with politics, art, and history into a unified whole which illuminates our place in the world and gives us new ways to think about the future." --David Henry Hwang, playwright, author of Yellow Face and M. Butterfly

"Offering an unconventional memoir from his vast body of previously published works, Gordon H. Chang bridges histories of modern China and Asian America, while drawing a personal arc of an engaged scholar unabashed about pursuing history to expose racism and social inequality at home. War, Race, and Culture critically examines US-China relations guided by a vision of global justice." --Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Brown University

About the Author

Gordon H. Chang is Professor of History and Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (2019) and coeditor of The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (Stanford, 2019), among other books.