‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant Chinese district, an alien enclave of ‘the East’ in ‘the West’. By the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference. By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a place in Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an interconnected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.

An evocative collection of vintage photographs traces the history of San Francisco's Chinatown, the largest and oldest Chinese enclave outside of Asia, from the Gold Rush era to the present day, capturing the realities of everyday life, as well as the changes in the community, the challenges confronting the Chinese immigrants, and its rich cultural heritage. Original.

"A landmark contribution. . . . These rich materials—including proverbs, immigration interrogations, poems, articles, photographs, social workers' reports, recipes, and oral histories—add a new dimension to Asian American studies, U.S. women's history, Chinese American history, and immigration studies."—Valerie Matsumoto, University of California, Los Angeles

The Chinese experience in Hawai‘i has long been told as a story of inclusion and success. During the Cold War, the United States touted the Chinese community in Hawai‘i as an example of racial harmony and American opportunity, claiming that all ethnic groups had the possibility to attain middle-class lives. Today, Honolulu’s Chinatown is not only a destination for tourism and consumption but also a celebration of Chinese accomplishments, memorializing past discrimination and present prominence within a framework of multiculturalism. This narrative, however, conceals many other histories and processes that played crucial roles in shaping Chinatown. This book offers a critical account of the history of Chinese in Hawai‘i from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in this context of U.S. empire, settler colonialism, and racialization. Nancy E. Riley foregrounds elements that are often left out of narratives of Chinese history in Hawai‘i, particularly the place of Native Hawaiians, geopolitics and U.S. empire building, and the ongoing construction of race and whiteness. Tracing how Chinatown became a site of historical remembrance, she argues that it is also used to reinforce the ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism, which upholds racial hierarchy by lauding certain ethnic groups while excluding others. An insightful and in-depth analysis of the story of Honolulu’s Chinatown, this book offers new perspectives on the making of the racial landscape of Hawai‘i and the United States more broadly.

The crippling custom of footbinding is the thematic touchstone for this engrossing study of Chinese women in San Francisco. Judy Yung, a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco, shows the stages of "unbinding" that occurred in the decades between the turn of the century and the end of the World War II, revealing that these women - rather than being passive victims of oppression - were active agents in the making of their own history.

A New History of Asian America is a fresh and up-to-date history of Asians in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on current scholarship, Shelley Lee brings forward the many strands of Asian American history, highlighting the distinctive nature of the Asian American experience while placing the narrative in the context of the major trajectories and turning points of U.S. history. Covering the history of Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Southeast Indians as well as Chinese and Japanese, the book gives full attention to the diversity within Asian America. A robust companion website features additional resources for students, including primary documents, a timeline, links, videos, and an image gallery. From the building of the transcontinental railroad to the celebrity of Jeremy Lin, people of Asian descent have been involved in and affected by the history of America. A New History of Asian America gives twenty-first-century students a clear, comprehensive, and contemporary introduction to this vital history.

The Heritage Corridor argues for a transnational approach to investigating and recording heritage places that emerge from histories of migration. Addressing the material legacy of migration, this book also relates it to issues of contemporary importance. Presenting an image of the built environment of migration as one shaped by the ongoing flows of people, ideas, objects and money that circulate through migration corridors, Byrne proposes that houses and other structures built by migrants in their home villages in China over the period 1840–1940 should be seen as crystallisations of the labour, aspirations and longings enacted and experienced by their builders while overseas. Demonstrating that the material world of the migrant is distributed across transnational space, the book calls for an approach to the heritage of migration that is similarly expansive. It proposes and illustrates new methods and strategies for heritage practice. The Heritage Corridor is a book for scholars and students in the fields of critical heritage studies, migration studies and Chinese diasporic mobilities. It is designed to be accessible to heritage practitioners, readers with an interest in the material worlds of migration, past and present, and to all those with an interest in the ‘archaeology’ of transnational migration.