Review: The color of success: Asian Americans and the origins of the model minority myth by Ellen Wu
Publication Type
Book Review
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
3-2014
Abstract
Weaving rich institutional histories of groups that have purported to speak for all Asian Americans, like the Japanese American Citizens League and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success meticulously describes how their claims to represent their ethnic communities were vigorously contested by Japanese and Chinese Americans themselves from the 1930s to the 1960s. Wu sets these representational challenges against the larger backdrop of the rise of an American liberal political framework and its assimilationist agenda for racial minorities in the United States in the 1930s, which was produced by the geopolitical challenges of totalitarian fascism and communism. Always careful to position Asian Americans themselves as the agents of community formation, Wu describes how the “success story” of the so-called model minority could only have been produced by Asian American acceptance of such liberal racial ideologies. In so doing, Wu demonstrates with sophistication that intra-community contestations among Asian Americans over the making of American liberal racial formations have produced the ambivalent present of an ideologically fraught Asian American community landscape.
Discipline
Asian Studies | Human Geography
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Amerasia Journal
Volume
40
Issue
1
First Page
118
Last Page
121
ISSN
0044-7471
ISBN
9780691168029
Identifier
10.17953/amer.40.1.85jpv59pu7x170n1
Publisher
University of California
Citation
TSE, Justin Kh.(2014). Review: The color of success: Asian Americans and the origins of the model minority myth by Ellen Wu. Amerasia Journal, 40(1), 118-121.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3141
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.40.1.85jpv59pu7x170n1