Nadia Y. Kim's Imperial Citizens joins the growing ranks of scholarship on race, diaspora, and citizenship emerging from the productive intersection of Asian studies and Asian American studies. Following the “transnational turn” in fields and disciplines that previously tended to be nation bound and U.S.-centric, Kim sets out in this book to bring historical depth and theoretical breadth by examining how pre-migration attitudes toward race and racial hierarchy shape and determine immigrants' experience of racial triangulation and racial ideologies long before their arrival in the United States. The transnational approach does more than avoid potential pitfalls of “methodological nationalism”—it also sheds light on the inseparability of (im)migrant subject formation and transnational racial subjection. Kim reveals how global racial ideologies are structured by interwoven dynamics of geopolitics and socioeconomic mobility, missionary encounters and military deployments, as well as the global circulation and consumption of mass media.
Particularly compelling are chapters 4...
