TIHS with Calvin Cheung-Miaw: "From Class Formation to Racial Formation: Marxism and Asian American Studies in the 1980s"

The idea that Asian Americans are treated as inassimilable aliens is at the core of Asian American Studies today. But it wasn't always so. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, Asian Americanists such as Lucie Cheng, Edna Bonacich, Peter Kwong, Dana Takagi, and others pursued research agendas shaped by Marxist thought and politics, examining how class relations among Asian Americans shaped ethnic politics. This paper explores how class politics in Asian American Studies came to be replaced by racial identity politics, undergirded by racial formation theory. Against accounts that emphasize the complicity of identity politics and neoliberalism, I place this shift within the context of larger radical efforts to locate a social base that could anchor a progressive fightback against Reaganism.

Bio:

Calvin Cheung-Miaw is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. An historian of race, he works at the intersection of U.S. intellectual and social movement history. His book project, Asian Americans and the Color-Lines, uses the intellectual history of Asian American Studies to explore the rise and fall of Third Worldism in the United States.