In "Common Ground," Gary Okihiro uses the experiences of Asian
Americans to reconfigure the ways in which American history can be
understood. He examines a set of binaries--East and West, black and
white, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual--that have
structured the telling of our nation's history and shaped our ideas
of citizenship since the late nineteenth century. Okihiro not only
exposes the artifice of these binaries but also offers a less rigid
and more embracing set of stories on which to ground a national
history. Influenced by European hierarchical thinking in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo Americans
increasingly categorized other newcomers to the United States.
Binaries formed in the American imagination, creating a sense of
coherence among white citizens during times of rapid and
far-reaching social change. Within each binary, however, Asian
Americans have proven disruptive: they cannot be fully described as
either Eastern or Western; they challenge the racial categories of
black and white; and within the gender and sexual binaries of man
and woman, straight and gay, they have been repeatedly positioned
as neither nor.
Okihiro analyzes how groups of people and numerous major events
in American history have generally been depicted, and then offers
alternative representations from an Asian-American viewpoint--one
that reveals the ways in which binaries have contributed toward
simplifying, excluding, and denying differences and convergences.
Drawing on a rich variety of sources, from the Chicago Exposition
of 1898 to "The Wizard of Oz," this book is a provocative response
to current debates over immigration and race, multiculturalism and
globalization, and questions concerning the nature of America and
its peoples. The ideal foil to conventional surveys of American
history, "Common Ground" asks its readers to reimagine our past
free of binaries and open to diversity and social justice.
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