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Traces how Chinese migrants challenged racialization and disenfranchisement by establishing Chinese restaurants during the Gilded Age. 

In Gastrodiplomacy, Heather Ruth Lee dives deep into not just the history of Chinese restaurants in early twentieth-century New York City but the delicate, inchoate, and constantly evolving dynamics among their owners, workers, and their predominantly white clientele. Lee argues that the stylistic and capitalist choices made by restaurateurs (“gastrodiplomats”) had outsized political effects on paternalistic white diners (“gastroliberals”) who patronized their establishments, particularly when it came to racial relations in cities that were growing and diversifying. Lee is not starry-eyed—satisfying white tongues and stomachs didn’t lead to an urban utopia of peace, harmony, and brotherhood—but she shows the great and subtle influences of Chinese migrants on American urban space, culture, and metropolitan identity in a defining time.

In Lee’s capable and compelling telling, the Chinese restaurant becomes a distinctive locus for the negotiation of political power, cultural influence, urban identity, and more. Gastrodiplomacy reveals much about burgeoning and increasingly cosmopolitan American cities, as well as about their dynamic relationships with the fluidities of the American character.

In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body.

Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."

Sara L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to American national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality.

Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.

The place occupied by Japanese Americans within the annals of United States history often begins and ends with their cameo appearance as victims of incarceration after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In this provocative work, David K. Yoo broadens the scope of Japanese American history to examine how the second generation—the Nisei—shaped its identity and negotiated its place within American society. 

Tracing the emergence of a dynamic Nisei subculture, Yoo shows how the foundations laid during the 1920s and 1930s helped many Nisei adjust to the upheaval of the concentration camps. Schools, racial-ethnic churches, and the immigrant press served not merely as waystations to assimilation but as tools by which Nisei affirmed their identity in connection with both Japanese and American culture. The Nisei who came of age during World War II formed identities while negotiating complexities of race, gender, class, generation, economics, politics, and international relations. 

A thoughtful consideration of the gray area between accommodation and resistance, Growing Up Nisei reveals the struggles and humanity of a forgotten generation of Japanese Americans.