By being rendered unable to speak for themselves within the civic realm, Asian Americans could be racialized and constructed into what Rey Chow describes as an “ethnic specimen,” a monolithic representative of a static foreign culture to be observed, scrutinized, and ultimately regulated. Hall rendered the Asian community voiceless in the legal arena, the Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited the right of naturalized citizenship to free white persons, also ensured that Asian Americans would remain politically voiceless. Hall employed the same rhetoric of racial inferiority to reason that Asian Americans should not be given the “right to swear away the life of a citizen” in court or any rights to civic participation. Sandford ( 1857) attached inferiority to race to divest African Americans of the right to citizenship and the right to sue in court, People v. 4 George Hall had been found guilty for the murder of Chinese miner Ling Sing based on testimony of Chinese witnesses the Court overturned his conviction by reasoning that California laws prohibiting African Americans and Native Americans from testifying against whites also extended to Asian foreigners. Hall ( 1854), where the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese witnesses were barred from offering testimony against white citizens in court. 3 Perhaps the earliest example of such divestment occurred with the literal silencing of Asian American witnesses as a matter of law in People v. The silencing of Asian American subjects has been accomplished primarily through laws that sought to exclude them from rights of American civic membership, including immigration, naturalization, marriage, and property ownership. This article identifies works of Asian American writers that provide counternarratives and counter-histories that respond to, assess, and critique the narratives that law produces, and considers how their writings seek to reclaim and re-imagine the place of Asian Americans in the American political and cultural landscape. In the 20th century, Asians were reconfigured as a model minority emblematic of the American dream to justify continued racial hierarchies elsewhere. In the 19th century, Asians were ostracized as a threatening foreign element requiring regulation and exclusion. This article considers how Asian Americans have been ascriptively constructed in American law to serve as cultural foils to American citizenship and silenced in the process. These definitions have cast Asian immigrants both as persons and populations to be integrated into the national political sphere and as the contradictory, confusing, unintelligible elements to be marginalized and returned to their alien origins. In the last century and a half, the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally. Asian American authors in this era resisted such co-opting of Asian American experiences by writing counter-histories that challenge the grand narrative of American exceptionalism produced by seemingly progressive laws that these authors critique as reifying and perpetuating racist and xenophobic biases that continue to be applied to not only Asian Americans but also other minority groups. Following World War II, as the United States redefined itself as the leader of the free world during the Cold War, the discriminatory laws were reformed, and Asian Americans were reconstructed into a model minority that now served the dominant narrative of America as a nation of equality and opportunity. Asian American writers during this era sought to challenge the stereotypical representations of Asians and provided voice to the silences produced by the discriminatory laws. During this era, Asians were stereotyped in literature and popular culture as threatening menaces that required restriction and surveillance, which was later exacerbated by the hostilities between the United States and Japan during World War II. In the 19th century, Asian Americans were marginalized and omitted from the national narrative through discriminatory laws that excluded them from naturalized citizenship, civic participation, and eventually immigration. The place of Asian Americans in the American national narrative has always been mediated through the laws, particularly relating to citizenship and immigration.
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