Black and Yellow Encounters: Race, Labor, Immigration and the Emergence of the Third World Left

Black and Yellow Encounters: Race, Labor, Immigration and the Emergence of the Third World Left is a Social Science class taught by Lili Kim and Amy Jordan.

Course Description
Recent scholarship has pushed scholars to rethink the intersections between race, labor and immigration history. How have the struggles of African American laborers and Asian immigrant labor been critical to the defining of work, nation and the shifting boundaries of U.S. citizenship? These two communities of laborers, while often despised, have often been at the core of debates over what constitutes a modern labor force in the U.S. In the late Nineteenth century, these debates were frequently couched in terms of the movement of workers of color both at home and in the Circum-Caribbean. This course will explore the struggles of Asian immigrant laborers and African American workers as they fight to expand their economic and political rights throughout the late Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. We will pay particular attention to the growing body of literature that documents instances of Black and Asian solidarity, the emergence of third world left, radical Orientalism, both in local communities like Los Angeles as well as in international contexts such as the Bandung Conference.