Review: The color of success: Asian Americans and the origins of the model minority myth by Ellen Wu

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Asian Studies; Human Geography
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3141; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4398/viewcontent/Review_Color_of_success_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Weaving rich institutional histories of groups that have purported to speak for all Asian Americans, like the Japanese American Citizens League and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success meticulously describes how their claims to represent their ethnic communities were vigorously contested by Japanese and Chinese Americans themselves from the 1930s to the 1960s. Wu sets these representational challenges against the larger backdrop of the rise of an American liberal political framework and its assimilationist agenda for racial minorities in the United States in the 1930s, which was produced by the geopolitical challenges of totalitarian fascism and communism. Always careful to position Asian Americans themselves as the agents of community formation, Wu describes how the “success story” of the so-called model minority could only have been produced by Asian American acceptance of such liberal racial ideologies. In so doing, Wu demonstrates with sophistication that intra-community contestations among Asian Americans over the making of American liberal racial formations have produced the ambivalent present of an ideologically fraught Asian American community landscape.