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gefördert durch:

Förderung / funding: Max Weber Stiftung

Laufzeit / duration: 3/2022 bis 2/2023

Projektleitung / project leader: Dr. Albert Manke

Chinese and other Asian migrants to the Americas have been confronting discriminatory practices and exclusion since the beginning of European expansion to the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia. Nevertheless, many Chinese migrants were able to build successful communities and ultimately even become what is today labeled as the “model minority” in the U.S., or as an intrinsic part of the “national ethnos” in Cuba. Consequently, the aim of this project is to identify the multiple strategies that Chinese developed to cope with racism, xenophobia, and exclusion by creating protected spaces that could eventually turn into spheres of acceptance, inclusion, and power. At the center of these strategies were diasporic networks and associations (native-place societies, secret societies, and others) that often served the purpose of mutual aid and protection and ultimately shaped the Americas and transpacific as well as inter-American relations in significantly entangled ways. Sources for this project that follows a transdisciplinary approach include cultural artifacts and recently declassified archival documents at the University of California, Berkeley, where Albert Manke was based for the last few years.