The Chinese Question and Global Politics in the 19th Century

INALCO, Grands Moulins, salle 510

Mae Ngai, historienne à l’université de Columbia (New York) et auteure de Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) parlera de : « The Chinese Question and Global Politics in the 19th Century ».

Résumé de l’intervention :

The rise of exclusionary laws against Chinese immigration in the late 19th century; the local iterations of anti Chinese politics in different white settler societies especially comparing differences in American and Australian gold rushes, the rise of a global Chinese « question » — the construction of Chinese as a « coolie race » — as a constitutive element of white settler nationalism and the rise of Anglo American global hegemony. I try to disaggregate the local and the global to think about how some ideas acquire the force of global politics.