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Dr. Lisa Mar: Difference between revisions
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Dr. Lisa Rose Mar teaches about immigrants and Asian Americans, in the past and present. Her research interests are in immigration, politics, and culture. She often employs transpacific and transnational perspectives that bring together the United States, China, and Canada. | Dr. Lisa Rose Mar teaches about immigrants and Asian Americans, in the past and present. Her research interests are in immigration, politics, and culture. She often employs transpacific and transnational perspectives that bring together the United States, China, and Canada. | ||
'' | ''Publications'' | ||
Dr. Mar is the author of the book, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2010). Brokering Belonging traces several generations of Chinese "brokers," ethnic leaders who acted as intermediaries between the Chinese and Anglo worlds of Canada. Before World War II, most Chinese could not vote and many were illegal immigrants, so brokers played informal but necessary roles as representatives to the larger society. Dr. Mar's study of Chinatown leaders shows how politics helped establish North America's first major group of illegal immigrants. Drawing on new Chinese language evidence, her dramatic account of political power struggles over representing Chinese Canadians offers a transnational immigrant view of history, centered in a Pacific World that joins Canada, the United States, China, and the British Empire. | Dr. Mar is the author of the book, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2010). Brokering Belonging traces several generations of Chinese "brokers," ethnic leaders who acted as intermediaries between the Chinese and Anglo worlds of Canada. Before World War II, most Chinese could not vote and many were illegal immigrants, so brokers played informal but necessary roles as representatives to the larger society. Dr. Mar's study of Chinatown leaders shows how politics helped establish North America's first major group of illegal immigrants. Drawing on new Chinese language evidence, her dramatic account of political power struggles over representing Chinese Canadians offers a transnational immigrant view of history, centered in a Pacific World that joins Canada, the United States, China, and the British Empire. | ||
Review of | Review of ''Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945'' by Lisa Rose Mar (review) | ||
Lawrence Lam | Lawrence Lam | ||
From: | From: ''Canadian Ethnic Studies'' | ||
Volume 44, Number 2, 2012 | Volume 44, Number 2, 2012 | ||
pp. 162-164 | 10.1353/ces.2012.0004 | pp. 162-164 | 10.1353/ces.2012.0004 | ||
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The author has provided an engaging and insightful analysis of the pivotal roles of the Chinese brokers and how the process of brokerage has mitigated the adverse impact of Canada’s racial policies on this disenfranchised group during the exclusion era, 1885–1945. Drawing upon various sources of documents, especially the underutilized Chinese language historical documents such as the Chinese language newspapers, the author shows how these Chinese brokers with their acquired Chinese and English capability, acting as leaders and intermediaries, operated, navigated, and negotiated with the Anglo constituencies. These interactions and transactions revealed that the politics of the Anglo and Chinese worlds were inextricably linked. The Chinese did not merely and passively react to the discriminatory policies and practices. Instead, in their responses to the largely anti-Chinese era, they took action to shape and re-shape their own immediate living milieu and the surrounding society. The examination of these brokers’ work shows that in spite of being defined and redefined by the Anglo hegemony as a uniquely Chinese race, marginalized and stigmatized inferior stock living in an ethnic ghetto, these brokers displayed ingenuity in responding actively to the “politically complex Anglo of prejudice” and reinserting “Chinese Canadians as part of a more integrated political history” (6). The author’s analysis has also raised questions about the depiction of the Chinese as sojourners which should have been indelibly linked to European hegemony in an Anglo settler society. | The author has provided an engaging and insightful analysis of the pivotal roles of the Chinese brokers and how the process of brokerage has mitigated the adverse impact of Canada’s racial policies on this disenfranchised group during the exclusion era, 1885–1945. Drawing upon various sources of documents, especially the underutilized Chinese language historical documents such as the Chinese language newspapers, the author shows how these Chinese brokers with their acquired Chinese and English capability, acting as leaders and intermediaries, operated, navigated, and negotiated with the Anglo constituencies. These interactions and transactions revealed that the politics of the Anglo and Chinese worlds were inextricably linked. The Chinese did not merely and passively react to the discriminatory policies and practices. Instead, in their responses to the largely anti-Chinese era, they took action to shape and re-shape their own immediate living milieu and the surrounding society. The examination of these brokers’ work shows that in spite of being defined and redefined by the Anglo hegemony as a uniquely Chinese race, marginalized and stigmatized inferior stock living in an ethnic ghetto, these brokers displayed ingenuity in responding actively to the “politically complex Anglo of prejudice” and reinserting “Chinese Canadians as part of a more integrated political history” (6). The author’s analysis has also raised questions about the depiction of the Chinese as sojourners which should have been indelibly linked to European hegemony in an Anglo settler society. | ||
''Brokering Belonging'' is composed of five chapters. Chapter 1—Negotiating Protections—documents the rivalry of two influential Chinese brokers and how they help the Chinese immigrants to evade the head tax by forming alliances with Canada’s ruling political party. Chapter 2—Arguing Cases—demonstrates these brokers, while being barred from practicing law, acted as “Chinese legal interpreters” in cases contending the discriminatory laws and justice system and appealing to the Canadian and British Empire courts for reification. Chapter 3—Popularizing Politics—examines the emerging new generation of Chinese brokers (charismatic brokers who’re intellectuals, labor leaders and civil rights activists) and how they, in addition to challenging the power of the traditional merchant brokers and legal interpreters, organized a year-long protest against the public school segregation and joined forces with other anti-colonial protests against the British colonialism in China and India. While the activities and organized and co-coordinated protests of these new Chinese had provoked backlashes from some Chinese and Anglo business leaders and elites, they had, nonetheless, effectively brought ordinary people into brokerage politics. Chapter 4—Fixing Knowledge—provides a fascinating analysis of how these brokers managed to portray the Chinese as committed and dedicated to become settled and assimilated into the wider society. It reveals vividly how these new intellectual brokers attempted to reshape and reconstruct the discourse about the Chinese in Canada and the United States by taking an active role in the very first major academic survey of East Asian Immigrants’ opinion in 1924 conducted by Robert Park, Chicago School of Sociology, University of Chicago. These brokers organized in a community campaign to strategically place themselves as interviewees for the study, and successfully convinced the researchers to see the Chinese, not as sojourners per se, but as “a patient and diligent model minority” (8) and as “tragic marginal men” (8). Chapter 5—Transforming Democracy—examines the brokers’ continuing negotiations and interactions with Anglos during the Second World War. With the unpopular war policies, contested issue of conscriptions, the brokers lobbied and mobilized Chinese Canadians to take part in the Canadian labor unions. By joining forces with other labor unions to protest tax regulations and to demand equal pay, and to boycott military services, the combined efforts have resulted in persuading the Canadian labor unions to combat racial discrimination, and with the political changes in China (the rise of political power of the Communist Party), a new era of Chinese Canadians—aliens to citizens—was on the horizon. | |||
For those academic researchers interested race relations, ethnic studies, ethnic communities, and those interested in taking a critical look at the history of Chinese settlement in Canada in which different classes and sectors interact, interpret and manage their identity and the social construction of the vision and... | For those academic researchers interested race relations, ethnic studies, ethnic communities, and those interested in taking a critical look at the history of Chinese settlement in Canada in which different classes and sectors interact, interpret and manage their identity and the social construction of the vision and... | ||