Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation

How did thousands of Chinese migrants end up working alongsideAfrican Americans in Louisiana after the Civil War? With the stories ofthese workers, Coolies and Cane advances an interpretation ofemancipation that moves beyond U.S. borders and the black-whiteracial dynamic. Tracing American ideas of Asian labor to the sugarplantations of the Caribbean, Moon-Ho Jung argues that the racialformation of coolies in American culture and law played a pivotal rolein reconstructing concepts of race, nation, and citizenship in the UnitedStates. Jung examines how coolies appeared in major U.S. politicaldebates on race, labor, and immigration between the 1830s and 1880s.He finds that racial notions of coolies were articulated in many, oftencontradictory, ways.