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This work-in-progress considers the experience of female Chinese runaways in the 19th-century U.S. West. By focusing on their fugitive movements—what they wished to escape, how they fled, and where they sought refuge—the chapter examines the multiple and intertwining forces that conditioned Chinese women's lives. This is part of a larger book project on the legal regulation of race and alienage in the American West. While previous scholarship has focused on how federal law “excluded” the Chinese from the nation and erected immigration controls at its borders, this book will ask how local and state law “included” the Chinese within the political economy and forged a racial regime in the interior.
Beth Lew-Williams is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), maps the tangled relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia. During a period better known for the invention of the modern citizenship, the book reveals how violence, exclusion, and imperialism produced a modern concept of alienage in U.S. law and society.
Her next book project, tentatively titled John Doe Chinaman: Race and Law in the American West, considers the regulation of Chinese migrants within the United States during the nineteenth century.
At Princeton, Lew-Williams is affiliated faculty in the Program in American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Asian American/Diaspora Studies. She is also a core member of the Princeton Migration Lab. Her teaching interests include Asian American studies, ethnic studies, migration & borders, gender & sexuality, violence, and the history of the U.S. West.
Part of the Aoki Center and UC Davis History Department colloquium on Free People of Color: Race, Law and Freedom in the 19th and 20th Century U.S.
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