Genealogy

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Philip Q. Yang

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Guest Editor

Department of Sociology and Social Work, Texas Woman's University, Denton, TX 76204, USA
Interests: international migration/immigration; race and ethnicity; Asian Americans; transnationalism; citizenship; population studies; quantitative methodology
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Genealogy entitled “Tracking Asian Diasporic Experiences” calls for essays about historical and contemporary diasporic experiences of Asians around the globe. Since the dawn of human existence on the Asian continent, Asians have left their homelands and migrated to different parts of the world. Much has been written about the diasporic experiences of some Asian ancestry groups (e.g., Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese) in certain destinations such as Southeast Asia, the United States, Canada, and Australia, but much more needs to be researched about Asian diasporic experiences in other destinations (e.g., Africa, Europe, Latin America) and understudied Asian ancestry groups (e.g., Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Thais, Indonesians, Burmese), especially from genealogical and transnationalism perspectives. The goal of this Special Issue is to expand and deepen our understanding of Asian diasporic experiences from genealogical and transnationalism perspectives. The focus of this Special Issue is on the causes and processes of Asian diasporas and their impact on family relations, family history, and family lineage across the globe. The editorial team hopes to attract contributions from any discipline of the social sciences, humanities, and applied sciences (e.g., law, education, business, family studies, health studies) with different theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations that can shed new light on the themes. We welcome all relevant submissions but are particularly interested in articles that address the following issues:

The origins of Asian diasporas;
Experiences of Asian diasporas in Africa;
Experiences of Asian diasporas in Latin America;
Experiences of Asian diasporas in Europe;
New perspectives on Asian diasporas in other Asian countries;
New perspectives on Asian diasporas in the United States;
New perspectives on Asian diasporas in Canada;
New perspectives on Asian diasporas in Oceania;
Global diasporic experiences of understudied Asian groups including, but not limited to, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Thais, Indonesians, Burmese, Laotians, and Cambodians;
The impact of Asian diasporas on the narratives of Asian family histories;
The effect of Asian diasporas on Asian family lineage;
The effect of Asian diasporas on Asian family relations;
Asian diasporas and familial naming practices;
Effects of migration policies on Asian diasporas;
New horizons in Asian diaspora research.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor ([email protected]) or to the Genealogy Editorial Office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

We encourage submissions from established authors and authors in poorer countries. Authors who do not have sufficient funds may request a waiver or discount for the Article Processing Charge (APC) in the cover letter for an approval by the Genealogy Editorial Office.

Prof. Dr. Philip Q. Yang
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Asians
diaspora
diasporic experience
historical
contemporary
understudied Asian diasporas
genealogy
family lineage
family histories
family relations

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 282 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Immigrant Exclusion Acts: On Early Chinese Labor and Domestic Matriarchal Agency in Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family

by Xiao Di Tong

Genealogy 2024, 8(1), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8010021 - 21 Feb 2024

Viewed by 1100

Abstract

In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Tracking Asian Diasporic Experiences)

13 pages, 284 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Bangladeshi Diaspora in the United States: History and Portrait

by Morsheda Akhter and Philip Q. Yang

Genealogy 2023, 7(4), 81; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7040081 - 24 Oct 2023

Viewed by 5368

Abstract

Despite the rapid growth of the Bangladeshi diaspora in the USA, knowledge about this new diasporic community remains very limited. This study argues and demonstrates that the Bangladeshi diaspora in the USA is a fast-growing and sizable diasporic community that requires systematic research and better understanding. It delineates the history of the Bangladeshi diaspora to the USA in four periods and documents the phenomenal growth of the Bangladeshi diasporic community in the USA since 1981, using data from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). By taking into account the legal Bangladeshi immigration as well as the emigration and mortality rates of immigrants and undocumented Bangladeshi immigration, it estimates the current size of the Bangladeshi diasporic community in the USA at about 500,000 instead of a range of low-to-mid 200,000s normally cited. Additionally, using the pooled samples of the 2001–2019 American Community Surveys (ACS) and other ACS data, as well as the DHS data, this paper provides a demographic and socioeconomic portrait of the Bangladeshi diasporic community in the USA. The findings are generalizable to the population and fill some important gaps in the literature. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Tracking Asian Diasporic Experiences)

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