Mae Ngai: Chinese Miners, the “Coolie” Question, and the Propaganda of History

Center for Race Gender Distinguished Guest Lecture

Chinese Miners,
the “Coolie” Question,
and the Propaganda of History

Prof. Mae Ngai, Columbia University
author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Monday, April 9, 2012
370 Dwinelle Hall
UC Berkeley

5:30 pm: Reception
6:00 pm: Lecture Discussion

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/178852985562320/

Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1998 and taught at the University ofChicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. Ngai is author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and theMaking of Modern America (Princeton 2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of ChineseAmerica (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010). Professor Ngai has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, NYU Law School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation andInstitute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times,the Nation, and the Boston Review. Before becoming a historian Ngai was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now working on Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908, a study of Chinese goldminers in the nineteenth-century North American West, Australia, and South Africa.