CVK
(Thanks to our Canadian correspondent Phil C. for this one! ) Indolink.com profiles Indian-American academic Susan Koshy and focuses on her new book Sexual Naturalization - Asian Americans and Miscegenation This book sounds absolutely fascinating. There’s been a lot written about interracial sex and antimiscegenation laws in terms of black-white relations, but this is probably the first I’ve heard of a book that focuses exclusively on Asian-white miscegenation:

…the law claimed that interrracial sex was deviant and dangerous and viewed the sexuality of non-whites in opposition to white middle class sexual practices and family values. Koshy goes on to reveal how, for Asian Americans, including South Asian Americans, the antimiscegnation laws reaffirmed their status as perpetual foreigners, as racial and sexual aliens. Not only were sexual relationships between the predominantly male Asian immigrants and white women outlawed, but American women who married noncitizen Asian men were denaturalized. What’s even worse, popular discourse identified Asian women as prostitutes and “bachelor ” communities of Asian migrants as aberrant and pathological sexual formations.

Essentially, Koshy’s book provides an intellectual interrogation of America’s efforts to preserve white superiority. Stanford University Press claims that this is the first major study of Asian-white miscegenation which traces the shifting gender and racial hierarchies produced by antimiscegenation laws and their role in shaping cultural norms. Koshy shows how the laws helped the reproduction of the United States as a white nation, which were also paralleled by extraterritorial privileges that facilitated the sexual access of white American men to Asian women overseas. “Miscegenation laws thus turned sex acts into race acts and engendered new meanings for both” observes Koshy.