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Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America, by Daryl J. Maeda. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 203pp. $20.00 paper. ISBN: 9780816648917.
In Chains of Babylon, Daryl Maeda recovers the political actions and cultural productions of a generation of Asian American activists. While there exists extensive collective behavior and social movements literature on African Americans, and to a lesser extent on Chicano/ Latinos and Native Americans, Asian Americans are often absent from mobilization studies. Although a few notable books provide a glimpse into Asian American activism during the late 1960s and 1970s, Maeda not only fills in the gaps, but also extends our understanding of the complexities of ethnic and race relations, presents a cultural history of Asian American activism, and corrects those who focus on Asian American activism as solely a domestic struggle. He meticulously argues that the Asian American movement was not merely concerned with identity politics or racial uplift, but engaged in struggles against entrenched structural and political forms of racism and imperialism, which he refers to as the "the twin chains of Babylon."
Rather than using a civil rights framework, Maeda employs a liberation or power movement framework to examine resistance to assimilation that simultaneously challenges forms of racial oppression and exploitation. He maintains that Asian American activists linked U.S. imperialism at home and abroad, especially in their opposition to the Vietnam War. They objected to the racist underpinnings of the war, namely U.S. colonialism in Southeast Asia, the massacre of their Asian "brothers and sisters," and the disproportionate number of non-white U.S. soldiers killed...