John Cheng
Binghamton University
Binghamton, New York, United States
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John Cheng is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University and a historian of 19th and 20th-century America with particular interests in racial formation, popular culture, and the history of science and technology. He is the author of Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (and an advisor and contributor to California Newsreel’s documentary series, Race: The Power of an Illusion. His current book project, Precarity and Persistence: Asian American Racial Citizenship in the 20th-Century United States, is a social history of Asian Americans and their families who lived within and resisted legal restrictions denying their full citizenship. For many years, he was a volunteer and board member for the Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project (DVRP) in Washington, DC and currently works with local community organizations to assist victims of anti-Asian racism in upstate New York.
Area of Expertise
Asian American Studies & Blackness: The Case of Indo-Caribbeans
Although little studied, Indo-Caribbeans are a major part of the story of Asians in the Americas, and of Asian negotiations with both “Black” communities and hegemonic anti-Black social hierarchies. Indo-Caribbeans are West Indians of South Asian descent. They were the first and largest Asian indentured labor diaspora in the Americas. Until 1965, Indo-Caribbeans were also the largest South Asian population in the New World. Indo-Caribbeans’ ancestors were brought to the Caribbean by Britain’s “East Indian Indentured Labor Scheme” starting in 1838 after the abolition of chattel slavery in the British Empire. Their arrival in the Caribbean marked the first, and arguably most demographically significant, temporally continuous, and culturally significant encounter between “Africans” and “Asians” in the Americas. In this panel, we explore how Indo-Caribbeans in the West Indies and its diasporas have historically negotiated their status and identities in relation to Afro-West Indians, against a global context of anti-Blackness.
John Cheng
Binghamton University
Binghamton, New York, United States
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