Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America

Thinking Orientals is a groundbreaking study of Asian Americans and the racial formation of twentieth-century American society. The book reveals the unusually influential role Asian Americans played in constructing the understandings of their own ethnic identity and also examines the impact of sociologists, particularly sociologists at the University of Chicago, in the study of the "Oriental Problem" before World War II. The book includes a new analysis of the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and of the subsequent "model minority" profile.