Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 177

February 15-16, 2020: Fantasy Stories I Love: African Fantasy

[Since I’m teaching the Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class this semester, for my annual Valentine’s series I wanted to focus on fantasy authors & stories I’ve loved. Leading up to this weekend post on an emerging community who deserve more love!]On my first experience with a genre community, and my need to read a lot more.As I mentioned in my Spring semester preview post for my Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class, for this iteration of that course and syllabus I decided to include a new contemporary fantasy novel, Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (2015). I won’t restate everything that’s in that post, particularly about my shameful lack of prior experience (either as a reader or a teacher) with African and African American fantasy. Suffice it to say that this small first step was long overdue, and I’ve greatly enjoyed the chance to read Wilson’s book (which is awesome and I can’t wait to teach toward the end of the semester) and begin to correct these gaps in my genre knowledge.In truth, though, one book is a painfully small start—while I’d have to start somewhere and can only read one book at a time, I’m well aware of the breadth and depth of work beyond this one (even just other works by Wilson himself, much less the vast swath of other writers), of just how much I have to read if I’m to truly begin correcting a sizeable blind spot in my love of fantasy fiction. I see lists like this one, or this one, or this one, and the size of that blind spot, and of the task ahead of me if I’m to truly correct it, becomes particularly clear. So as I do often in this space, I’m asking for the input and collective wisdom of my community of fellow readers. What African and African American fantasy and sci fi authors, books, and series would you especially recommend I start with? Beyond Wilson’s book and this first pedagogical experience, where should I go next?Of the many things I love in 2020, this blog—and more exactly the communities to which it has connected me—is very high on the list. So let’s put that love to work!Annual non-favorites series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite fantasy authors or stories you’d share?

February 14, 2020: Fantasy Stories I Love: George R.R. Martin

[Since I’m teaching the Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class this semester, for my annual Valentine’s series I wanted to focus on fantasy authors & stories I’ve loved. Leading up to a weekend post on an emerging community who deserve more love!]On why the book that took Martin’s blockbuster series off the rails also exemplifies his ground-breaking achievements.I know it’s very difficult to write about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series in 2020 without discussing HBO’s Game of Thrones, the adaptation Martin’s books that became one of the biggest TV shows of all time. But as someone who read the first Martin book, A Game of Thrones (1996), shortly after its initial release—and someone who gave the TV show the old college try when it came along 15 years later, getting a season and a half in before realizing that it was so fully not my beloved Martin books that there was no way I would ever be able to enjoy it—the books are what I love, and so they’re what I’ll write about in this Valentine’s Day post. Perhaps my favorite thing about Martin’s books, the way that each chapter is written in the third-person limited omniscient perspective of one character (with at least a dozen distinct such perspective characters per book, and more added with each volume), opening up countless layers of characterization, backstory, and world-building as a result, was simply impossible to replicate in the show; that’s a difference in medium, plain and simple, but it wasn’t one that I was going to be able to get past as a viewer.No post about Martin’s books can avoid the elephant in the room: the entirely uncertain status of the series, and more exactly of whether Martin will ever finish it (the most recent, fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons [2011], came out 6 years after the prior, fourth book, A Feast for Crows [2005]; and it has now been nearly 9 years since Dance with no sixth book in sight). There are of course all sorts of theories and arguments about why the series has slowed down so markedly, but many of them focus precisely on those fourth and fifth books, and in particular on a hugely controversial choice that Martin made with Feast: his work on the book in progress was getting so voluminous that it looked unlikely to be published as one volume; and rather than divide it up at the halfway point as you might expect, Martin decided to publish one book featuring half of his central characters (Feast) and then a second featuring the other half (Dance). At the time a concluding note in Feastsuggested that the follow-up book would be published in the following year; but of course it ended up taking six years for Danceto be completed, and it’s difficult to separate that fraught period from this controversial decision and thus from Feastas the embodiment of all those issues.I get all that, and as a reader desperately waiting for book six I share these frustrations (while recognizing that no, Martin does not owe us anything). But I’m also frustrated by the frustrations, because to my mind A Feast for Crowsis a towering achievement and one that exemplifies much of what makes Martin’s series so unique and successful. To put it simply, Martin’s series is the most realistic epic fantasy I’ve ever read, combining plenty of fantastic elements (dragons, magic, chosen ones and quests, etc.) with profoundly realistic depictions of historical and social themes like class, gender, sex, love, marriage, family, power, politics, and, most importantly for Feast, war. You see, by the fourth book the multi-part war that began in Game of Thrones has been raging for some time, and in one of Feast’s plot threads a main character finds herself traveling across the countryside with an itinerant priest seeking to tend to the lives, families, homes, and communities that have been affected by that conflict. I know many readers have complained that this thread was a digression, embodied the ways in which the series began to lose steam with Feast. But I think it’s at the heart of Martin’s project, a vision of epic fantasy that does all the things we love in the genre but also seeks to do things we (or least I) had never seen, like portray, with realism and sensitivity and power, the historical and social effects of those genre elements.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite fantasy authors or stories you’d share?

February 13, 2020: Fantasy Stories I Love: Robin Hobb

[Since I’m teaching the Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class this semester, for my annual Valentine’s series I wanted to focus on fantasy authors & stories I’ve loved. Leading up to a weekend post on an emerging community who deserve more love!]On the prolific author who helped change epic fantasy’s trite narratives of gender and sexuality.I’m not sure exactly what percentage of my high school time was spent reading epic fantasy series by David Eddings, Robert Jordan, and Tad Williams, but I know it was a very high percentage indeed. Each of those authors and series offered a distinctive and interesting spin on the epic fantasy genre, and it’s been fun to watch my older son get into Eddings (as of this writing he just finished reading every one of Eddings’ novels) and to imagine him continuing to trace his own journey through these genre titans (while, I’m sure, finding his own that he’ll share with me). But revisiting Eddings through his reading has reminded me of a shared limitation of which I was only dimly aware when I was a teenage reader: in how these authors and series depict female characters, and as a result themes of gender and sexuality. They’re not identical by any means, and each series does include powerful female characters to be sure; but I would nonetheless argue that the ultimate role of even those powerful heroines is as love interests for the male leads, and ones who need rescuing and protection at least as often as they hold their own alongside those heroes. These series might not be sexist, that is, but neither are they particularly nuanced (much less progressive) when it comes to gender and sex.Which is why finding the fantasy fiction of Robin Hobb was such an eye-opening and important moment for me. Beginning with 1995’s Assassin’s Apprentice (which I’ll be teaching in a couple months in my Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class), the first book that novelist Megan Lindholmwrote under the pseudonym Robin Hobb, Hobb has now published 16 novels (along with numerous short stories and a novella) in the Realm of the Elderlings world, a collection of interconnected epic fantasy series set in different corners of the same universe. Those series include a number of different themes and threads—one part of the world, the focus of the Liveship Traders and Rain Wild series, is nautical and features pirate stories; another, the focus of the Farseer, Tawny Man, and Fitz and the Fool series, includes fantastic elements centered around the bonds between humans and animals—but one thing they all share is an interest in pushing far beyond the traditional depictions of gender and sexuality in epic fantasy. Indeed, as the Elderlings books have evolved, Hobb has deepened both those elements and the ways they challenge epic fantasy tropes: the first, Farseer series feels the most traditional (it tells the story of a young boy who turns out to have a vital role to play in a mythic battle); while the most recent, the Fitz and the Fool series, focuses on that same character as a middle-aged man through the lens of his complex relationship to a character whose gender and sexuality are themselves central themes.It's difficult to write too much more about that latter series, and particularly about the character of the Fool (present throughout the Elderlings books but increasingly central in the later series), without spoiling more of Hobb’s plots and world-building than I’m willing to do here. But I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler (since these elements were present in that earliest series) to note that, while the Fool is a deeply mysterious and ambiguous character (especially because these books are narrated in first-person by Fitz, who can thus never truly know any other character in the most internal way), they are also one of the first (and to this day still one of the only) transgender characters I’ve ever encountered in epic fantasy. To be honest, when I read that first series in high school I had very little understanding of that identity, or even of LGBTQ identities overall; my high school, like America in the early 90s overall, did an excellent job pretending such identities simply did not exist. If and when my son gets to Hobb, I’ll be very interested to see how his engagement with this character and these themes is influenced by the far more present conversations about those identities in 2020. But while I didn’t quite have the tools yet to understand what Hobb was doing with characters like the Fool, I knew that it was radically different from any epic fantasy I had read—and very important (while at the same time wonderfully readable and entertaining) as a result.Last loving tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite fantasy authors or stories you’d share?

February 12, 2020: Fantasy Stories I Love: Iron Crown Enterprises

[Since I’m teaching the Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class this semester, for my annual Valentine’s series I wanted to focus on fantasy authors & stories I’ve loved. Leading up to a weekend post on an emerging community who deserve more love!]On the rise, fall, and enduring legacy of an innovative gaming company.I wrote a bit in this post on role-playing games about Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE), the Charlottesville-based gaming company whose Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP) system played a significant and wonderful role in my childhood. First developed as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in the late 1970s by a group of University of Virginia students, MERP (known initially as Rolemaster before the company signed an exclusive worldwide license with Tolkien Enterprises in 1982) became a flagship product for ICE, which the students incorporated in 1980 not long after their graduations. As Stranger Things reflects, the ‘80s were a heyday for roleplaying, and ICE was at the forefront of the trend, developing multiple gaming systems (including two sci fi counterparts to Rolemaster known as Spacemaster and Cyberspace), creating numerous supplements and adventures for those games, and branching out into board games (including a favorite of mine that my sons and I have brought back into the mix, Riddle of the Ring) and solo gaming books as well. ICE was most everywhere in gaming culture in the late 80s and early 90s, making them a standout presence in Charlottesville’s business scene of the era as well.By 1997 the company was experiencing severe financial difficulties, however, and in October 2000 it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which cost them the Tolkien Enterprises license. The Wikipedia pageidentifies a number of factors in that precipitous decline, and I can’t claim any insider knowledge (or really any knowledge at all) beyond what I’ve read in such histories. But I have to admit a strong inclination to agree with this sentiment (also from Wikipedia): “There has been some debate over whether Tolkien Enterprises forced ICE into bankruptcy in order to get the gaming license in anticipation of the upcoming new movie franchise.” Peter Jackson and company had begun planning the Lord of the Rings films in earnest around 1997, and began filming in 1999 ahead of the 2001 release of the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring. If ICE had still possessed the worldwide gaming license as of 2001, it’s fair to say that the company (as long as it could have produced enough product to meet the new demand) would have exploded into international prominence. Perhaps the timing of the difficulties and bankruptcy is just an extremely frustrating coincidence, but perhaps it reflects some of the least attractive sides to the business, gaming, and artistic worlds. At the very least, it’s important to note that ICE did wonderful justice to Tolkien’s legacy during an era when it was far less visible, and deserved the chance to do so once Tolkien became Hollywood royalty.Unfortunately ICE didn’t get that chance, and after 2001 ceased to exist as an independent company; the company has changed hands and names a few times since and is currently part of Guild Companion Publications. But I would nonetheless stress a couple vital and enduring elements to ICE’s legacy, beyond its meaning in my own young life (although that too, and again I have tried to pass that meaning on to my sons in various ways as well). For one thing, ICE’s dozens of supplemental books about Middle-earth are among the most beautifully crafted gaming products I’ve ever encountered, and by themselves more than make the case that games are a form of art and culture just as much as they are play. And for another, I think ICE’s history comprises the ideal small business success story, one that acknowledges prior and necessary influences (without both Dungeons & Dragons and public higher education there’d be no ICE to be sure) but that at the same time reflects the genuine vision and passion of a group of committed individuals who turned their particular talents and collective interests into a viable and highly successful business. I’m glad to have had the chance to connect with it, and I know Charlottesville is much better for having hosted ICE.Next loving tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite fantasy authors or stories you’d share?

February 11, 2020: Fantasy Stories I Love: Tolkien Takeaways

[Since I’m teaching the Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class this semester, for my annual Valentine’s series I wanted to focus on fantasy authors & stories I’ve loved. Leading up to a weekend post on an emerging community who deserve more love!]On three AmericanStudies lessons from the Lord of the Ringstrilogy.1)      Cross-Cultural Transformation: In recent years Tolkien (like his peer and friend C.S. Lewis) has been critiqued for his portrayals of non-European societies and cultures, and rightfully so; Middle-earth’s darker/southern men are frustratingly under-developed and one-dimensional in comparison to his northern societies. But at the same time, the characters and relationship that undergo one of the most significant changes in the course of the story are Gimli and Legolas, a dwarf and elf who begin with the typical antipathy those races feel toward one another and end the best of friends. And characters like Boromir and his father Denethor, who focus solely on their own city/nation (Gondor) and its needs, are proven time and again to be dangerously narrow-minded and myopic. Cross-cultural transformation for the win!2)      Democracy, Ultimately: One of the questions that came up again and again from my sons as we read through the series a few years back was why Sam calls Frodo “Mr. Frodo”; the boys understood that Sam began the series as Frodo’s employee (his gardener, specifically), but still couldn’t get why, once they were on their journey together, he continued to address his friend as his boss or superior. There’s no doubt that Sam begins the series as a simple man who is in social status but also perspective and identity below Frodo, and perhaps he remains there in some ways throughout. Yet at the same time, I would argue that the series’ culmination—both in the final stages of Frodo and Sam’s epic journey and in the multiple aftermaths that follow it—both depends on Sam’s actions and heroism and comes to focus on him as the embodiment of the Shire’s and Middle-earth’s future. Tolkien might have begun his world-building with a sense of English prep school elitism, that is, but he ended it with a genuine and inspiring vision of democracy.3)      Gollum and Empathy: In one of the series’ most famous exchanges (and one of the moments that the film versions got exactly right, even though they shifted its setting entirely), Frodo expresses regret that Bilbo did not kill the creature Gollum when he had the chance, and Gandalf disagrees, noting both that “it was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand” and that this pity might decide the fate of all. Given Gollum’s prominent role in the quest’s denouement, it’s easy to focus on the second point, but I would argue that it is in fact the first which drives Tolkien’s development of his most complex and interesting character. And I would go further, arguing that it is not just pity but also and most importantly empathy that the series shows toward the seemingly monstrous Gollum. Tolkien certainly depicts a world with clear powers of good and evil, but also one in which many characters occupy a grayer area between those two extremes, include layers of identity that defy any one categorization and demand empathy if we are to understand them. That’s a very valuable takeaway indeed.Next loving tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite fantasy authors or stories you’d share?

February 10, 2020: Fantasy Stories I Love: Revisiting Lloyd Alexander

[Since I’m teaching the Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy class this semester, for my annual Valentine’s series I wanted to focus on fantasy authors & stories I’ve loved. Leading up to a weekend post on an emerging community who deserve more love!]On watching my older son read a childhood favorite series of mine.Eight and a half years ago, I wrote a post inspired by my delighted discovery that Lloyd Alexander, author of many of my childhood favorite books including the Chronicles of Prydain series, was born outside of Philadelphia (rather than in Wales as I had always thought, given the Welsh-inspired sideto the Prydain books in particular). Obviously Alexander could be from the Moon and his books would still be the same wonderful contributors to my childhood love of all things fantastic (and more than a little mischievous), but it’s nonetheless very cool for this AmericanStudier to know that Alexander was bringing these old European myths and legends to a late 20th century American context, a la Shadow and Wednesday and company in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The detail made me feel that much more connected to Alexander, and that much more excited to start sharing his books with the boys when they got old enough.I think I read them Time Cat (1963) at some point in our early days with chapter books, but it clearly didn’t make too much of an impression (not for any fault with the book, just don’t think we were quite ready for it); so it was really a couple years ago when I truly got to share Alexander with them for the first time. My older son had just finished his last Rick Riordan book (until the next one came out in late 2019, anyway—man that dude writes fast!), and I got him the first Prydain Chronicle, The Book of Three (1964), from the library. The boys are open to most everything, but certainly they have read books that didn’t quite work, or at least didn’t grab them enough that they would feel a need to continue with that series or author. So needless to say I’ve was beyond thrilled that he seems to have enjoyed Prydain as much as I did—he tore through all five books, and was doing the thing where he asks me to mute commercials when we’re watching playoff football games so he can read literally every possible second (his father used to read a book while walking down the halls at school, so I know the feeling quite well).For whatever reason he’s not a big fan of talking to me too much about the books he reads (I think he thinks of me as an English Professor and that I’m asking as a kind of homework or the like), but I managed to get a couple thoughts out of him when he had finished the series (with his explicit permission to include them as part of this blog post). He said that he could tell by the language that they weren’t written recently, although we talked about how that was a choice even in the 1960s and an attempt to make the books feel more like classic myths or legends. And he said that he really loved the characters, that despite that archaic language they didn’t feel like they were part of an old story but like he could imagine interacting with them in his own life (a paraphrase but definitely the gist of his thoughts). I think (without making this into, y’know, literary analysis homework or anything) that he has hit the nail on the head in terms of the combination that makes Alexander’s series so perennially engaging: a legendary story and style that satisfies our human need for myths, wedded to deeply human and relatable characters that can draw in any audience, young or old. Sounds like some good goals for any YA and fantasy series to me!Next loving tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Favorite fantasy authors or stories you’d share?

February 8-9, 2020: Immigration Laws and Narratives in 2020

[On February 5, 1917 Congress passed the influential and exclusionary Immigration Act of 1917. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Act and other stages across the history of immigration laws, leading up to a weekend post on where our laws and narratives stand in 2020.]On two distinct but ultimately interconnected public scholarly lessons for the present.One of the more consistent phrases deployed in response to the anti-immigrant bigotry and xenophobia at the heart of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and then his presidency(and, frustratingly but clearly, not at all limited to him and his administration in our current moment) has been that America is “a land of immigrants.” The sometimes unstated, sometimes overt argument being that these attitudes and policies run counter to fundamental American histories and values. But of course, as both my latest book We the People and Erika Lee’s wonderful new book America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States remind us, anti-immigrant, exclusionary sentiments are as foundational to the US as immigration has been. Moreover, and perhaps even more saliently, what I hope this week’s blog series has highlighted is that much of the time American immigration laws themselves—from their 19th century creation and early 20thcentury development to their late 20th century shifts and evolution—have at the very least reflected and extended those anti-immigrant narratives, if they have not indeed been a primary societal location for them. Seen through that lens, many of the Trump administration’s extreme and xenophobic policies and proposals sit squarely in the history and legacy of American immigration laws. The Muslim Ban, his first post-inauguration policy proposal, represents another ethnic and national exclusion, much like the Asian exclusions that comprised the first national immigration laws (although the fact that it targets a religion makes it, I would argue, even more unconstitutional than those exclusions were [although although the  Supreme Court generally sided with those exclusions]). Detaining Hispanic immigrant families and children at the border echoes both the Angel Island detentions during that Asian exclusion era and the long 20thcentury history of targeting and deportations of Mexican Americans. Even when his proposals seem to violate fundamental aspects of our current immigration laws, such as his goal of eliminating so-called “chain migration” (family reunification as a legal priority), these histories remind us that even those now fundamental aspects have always been conflicted and contingent (as I noted in Friday’s post, family reunification was only added to our national immigration laws in 1965, and then in relationship to other priorities such as economic status that Trump is now seeking to amplify). So one public scholarly lesson of better remembering our immigration histories has to be that Trump and our era are, sadly but clear, not nearly as much of an anomaly as we inclusive folks would like to believe. But there’s another lesson, and it’s the one I argued for in this We’re History piece on birthright citizenship (itself a target of Trump administration challenges): the histories of the battles for inclusion, for immigrant and civil rights in opposition to these discriminations and exclusions, both remind us of the need to and model the ways to carry that battle forward in the 21st century. To me, that’s the definition of critical patriotism: recognizing all the ways that the US has consistently fallen short of our national ideals, but also remembering the figures and communities that have fought to push us closer to those ideals, and committing to honoring their legacy by carrying the fight forward. The history of immigration and immigration laws offers one particularly clear and salient illustration of all those layers, and better remembering its most exclusionary elements only drives home the continued, desperate need for efforts to push us further toward the inclusive ideal embodied in the “land of immigrants” narrative.Valentine’s series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

February 7, 2020: Immigration Laws: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

[On February 5, 1917 Congress passed the influential and exclusionary Immigration Act of 1917. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Act and other stages across the history of immigration laws, leading up to a weekend post on where our laws and narratives stand in 2020.]On why the landmark 1965 law was truly groundbreaking, and two ways to complicate that narrative.If this week’s series thus far has done what I hoped it would, it has (among both more specific topics for each post and other continuing threads and themes of course) convinced you of the historical truth I articulated most overtly at the end of yesterday’s post: that for much of American history, the creation and development of immigration laws served not just to discriminate against particular communities of arrivals, but also and often especially to embody an exclusionary attitude toward American communities already here. With that longstanding history in mind, it’s difficult to overstate just how much the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act) represented a break from that legacy, a law intended to make it both possible and easier for many groups (including the Asian immigrants who had been so fully excluded for nearly a century) to come to the United States. For that reason, I think it’s entirely fair and accurate to see the law as a third component to the prominent Great Society laws (the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act) through which President Lyndon Johnson and his Democratic and progressive allies helped move America significantly further toward equality and justice.That’s a central aspect of the 1965 Act, and one that again is difficult to overstate. Yet history is multi-layered (that could probably be a motto for this blog!), and any narrative of historical events that emphasizes only one element or meaning is likely limited at best. One way to complicate our narratives of the 1965 Act is to note that, while it importantly did away with quotas based on national/ethnic origins, it also created a system of preferences that was in its own way quite hierarchical as well. One such preference, for family reunification, was entirely understandable and difficult to critique (although the Trump administration has tried to through its propagandistic attacks on “chain migration”). But the 1965 law also created a number of other preferences, from the economic (the “million dollar visa” category about which I wrote earlier in the week) to the educational (prioritizing immigrants with particular levels of and degrees in higher education). Each of those preferences and categories can certainly be supported (although I find the “million dollar visa” quite disturbing, to be honest), but at the very least they make clear that even after the 1965 Act, US immigration policy continued to define certain immigrant communities as more desirable than others (and, more troublingly, vice versa).The other way to complicate narratives of the 1965 Act as representing a significant shift in favor of American diversity is one for which I’ve been arguing since my Chinese Exclusion Act book. The simple fact is that nearly all of the national and ethnic categories that benefitted from the 1965 law had already been part of the US, in many cases for centuries—I made that case at least for Asian American communities in that book, and do so for Muslim American communities (another group frequently associated with post-1965 immigration) in a chapter of my most recent book. While certainly post-1965 America has seen increasing diversity (both in terms of the number of distinct nations represented and the number of Americans from those nations), it’s quite different (and to my mind far more accurate) to describe that trend as a return to and amplification of longstanding, foundational diversity, rather than something new. After all, to describe this post-1965 diversity as new (even if one is doing so in order to celebrate it) is not just inaccurate (although, again, I believe that it is); it also makes it far easier for critics of this trend to argue that it represents a change in American identity, a change that exclusionary voices seek to define as threatening and destructive. Instead, it’s far more accurate to say that the 1965 Act represented a change in American immigration law, one that allowed such laws for the first time to amplify rather than seek to limit our foundational diversity.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

February 6, 2020: Immigration Laws: The Tydings-McDuffie Act

[On February 5, 1917 Congress passed the influential and exclusionary Immigration Act of 1917. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Act and other stages across the history of immigration laws, leading up to a weekend post on where our laws and narratives stand in 2020.]On the specific contexts for and broader implications of a particularly xenophobic 1930s law.The anti-Filipino prejudice that developed in America across the first few decades of the 20thcentury is perhaps even more egregiously hypocritical than racism always already is in a nation founded upon “all men are created equal.” After all, throughout this period the US was occupying the Philippines (and for much of it fighting a war against Filipino rebels seeking independence from that imperial occupation), which meant that the tens of thousands of Filipinos who immigrated to the US during the period were likely fleeing a conflict of our own creation and definitely moving to a nation of which they were already part. Moreover, many of those Filipino arrivals contributed immeasurably to their new nation, from military heroes like Vicente Lim to community activists like Agripino and Florence Jaucian. Yet despite those realities (if not, indeed, because of them) anti-Filipino racism emerged as a prominent national force during these same decades, one that culminated in numerous hate crimes and acts of racial terrorism (such as the horrific 1930 Watsonville, California “riots”) and, most relevantly for this week’s series, in a pair of interconnected, xenophobic 1930s laws: 1934’s Tydings-McDuffie Act and 1935’s Filipino Repatriation Act.The Repatriation Act was a particularly telling reflection of the strength of these anti-Filipino sentiments, as it revealed that Congress was willing to grant the Philippines eventual independence (again, a concept against which the US had not too long before fought a 15-year war) in exchange for the “repatriation” of all Filipino Americans back to the islands. But the Tydings-McDuffie Act was even more egregious for one particular reason: it was quite possibly illegal. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Filipino immigrants were not part of the “Asiatic Barred Zone” created by the Immigration Act of 1917, because they could not be—since the Philippines were a US territory/colony at the time, Filipino nationals could not be restricted from coming to the United States. But by the 1930s, giving in to the increasing anti-Filipino sentiments, Congress sought to impose such a restriction nonetheless, and found a backdoor way to do so: agreeing to grant the Philippines independence in 1945 and then claiming that this future independent status made it legal to immediately restrict Filipino immigration to 50 arrivals per year (a quota so small as to make this an exclusion act by another name). I suppose if Congress passes a law that makes it by default “legal,” but this particular law at best created a loophole and at worst made an end run around both the Constitution and legal traditions.So the Tydings-McDuffie Act reflects the strength and sway of such xenophobic sentiments—but it also and perhaps even more importantly exemplifies the ways in which immigration laws have been both created and manipulated in service of such exclusionary attitudes. I’ve argued since at least my Chinese Exclusion Act book that one of the most pernicious American myths is the narrative that our immigration laws have ever represented a set of “rules” which arrivals could “choose” to follow. But over time I’ve come to understand even more clearly that those laws were not just nonexistent (at first) and then created in arbitrary, haphazard, and discriminatory ways, although both those things are true and significant. Instead, perhaps the most fundamental truth of virtually every American immigration law (with the partial exception of the 1965 Act, on which more tomorrow) is that they had much less to do with immigration and much more to do with enforcing and extending an exclusionary narrative of American identity. That doesn’t mean that they don’t also create various systems that affect other (and often all) groups of immigrant arrivals, but such effects are secondary to the fundamental, exclusionary purpose of most of these laws. A stark and crucial truth revealed with especial clarity by the Tydings-McDuffie Act.Last law and stage tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

February 5, 2020: Immigration Laws: The Immigration Act of 1917

[On February 5, 1917 Congress passed the influential and exclusionary Immigration Act of 1917. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Act and other stages across the history of immigration laws, leading up to a weekend post on where our laws and narratives stand in 2020.]On how the 1917 law built upon the Chinese Exclusion Act, and how it went far beyond it.I’ll admit that when I’ve written and talked about the Immigration Act of 1917, it’s largely been to note that it greatly extended and amplified the era’s exclusion of immigrants from Asian nations. That had begun with the Chinese Exclusion Act of course, and then Japanese immigrants had likewise been the subject of their own exclusionary policy, the so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907 (Teddy Roosevelt apparently didn’t like the sound of “exclusion act,” so went with a softer name for a very similar, xenophobic principle and policy). But the 1917 Act went much further still, creating an “Asiatic Barred Zone” comprised of “any country not owned by the U.S. adjacent to the continent of Asia” (ie, basically every East and Southeast Asian nation other than the Philippines, which were occupied at the time by the US but would soon be subject to their own exclusionary laws, as I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post). For the last 50 years of the pre-1965 period, then, the Chinese Exclusion era was really the Asian Exclusion era, and the 1917 law was the pivot from more specific to more comprehensive xenophobia and discrimination.That’s all true and was a central focus of the 1917 law, but it also went much further in a number of important ways. For one thing, it identified a wide range of other categories of arrivals who were similarly excluded, such as: “idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, alcoholics, poor, criminals, beggars, any person suffering attacks of insanity, those with tuberculosis, and those who have any form of dangerous contagious disease, [and] aliens who have a physical disability that will restrict them from earning a living in the United States, polygamists and anarchists, those who were against the organized government or those who advocated the unlawful destruction of property and those who advocated the unlawful assault or killing of any officer.” While each item on that list has a particular set of contexts, in sum this collection made the 1917 law far closer to a national immigration law than the prior laws (which had focused on excluding those particular nationalities, with very little reference to any other communities or categories). Indeed, while the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and 1924 Quota Act (or Johnson-Reed Act) made exclusion based on nationality the defining national immigration policy for the next forty years, in overall ways you could say that they simply expanded the exclusionary frame created by the Immigration Act of 1917.Moreover, while those national quotas were eliminated by the 1965 Immigration Act, the 1917 law also included other exclusionary details that have remained much more consistently present throughout the next century of American immigration law. It linked immigration to financial status in very overt ways, imposing an $8 per head (roughly $160 in 2019 terms) tax for all arrivals over 16 and making it illegal for any adult who had not paid their own tax to enter the US; to this day our immigration system continues to favor the wealthy, as illustrated by the “Million Dollar Visa” policywhich remains in effect. The 1917 law also imposed a literacy test for all arrivals over 16, requiring them to prove that they could read 30-40 words in some language before they were allowed to enter; the 1965 Immigration Act’s preferences for particular levels of education and forms of employment reflects the continued presence of these kinds of educational and professional emphases. In creating these kinds of preferences—and doing so through excluding those who could not meet them—the Immigration Act of 1917 likewise set the stage not just for the 1920s Quota Acts, but for much of the next century of American immigration law.Next law and stage tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?