The Politics of the Excluded: The Political Thought of Wong Chin Foo

Abstract

This article examines the concepts of citizenship and exclusion in the writings of the nineteenth-century Chinese American figure Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898) and situates his works within the context of Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Against a backdrop of intensifying racial violence and legal and social exclusion, Wong repudiated racial stereotypes that were used to justify Chinese exclusion. He argued that the Chinese were culturally and morally distinctive but assimilable to American society. Central to his argumentative strategy was his critical reappropriation of the idea of the Chinese as unassimilable “heathens.” However, his conception of citizenship as conditional on “character and fitness” exposed the exclusionary nature of American citizenship and reinscribed its boundaries along racial and class lines. In treating Wong as a political thinker in his own right, this essay makes three contributions. First, it offers a historical elucidation of what Gordon Chang has called “the politics of the excluded.” Wong’s works show how central categories of politics and political thinking—like citizenship—are reconfigured by the very people those categories were designed to exclude. Second, this essay offers an alternative interpretive framework for reading texts within Asian American political thought and intellectual history. Finally, this essay forms a theoretical intervention by showing how Wong discloses the peculiarities of Asian American positionality in debates about racial citizenship in America.