Indolink.com takes a look at a new book, Sexual Naturalization, by Indian-American scholar Susan Koshy, which highlights the historical role of sex (or rather the prohibition of) in U.S. immigration policy:
“…Antimiscegnation laws worked in conjunction with immigration and naturalization laws to impede the reproduction of Asian immigrant communities, position Asians as racial aliens and sexual deviants, and secure the future of the United States as a white nation.” Susan Koshy.
For nearly fifteen years, Indian-American scholar Susan Koshy has been probing certain key historical elements that impact South Asians in America. For instance, she prods the racial undercurrent that define whiteness, ethnicity, gender, color, and citizenship as it is reflected in the American response to Asian immigrants.
I thought this book might make an interesting read for many SM readers. Judging from comments left following previous posts on our site, many white people that are one half of a white/South Asian couple have enjoyed our website because it has provided them with even a little bit of extra insight into their significant other’s culture. History books that outline what it took to enjoy the freedoms we have today are always interesting to me at least.
…the law claimed that interrracial sex was deviant and dangerous and viewed the sexuality of non-whites in opposition to white middle class sexual practices and family values. Koshy goes on to reveal how, for Asian Americans, including South Asian Americans, the antimiscegnation laws reaffirmed their status as perpetual foreigners, as racial and sexual aliens. Not only were sexual relationships between the predominantly male Asian immigrants and white women outlawed, but American women who married noncitizen Asian men were denaturalized. What’s even worse, popular discourse identified Asian women as prostitutes and “bachelor ” communities of Asian migrants as aberrant and pathological sexual formations.
Koshy shows how the presence of large numbers of new immigrants often concentrated in urban centers triggered fears of lawless and deviant sexuality, the proliferation of vice and prostitution, and the contamination of American genetic stock.
Some things never change I guess. Large concentrations of immigrants in urban centers seem destined to trigger fears of vice and contamination, and now terrorism in contemporary times.
Koshy reveals that laws that originally banned sexual relations between blacks and whites were eventually extended to prohibit marriages between whites and “Indians” (native Americans), “Mongolians” ( Chinese , Japanese, and Koreans), “Hindus/Asiatic Indians” (official term for south asians) and “Malays” (Filipinos).
Actually the earliest antimiscegnation laws that were passed in 17th century Maryland and Virginia affected the first South Asians who were brought as indentured slaves by the East India Company to the American colonies. Thus, records from the Maryland State Archives reveal that a daughter born in 1680 to an East Indian man and his Irish wife, was branded a mullato and sold as a slave in Maryland — as a result of antimiscegnation law.
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