Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement

Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement
ISBN-10
0231135351
ISBN-13
9780231135351
Category
Social Science
Pages
320
Language
English
Published
2010-02-26
Publisher
Columbia University Press
Author
Moon-Kie Jung

Description

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Hawai'i changed rapidly from a conservative oligarchy firmly controlled by a Euro-American elite to arguably the most progressive part of the United States. Spearheading the shift were tens of thousands of sugar, pineapple, and dock workers who challenged their powerful employers by joining the left-led International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union. In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized a mass working-class movement. He overturns the unquestioned assumption that this interracial effort traded racial politics for class politics. Instead, the movement "reworked race" by incorporating and rearticulating racial meanings and practices into a new ideology of class. Through its groundbreaking historical analysis, Reworking Race radically rethinks interracial politics in theory and practice.

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