Position: Arthur Eisenberg and Susan Engel Associate Professor, Department of History
Chloe affiliation: Faculty Board Member
Julian Lim centers transnational methodologies and relational approaches in her research on racism and immigration.
What do you think scholars of racism, immigration, and colonialism can gain from these approaches?
Transnational methodologies and relational approaches really come from studying immigration from the migrant point of view. There is often an emphasis in legal history which tends to be top-down, and where lawmakers take center stage. The study of immigration law also tends to be somewhat insular and only concerned with what happens when people arrive at the border. It can be a very nation-centered and domestically oriented framework for understanding immigration history and law.
However, I’m committed to social history and telling the stories of the “everyday” people who are affected by those laws most directly. If you focus on the stories and experiences of the people who are on the move, you realize that migration is much less unilinear and straightforward than we usually think. During the period I study, where there are various restrictions on entry into the United States, people had to make a dense set of choices about where to go and what paths to take, especially if their ultimate destination is still the United States. If you follow people on the move, and pay attention to their travels and experiences across multiple international borders, other pathways and complicated circuits of migration come into view.
I want to know where they’re coming from, where they’re going, how they’re getting there, and how they’re moving through different places all along the way. This requires a transnational approach, because many migrants didn’t come directly to the United States. This also means, as a historian, that we also need to be transnational in our research methods, moving outside of the United States and into the archives of the other countries and places through which our historical subjects lived and moved.
The intersection of Asian American and Latinx histories
My relational approach to studying race and immigration was shaped in part by my initial interest in understanding the intersections between Asian American and Latinx histories, then by the works of historians like Natalia Molina and Erika Lee, but perhaps mainly by what I found in the course of researching my dissertation. Nineteenth-century Americans, for example, did not see Chinese immigrants as purely distinct from African Americans or Native Americans. If you look through historical records, there is abundant documentation of how anti-Chinese restrictionists saw the “Chinese problem” as linked to the “Indian problem” and vexing questions (for many white Americans) about Black citizenship and equal standing.
In my research, I saw that if we look at the Chinese Exclusion Act and its enforcement closely, the story is not solely about the Chinese. Immigration policies primarily targeting the Chinese can also get manipulated, transferred, reconfigured, and easily applied to other groups who are migrating to the United States but viewed as “undesirable.” Anti-polygamy restrictions targeting European Mormon migrants were quickly transposed to Muslim immigrants from the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century.
As Natalia Molina explains, while it’s important to recover the histories of long-marginalized groups, a relational approach to race that links the experiences of different racialized groups allows us to better “see” and understand how various elites maintained and reify systems of power and inequality over time—and with consequences for Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous communities that are not totally distinct, even if applied and felt differently across the groups. The histories of racial formation are very much intertwined, and relational race approaches to studying the past allow us to see those connections more clearly.