Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, delivered the 2022 Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture on September 29. Her lecture, “The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics,” focused on the origins of anti-Chinese racism in the U.S., locating it in the gold rushes from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, in the American west, Australia, and South Africa. After her lecture, Ngai sat down with Assistant Professor of English Takeo Rivera for a moderated Q&A session.
The Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture was established in 2008 to be a stimulating and energizing memorial to the progressive political values Professor Howard Zinn embodied as a writer, teacher, and mentor. Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a longtime professor in BU’s Department of Political Science. Renowned for his work as a historian, author, professor, playwright, and activist, he wrote dozens of books, including A People’s History of the United States. His work focused on a wide range of issues, including race, class, war, and history. More information about his life and work is available at howardzinn.org.
Below are Professor Rivera’s introductory remarks for Professor Ngai.
In 1991, Howard Zinn wrote the following: “I can understand pessimism, but I don’t believe in it. It’s not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don’t need certainty, only possibility.” When I first read Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as an eighth grade preteen huddled in a corner alone in the library, I was exposed to centuries of atrocities and injustices that were part and parcel to the settler-colonial foundation and development of the United States. And yet, from Zinn’s tome, the dominant feeling I gained was not despair, not a sense of inevitability to the ongoing oppression of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and imperialism, but indeed, of hope. Hope that, as Zinn said, was not grounded in certainty but possibility, of the capabilities of committed activists, masses of workers both salaried and enslaved, people’s movements consisting not of the Great Men but of the communities of the downtrodden, insistent on liberating themselves. Zinn was a chronicler of terror, but a historian of resistance.
Professor Mae Ngai embodies the very best of Howard Zinn’s legacy. She is one of the most influential and important American historians working today or otherwise, whose works are vital to both Asian American Studies and ethnic studies more broadly. It is difficult to have a fully informed discussion of immigration in the United States without citing her work. And like Zinn, Professor Ngai is not only unrelenting in her critique, eyes wide open to the crushing cruelties of racism, colonialism, and capitalism, but is constantly mindful that the agents of historical change are not rulers but communities.
Before she became one of the greatest historians of her generation, Prof. Ngai was a part of these community movements on the ground. Born in the Bronx to Chinese immigrants, a young Mae came into political consciousness in the mileu of Black civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests. She was no model minority–she dropped out of college to do urgent political organizing in New York’s Chinatown, running a radical newspaper, providing ESL training to residents, protesting against apartheid and police brutality. She was very active in labor organizing, working for the District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education–making her the perfect speaker today at BU as the graduate students have announced unionization. It was only after this deeply impactful work that she returned to finish her undergraduate work, falling in love with labor history, and when she was done she graduated with her PhD from Columbia with distinction, where she remains today as Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History. She has been a People’s Historian from the beginning.
Most scholars of race, ethnicity, and migration have first been exposed to Prof. Ngai through her first book in 2004, the now-canonical Impossible Subjects. The award-winning book is a detailed account of legal history and racialization, brilliantly elucidating how modern racial formation and immigration policy formed in dialectical relation with one another, and how white supremacist nation-building relied on the construction of such deviant figures to racial capitalism. Six years later, Prof. Ngai would go from the grand macro vision of Impossible Subjects to the micro, intimate story of the Tape family in The Lucky Ones, one of the earliest Chinese American lineages from the late 19th century, and how their negotiations with and active challenges to dominant US juridical, social, and cultural mores reflect a synecdoche of the history of Chinese America itself. And last year, she published the grand tome from which today’s talk is drawn: The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, winner of the 2022 Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the LA Times book prize in history. Relentless, Prof. Ngai is now already at work on her fourth book, Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Mae Ngai is someone who has stared at the naked viscera of history, yet has the courage to hold us all with its truth to march forward undaunted. We are honored to have her here today. Please welcome Professor Ngai to Boston University.