The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority Paperback - 2015

From the rear cover

"The Color of Success embodies exciting developments in Asian American history. Through the lens of racial liberalism and cultural diplomacy, Ellen Wu offers a historically grounded analysis of the Asian American model minority in the contexts of domestic race politics and geopolitics, and she unveils the complexities of wartime and postwar national inclusion."--Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania

"Tracing the history of Japanese and Chinese American racialization, this powerful and effective book illuminates the impact of war, international relations, and domestic politics through richly detailed narratives. Ellen Wu shows that the idea of Asians as the model minority began as an academic hypothesis and became a key feature for how race in the United States was conceptualized. This is an important work."--Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences

"The Asian American journey provides a crucial angle of vision for a nation whose understanding of its own history tends toward color-blind denials or the white-black binary. Through this lens, Ellen Wu has written an important analysis of mid-twentieth-century struggle and racial liberalism. The Color of Success is an illuminating and deeply researched book--its intellectual ambition reaches to the heart of U.S. political culture."--Matthew Jacobson, Yale University

"With rich archival detail and illustrative accounts, The Color of Success offers a distinct and important contribution to the vexing question of the model minority formation of Asian Americans in the middle of the twentieth century. The book has widespread relevance to comparative race relations, the politics of acculturation, the conspicuous limits of middle-class Americanism, as well as national loyalty and race neutrality."--Nayan Shah, University of Southern California