Common Ground: Reimagining American History

In Common ground, Gary Okihiro uses the experiences of Asian Americans to reconfigure the ways in which American history can be understood. He examines a set of binaries--East and West, black and white, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual--that have structured the telling of our nation's history and shaped our ideas of citizenship since the late nineteenth century. Okihiro not only exposes the artifice of these binaries but also offers a less rigid and more embracing set of stories on which to ground a national history. Okihiro analyzes how groups of people and numerous major events in American history have generally been depicted, and then offers alternative representations from an Asian-American viewpoint--one that reveals the ways in which binaries have contributed toward simplifying, excluding, and denying differences and convergences.

Author(s): Gary Y. Okihiro
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2001-04
Pages: 174
Categories: History