The Rising Tide of Color

The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.

The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring a wide range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies, this powerful collection of essays highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics. From labor and anticolonial activists around World War I and multiracial campaigns by anarchists and communists in the 1930s to the policing of race and sexuality after World War II and transpacific movements against the Vietnam War, The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.

Moon-Ho Jung is the Walker Family Endowed Professor and associate professor of history at the University of Washington and the author of Coolies and Cane.

"[T]his volume performs important historical work in remembering . . . and resurrecting the stories of those who resisted the violence and exclusions of state suppression while struggling for a more equitable and just society and yet were marginalized and forgotten. . . .Moon-Ho Jung’s introduction provides an impressive overview and genealogy of race, state violence, and radical movements. This synthetic essay alone makes the collection a valuable contribution to thinking about how the West Coast of North America as historically entwined in myriad ways with a transpacific world of continual crossings and recrossings."

S. Ani Mukherji:

"[An] edifying primer attuned, in the tradition of Preston and Williams, to connecting our contemporary crisis to the problems of the past.... Transnational in scope and attentive to intricacies of geography and intersectionality, the contributions to Rising Tide represent a promising wave of new scholarship on American radicalism."

Barbara McMichael:

"This assortment of essays shines a light on historical factors that continue to have an impact on national security matters and global unrest today. This is tough but thought-provoking stuff."

"This brilliant volume is incisive, intellectually generative, and analytically rigorous. The Rising Tide of Color reframes our understanding of race and social movements by centering on the Pacific Coast."—Diane Fujino, professor of Asian American Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara