Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America

A pathbreaking work by one of the leading scholars in the field, Iron Cages provides a unique comparative analysis of white attitudes toward Asians, Blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans in the nineteenth century, offering a cohesive study of the foundations of race and culture in America. With a new epilogue that assesses the prospect for race relations in contemporary American society, Iron Cages is important reading for anyone interested in the history of race relations in America. In his provocative new epilogue, "The Fourth Iron Cage," Takaki focuses on race in contemporary society within the context of America's nuclear arms-oriented ceconomy. He compares the Asian-American "model minority" and the black underclass, and extends his analysis to Native Americans, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans. The ascetic ideology is one of three successive ""cages"" that Takaki sees as the boxes that white Americans built to separate themselves from non-whites; the others are the corporate ""iron cage"" of bureaucratic capitalism and the technologically-based ""iron cage"" of power and domination (exemplified by Moby Dick). . But all of this doesn't add up to a convincing case, since it rests on a questionable periodization of economic development together with a questionable assumption of ideological ""fit""; and because, moreover, the attitudes Takaki outlines were prevalent earlier in Europe, and date to the first European explorations (as shown in Ronald Meek's Social Science and the Ignoble Savage). A further shortcoming is that Takaki, unlike Genovese, incorrectly uses ""cultural hegemony"" as if it referred to an imposed ideology, without investigating the extent to which these attitudes shaped the self-images of oppressed races. Takaki takes a positive step in trying to broaden the approach to American racism, but the ground is soft underneath.