Racialized as an enslaved labor force in the emergent age of free labor and free trade, "coolies" ultimately reflected the hopes, fears, and contradictions of emancipation. The ambiguous qualities ascribed to "coolies" served to confuse and collapse seemingly indissoluble divides at the heart of race (black and white), class (enslaved and free), and nation (alien and citizen, domestic and foreign) in U.S. culture. Locating, defining, and outlawing "coolies," at home and abroad, in turn evolved into an endless and indispensable exercise that resolved and reproduced the contradictory aims—racial exclusion and legal inclusion, enslavement and emancipation, parochial nationalism and unbridled imperialism—of a nation deeply rooted in race, slavery, and empire.

This is an excerpt from Moon-Ho Jung's entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 65).