“Paper More Precious Than Blood”: Chinese Exclusion Era Identity Documentation Processes and Racialization of Identity Data.

This project interrogates the United States’ national fixation on the answer to the question: <italic>Who are you?</italic> In this article, it is posed that identity documentation practices arising out of the Chinese Exclusion Act era cast identity as an empirical and immutable phenomenon, specifically in response to the racialization of American-born Chinese settlers as duplicitous, through the mechanisms that information is collected, the actual information itself, and the cross-references or connections created between cases. Through tracing this lineage, racialized identification data is identified and theorized as part of hegemonic data regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]