Building American Character

Abstract

This chapter explores the character of model minority through the figure of the first Asian American member of Congress, Dalip Singh Saund, and his autobiography, Congressman from India (1960). Linking the autobiography to the emergence of the model minority myth, this chapter shows how Congressman from India uses the discourse of character building to shape the exemplary figure of Saund, obscuring structural inequality and occluding Saund’s racial presence. This a precarious posture that pivots between race and ethnicity, destabilizing the model that that Saund seeks to build and guiding readers to a critical perspective upon the American dream and Saund’s Cold War propaganda function.