Across Global Souths: Asian Migrations through the U.S. South and the Circum-Caribbean

Abstract

Across Global Souths:Asian Migrations through the U.S. South and the Circum-Caribbean Joo Ok Kim (bio) and Giselle Liza Anatol (bio) A Special Issue of the American Studies Journal Across Global Souths: Asian Migrations through the U.S. South and the Circum-Caribbean investigates Asian/American cultures, politics, and relationships across multiple Souths, with an emphasis on the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Edward Said's foundational Orientalism (1978) has been expanded and extrapolated to multiple frameworks that situate Asian peoples and populations in terms of the East versus the West; this concept continues to circulate in the United States, where "Asian America" is largely envisioned as only populating the East and West coasts. The Across Global Souths project reframes the conversation with an emphasis on journeys to and from multiple Souths. The guest editors consider the broader geopolitical designation of "South" in the United States, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, and the U.S. Gulf Coast as a region in and of itself. Asian Americans in Dixie provides a critical reference point, defining the South as "a region of the United States and a space connected to and part of other transnational spaces" (Joshi and Desai, 2013, 4). Grounded within recent scholarly developments in the field of American Studies, we have invited further reflections on the diasporic condition of the category "Asian," as well as the diasporic condition of the category "Southerner," simultaneously challenging notions of an exclusively white, Euro-American U.S. [End Page 7] citizenry. A more inclusive, diverse conceptualization of what it means to be "American" subverts common racial identifications, which frequently fail to address the critical role that adopted cultural and ethnic traditions have played in the development of the U.S. national landscape; it also undermines notions of an unchanging, fixed identity. Furthermore, "American" is used expansively to consider migrations to and from different locations across the Americas. Framed this way, Brazil—the home to the largest population of Japanese people outside of Japan—and Cuba's Havana Chinatown emerge as rich sites for exploration. What distinguishes this special issue, firmly ensconced within both American Studies and current Global South frameworks, is the comparative focus on Asians in the U.S. South and the Caribbean and Caribbean diasporas. Although Global South Studies has raised important questions on "south/south" and hemispheric discourses, and Caribbean Studies has long foregrounded archipelagic and transnational critiques of colonialism, an interdisciplinary examination of Asian migrations within two locations that share centuries of overlapping histories has been understudied. For instance, the troubling "John Chinaman" stereotype of the nineteenth century, which depicted Chinese immigrants to the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Australia as "sinister, crafty, dirty, diseased, inscrutable, economically threatening, and, of course, strangely inassimilable," is commonly framed as "widespread in the West" (Lee Loy 1, 2010, emphasis added), resulting from migratory routes that traversed longitudinal, rather than latitudinal, lines. But even as we, the editors and contributors to Across Global Souths, foreground the geographical spaces of the U.S. South and the Caribbean in this special issue, we are inspired by broader theorizations of "south" that assemble other underexamined geographies and a range of methodologies, such as ethnographies that allow inquiry within unexpected sites of cultural formations, like restaurants, motels, and fishing-folk circles. This project thus convenes scholars working "across" different fields, disciplinary approaches, and research methods to foster greater understanding of the U.S. South–circum-Caribbean network. We feel compelled by stories like that of writer Cristina García, whose novel Monkey Hunting (2003) was partially inspired by a visit to a Chinese Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a plate of black beans and pork fried rice. The novel's publication and circulation animate histories of Asian migration to the Americas, and it implicitly critiques the loss of these histories; it also illuminates the scores of lost narratives about North–South crossings, including recipes, and patterns of movement engendered by the Vietnam War. In other words, even as it activates chronicles of the "coolie" trade, García's narrative engages texts that conventionally have been elided from constructions of historical archives (e.g., family...