Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies ed. by Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith (review)

Meeting Asian/Arab American StudiesThinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S. Sunaina Maira (bio) and Magid Shihade (bio) I am the witness of the massacre I am the victim of the map I am the son of simple words . . . —Mahmoud Darwish, from "Poem of the Land"1 Speak, your lips still have their liberty Speak, still yours is the spoken word . . . Speak, for the truth is alive even now Speak, say all you wish you had said. —Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from "Speak" (1941)2 Why link Asian and Arab American Studies? Why should we speak of Arab American studies in Asian American studies, or have a conversation in ethnic studies about points of convergence and divergence between these two areas? Is it in order to recognize an emerging ethnic studies field in the U.S., with all the limitations that a politics of recognition based on multiculturalism entails? Is it to extend a comparative ethnic studies approach that is increasingly transforming Asian American studies while raising questions about the definition of ethnic and racial boundaries? In our view, the answer is all of these, but much more. We argue here that speaking of Arab and Asian [End Page 117] American studies in the same breath is ultimately valuable because it illuminates a broader and more urgent issue: the need to develop a fuller analysis of U.S. empire. The meeting of Asian American and Arab American studies has been increasingly highlighted in discussions after 9/11 as it has become apparent that Asian American—particularly South Asian—and Arab American communities as well as Muslim Americans more generally, have similar experiences as targets in the "war on terrorism" waged by the United States. The question of how to produce intellectual and political knowledge to respond to the everyday crisis of empire is urgent at this particular moment, but we want to point out that it has always been so—the conjuncture between Asian/Arab American studies helps to situate U.S. empire in a much longer historical trajectory that links movements in, and out of, Asia and the Middle East. Imperial power operates by obscuring the links between homeland projects of racial subordination and minority co-optation and overseas strategies of economic restructuring and political domination. This link between the domestic and global fronts of empire can be exposed only if we expand our frame of analysis to consider the ways in which categories of subjects such as "Asian American" and "Arab American" are positioned in relation to U.S. empire. Ethnic studies has focused in large part on documenting, understanding, and challenging the construction of ethnic and racial boundaries as they intersect with other axes of domination, such as gender, sexuality, and class, within the nation. However, there has also been a movement in Asian American studies to acknowledge the transnational dimensions of Asian communities and histories, on the one hand, and the paradoxes and pitfalls of a multiculturalist identity politics, on the other. So the meeting of Arab/Asian American studies highlights the question of borders, and the political and epistemological work of boundaries in shaping our understanding of power and resistance. It helps us to locate the issue of ethnic and racial borders within the larger frame of U.S. empire, and to understand that the question facing Asian American studies today is how to intellectually and institutionally confront imperial, not just national or ethnic, politics. This has always been the challenge for ethnic studies, which has often remained confined within a national frame. [End Page 118] The purpose of linking Asian and Arab American studies is not to colonize Arab American studies within an ever-expanding rubric of pan-Asian ethnicity, but to do the opposite: to challenge the ever-expanding borders of an imperial project that operates through direct as well as proxy wars, neo-colonial occupation, and client states. Ultimately, it is for Arab Americanists themselves to decide where they want to be situated in the academy and how Arab American studies should be introduced into the curriculum. Research on Arab Americans is growing and gaining more academic recognition through new faculty hires and programs, though it continues to occur in...

Reviewed by: POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies Kamala Visweswaran POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies.” Edited by Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe. Durham: Duke University, 1997. The journal Positions was founded in 1993 with the objective of providing “a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.” Its mission statement identified intensifying global flows of labor and capital in the late 20th century as central concerns, and asked its readers to reflect on how these transformations might recast priorities in scholarship, teaching, and criticism. It is therefore in keeping with the intellectual tradition already established by the journal, that a special edition on “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies” explores emerging relationships between Asian and Asian American studies. [End Page 308] Positions, over the last few years, has published groundbreaking articles on questions of colonialism and modernity in East Asia, and explored the distinct perspectives post-structuralist and postcolonial theory might bring to area studies. This issue of the journal asks what ethnic studies might bring to area studies, and conversely establishes the importance of linking ethnic studies to critical area studies, or more particularly, of linking the contradictory, but mutually constitutive relations between Asians and Asian Americans. Guest editors Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe make it clear that such a relationship must account for “the long history of dissymmetry between the fields...the differences in their institutional locations, and the large gaps between the subjects and knowledges posited by each field” (viii). Yet they also establish the necessity of forging such a relationship. They remind us that Asian Americans are formed simultaneously within U.S. national and global frameworks. The return of (Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean) immigrants to the imperial center means that their racialization under terms of the U.S nation-state can’t be understood without understanding histories of colonialism and capitalist development in Asia. Such an approach disrupts the master narrative of becoming a national citizen for Asian American subjects, and productively recasts the relationship of Asian American studies with American studies. This special issue of Positions is, therefore, a timely and important collection of essays that significantly contributes to, and expands upon national discussions about the shape of Asian American studies east of California, reflected in other edited collections over the last decade: Gary Okihiro’s Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies (1988), Shirley Hune’s (1990) Asian Americans; Comparative and Global Perspectives, and Robert Lee and Lihbin Shao’s (1994) Building Blocks for Asian American Studies: Proceedings of the 1992 East Of California Asian American Studies Conference. Thus, Kim and Lowe tie the emergence of theoretical “new formations” in Asian American studies to “new immigrations”— by which is meant not only the inclusion of more recent post-1965 immigrant groups such as Koreans, Indians, and Vietnamese, but the multiple, back and forth migrations of such groups resulting from U.S imperial and economic policies. They identify and enumerate four major pressures (ix) that shape the questions to be posed as part of these new formations: 1. the ‘post-Fordist’ restructuring of global capitalism that employs ‘mixed production’ and ‘flexible accumulation’ and permits the exploitations of Asian workers both in Asia and the United States; [End Page 309] 2. the changed demography of the Asian American population as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which increased and diversified Filipino, Korean, Southeast Asian, and South Asian communities in the United States; 3. the colonial and neocolonial role of the United States in the Asian states from which these new Asian American communities emigrate; and 4. the failure of citizenship and civil rights to guarantee equality of opportunity and resources to poor, racialized and gendered communities in the United States. Editors Kim and Lowe have done an excellent job of laying out the parameters of this new relationship by including articles that address the politics and dynamics of the new immigration. Essays by Peter Kiang and Anuradha Advani reaffirm the field’s historic focus on community studies by examining relationships between community groups...

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another.

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

“To ‘P’ or Not to ‘P’?”:Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies Vicente M. Diaz (bio) I stole this title from a great Pinoy joke told to me by Gus Espiritu. Its humor comes from the particularities of Filipino rearticulation of Shakespeare's famous question (the joke also resonates among Carolinian speakers from Micronesia, and perhaps among many other Austronesian-based Pacific Island language speakers), but I also want to suggest that its stronger force likewise comes from a kind of lightness of being that self-mockery can make of ontological fundamentalism. Self-mockery is a serious weapon of cultural resilience and resistance—and as someone waiting in line, somewhat impatiently, I want to re-aim the line of "P's" trajectory in the direction of another culturally and historically specific mode of becoming. The converted question, "To P or not to P?" becomes, then, my way of marking the present territory, a slippery, even sticky sea of historical, political, and cultural determinations that exists between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in a more turbulent ocean of United States imperialism and colonialism. Choppy too, of course, is the no less innocent world of institutionalized study of these struggles, no matter how noble the motives may be. In this essay, I want to address the tensions raised by the "P Question" in relation to Asian American Studies from the vantage point of one who has been located in Pacific Studies as viewed from the Islands, particularly from Guam in Micronesia, where I was born and raised, and where I taught in the 1990s. But, I was also trained at the University of [End Page 183] Hawai'i, and though I did my doctorate in California, Hawai'i—through tremors that rocked the field of Pacific Studies as it intersected and was led by scholars housed at the UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS), the East West Center, and especially Kanaka Maoli scholars at the Center for Hawaiian Studies—continues to be generative in and of my own intellectual, political, and scholarly development. A robust and busy crossroad as well as homeland, Hawai'i draws up and projects out theoretical, cultural, and political movements from across the Pacific Island region and beyond the seas to make it a particularly fruitful location for intellectual and political production, especially for the kind that pays specific attention to the nuances of travel and mobility in relation to the staunch determinations over land that anchor Indigenous struggles.2 But lest my attempts at nuance fail, let me make one thing absolutely clear: for whatever productive dialogues there may be between Pacific Islander Studies and Asian American Studies, under no circumstance should Pacific Islanders, or Pacific Islands Studies, be subsumed under the institutional framework of Asian American history and experiences. Though I'm sure nobody wishes this to be the case, the question of just how Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies are articulated together will always raise the specter of unequal power relations. At the same time, however, I think it is vital, in order to maintain the integrity of our respective struggles and projects, that our resolve to keep the differences clear and equal not reify in any way any of the categories in question. To avert this unwanted outcome, I want to highlight the various sites or locales from which we practice our respective crafts. These different, differential, and differentiating sites of and for the situatedness of knowledge and politics, I believe, not only make a world of difference in our work, but are also themselves as much constituted by as they help constitute that work. Thus, I want to emphasize at the outset that the critiques of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies look very different from within the shores of the various Pacific Islands. But, I also want to assert that an Asian American inquiry must strive to comprehend the kinds of historical and political struggles that Native Pacific Scholars are trying to articulate, just as Native Pacific Scholars need to understand the specificities of Asian histories as they are bound up with the American [End Page 184] imperial project among and amidst Native Pacific Islanders in...

Beyond Nation and Empire Leo T. S. Ching (bio) Every discursive formation has its own institutional itinerary and condition of possibilities, and Asian studies and Asian American studies are no exceptions. Asian studies emerged out of American Cold War policy that divided the world into delimited regions. The underlying logic was that a region formed a complex whole that was unique and bounded, and could be distinguished from other regions by its sociocultural particularities. Asian American studies was institutionalized in response to the civil rights movement in the late 1960s United States as a politics of recognition and to create a broad coalition with African American studies and ethnic studies programs. Despite their common origins in the American Empire, abroad and at home, Asian studies and Asian American studies, until recently, have remained largely insulated from each other. This disengagement, for example, has obscured the parallelism between modernization theory as applied to Japan and later other East Asian countries and the model minority myth that aimed to divide Asian Americans from other underrepresented populations, specifically Black and brown peoples. Reading modernization theory and the model minority myth contrapuntally allows us to apprehend American imperial design as a dialectical process of expansion and domestication under the ideology of postwar liberalism. As a process of decolonizing American studies, one needs to be more attentive to this liberal imperial dialectic by opening itself to the seemingly non-American histories, aspirations, and polemics. This forum provides a much-needed conversation to deepen our understanding of this transpacific entanglement with a focus on Taiwan and Taiwan/America. This collection of essays intervenes not only in the critique of American empire but also the complicity of Taiwan's desire for a "normative" nation-state status. Unlike the conventional understanding of nation and empire as antithetical—the nation is homogeneous, egalitarian, and particular, whereas empire is diverse, hierarchical, and universal—Taiwan's aspiration for national independence and the disavowal of its settler colonialism tell another story. Instead of oppositions, nation and empire are seen as alternative or complementary expressions of the same phenomenon of power. Unlike earlier [End Page 383] scholarship that has lamented the marginalization of Taiwan, hence the desire for recognition and inclusion that often finds itself having to choose between Chinese and American empires, younger scholars included here resolutely refute this discourse of victimhood and false choices. Taiwan's long history within global coloniality, or what Arif Dirlik has referred to as "the land colonialisms made,"1 its ambiguous nation-state status, and fledging digital democracy offer possible alternatives to imagine a different relationship to nation and empire. Wendy Cheng's account of the arrest and prosecution of Chen Yu-hsi highlights the entanglement of Taiwanese/American history and the hypocrisy of American liberalism in adjudicating freedom and unfreedom that in turn silences voices of those prosecuted under Cold War anticommunism. Cheng's critique of American freedom reminds us of the long history of liberalism's intimate relationship to imperialism and colonialism. One only needs to recall that the founding of American freedom is on the backs of the unfreedom of others: the dispossessions of the indigenous population and the enslavement of people from Africa. The "rescue" of Chen Yu-hsi from the silencing of Taiwan/American history reveals the complicity of American hegemony and the institutionalization of area studies. While the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i was ostensibly established as an instrument of Cold War policy, the transpacific network of scholars and allies mobilized in support of Chen opens up the possibility of resistance to state-sanctioned violence. Cheng demonstrates that the freedom to speak and the freedom to remain silent concomitantly enables and incapacitates, includes and excludes, certain inconvenient narratives. Cheng implores us to resist this "silencing of the past" and to expose the complicity between state power and institutional formation. If Chen Yu-hsi's case represents the "silenced" history of Taiwan/America, Yukari Yoshihara's George H. Kerr and his transpacific traversing constitutes the dominant history of American studies' institutionalization in Asia. At the same time, Yoshihara alerts us to the "forgotten" imbrication of Asian studies and American studies in Asia. As a proficient Asianist trained...

14 A&Q Indigeneity at Sea The sea was open to anyone who would navigate a way through. . . . Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still. —­ Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands” In a context where representation (as “Asian American”) simultaneously takes place with nonrepresentation (the specificities of being Korean, Hmong, Pakistani ,etc.),PacificIslandersbecomeanotherun(der)representedAsianAmerican constituency to them that just needs more inclusion within the larger project. The problem with this, however, is that Pacific Islanders are not another underrepresented Asian constituency that fits uneasily into the Asian American coalition; they are not Asian American at all, and the political coalition that linked the two different pan-­ ethnic groups in the political and bureaucratic imaginary was the product of a moment that is long over, though its conceptual categories live on, much to the detriment of Pacific Islanders in general and Hawaiians specifically. —­ Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Are Not Asian Americans, and All Pacific Islanders Are Not Hawaiian” As always, this issue’s A&Q is a polyvocal feature, this time growing out of a panel organized by Charlotte Eubanks for the Global Asias 4 conference , convened at Penn State on March 31 through April 1, 2017. Each of the panelists was invited to respond to a set of questions (provided in edited form herein), reflecting on them from the specific vantage point of their own particularly institutional and disciplinary setting. The goal of the roundtable was to chart some of the interactions between notions of indigeneity and Asian-­ ness by focusing especially on Pacific Islanders and Oceania and attending to the particular histories, ideas, and epistemologies that such targeted attention might highlight. A & Q 15 1. What might a truly trans-­ Pacific Asian, Asian American, and/or Indigenous studies look like? If we set Asian studies and Asian American studies “adrift,” (how) can we craft meaningful alliances without erasing indigenous peoples and Pacific Islanders? 2. What is at stake—­demographically, aesthetically, legally, socially—­ in the categorization of Pacific Islanders with Asian Americans? With the categorization of Pacific Islanders with Indigenous peoples ? 3. How might we approach the relations between settler and indigenous communities without expunging difference and locality? What third terms are available, and how might these open crucial, nonbinary space? 4. How is your understanding of indigeneity shaped by, and how does it seek to shape, the institutions and disciplines in which you work? Pacific Worlds: Indigeneity, Hybridity, and Globalization RDK Herman The title of this essay today draws on my web-­based indigenous-­geography project Pacific Worlds (http://www.pacificworlds.com/). Created in 2000, this project works to portray Pacific Island communities through the words of community members themselves. The premise is that, despite climatic, linguistic, and material-­ culture similarities, each Pacific Island culture presents a complete and distinct worldview. And these worldviews developed in situ, through generations of interactions between the people and the environment. This kind of locally developed human–­environment knowledge is the cornerstone of what I call “indigeneity.” By this term, I am not referring to Indigenous Peoples as defined by the United Nations or other scholars or bodies. As I have stated elsewhere, all of our ancestors were Indigenous once, somewhere. Rather, my focus here is on a way of being in the world: being indigenous to a place means having a depth of knowledge, understanding , and connection to that place (Herman 2008). Indigeneity also includes a sense of stewardship and responsibility for managing that place and working respectfully with its nonhuman inhabitants. This included 16 A & Q holistic and spiritual engagement—­ both an extraordinary awareness of environmental conditions and, through that, a sense of consciousness and connectivity with the natural world and all its inhabitants. Prior to the onset of modernity, most people on this planet retained some degree of Indigeneity under this definition. I contrast indigeneity with modernity, the mode of human–­environment interaction based on industrial capitalism and characterized by commodification and exploitation of the environment. Capitalism fosters individual gain blind to consequences for other people, animals, and the natural world. And this approach...

Toward a "Subjectless" Discourse: Engaging Transnationalist and Postcolonial Approaches in Asian American Studies Nhi Lieu (bio) Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique . By Kandice Chuh. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 215pages. $59.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Inspired by Avery Gordon's evocative envisioning of a transformative social existence, Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwiseanalytically employs Asian American literature to unravel and reflect upon the complex dimensions of the category "Asian America." 1This productive enterprise questions the underpinnings of Asian American studies itself. As a field undergoing theoretical self-reflection, contemporary Asian American studies has often been characterized by the controversy over its representational politics. Since the field's inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Asian American studies scholars have been struggling with the epistemological question of its object of knowledge. Chuh "advanc(es) a critical approach to the study of Asian American literatures that conceives of that work as theoretical devices that help us apprehend and unravel the narrative dimensions of naturalized racial, sexual, gender, and national identities" (x). In so doing, Chuh questions the relationships between power, subjectivity, racial structures, historicity, and legal categories. Imagine Otherwisebegins by recounting the controversy that erupted at the 1998 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference when the organization awarded Lois Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging(1997) the prize for best fiction. Set in Hawai'i, Blu's Hangingdirectly defies preconceived notions about the islands as a perfect paradise by grappling with dark themes such as poverty, despair, violence, and the loss of innocence. Yamanaka's stark portrayal of physical abuse sets three young Japanese American children against a Filipino American sexual predator. Some members of the Asian [End Page 491]American Studies Association charged this representation with being racist against Filipinos and perpetuating negative stereotypes about Filipino men as sexual deviants. While Blu's Hangingconfronted many difficult and delicate issues within the Asian American community, the intra-ethnic conflict that would ensue at the association's meeting nonetheless surprised many. Chuh observes that "this controversy functioned as a crucible for testing the politics and practices of the association and its membership, dramatically highlighting marginalization and exclusionary knowledge politics within Asian American studies" (2). Using this test case as a starting point, Chuh brilliantly takes apart assumptions about "Asian America" in order to further a "subjectless analysis" that challenges Asian American representation as uniform, stable, monolithic, and essentialist. Chuh unravels the limits of an identity-based paradigm as the foundational basis for Asian American studies and suggests that "critique" replace the subject as the object of inquiry. Using literary and legal texts, Chuh displaces cultural nationalism as a political objective in identity-based categories and provides a productive analysis of race and sexuality in order to dispel the idea of a uniform subjectivity. Through critical readings of Carlos Bulosan's novel America Is in the Heartand Bienvenido Santos's short story "Immigration Blues," Chuh argues for a need to rethink the U.S. colonization of the Philippines as a racialized and sexualized historical project that contributes to Filipinos/Filipino American subject formation (38). As she asserts, the domination of the Philippines by the United States not only demonstrated the virility of white masculinity, but also created conditions that contradicted American principles of liberty and justice. In particular, U.S. law prohibited colonized subjects of the nation-state from being incorporated as citizen-subjects. Chuh carefully examines literary productions and legal cases filed by Filipino Americans who sought citizenship through military service. Despite their legal status as U.S. nationals, Filipino immigrants remained ineligible for citizenship because of their racial status and perceived threatening masculinity. Chuh argues that these incoherent legal and cultural positionings of Filipino Americans refuse categorization within the framework of a singular nationalist discourse and thus function as "a critique rather than identity" (56). Chuh uncovers the problem of privileging race as the primary analytical category and urges readers to think about other possibilities for organizing Asian American studies. The construct of "Filipino America" is promising precisely " becauseof its categorical flux" (57, her emphasis). Asian American studies may thus emerge "as a discourse critical of identity, of...

Reviewed by: Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen Hsinya Huang Allen, Chadwick. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. $75.00 hc. $25.00 sc.336pp. In Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Chadwick Allen develops methodologies for global Indigenous literary studies by challenging us to think beyond the national borders of contemporary (settler) nation-states and to focus on Indigenous-to-Indigenous relationships instead. He reorients understandings of transnationality and indigeneity through juxtaposition of diverse Indigenous texts and, in so doing, provides significant impulses, especially in the fields of Native American and comparative Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and global cultural studies, which affect the practice and transformation of intellectual work in global/transnational American studies as well as Indigenous studies. In an earlier article, titled “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies That Are Trans-Indigenous?,” which he rewrote as the introduction to Trans-Indigenous, Allen reminds us that conventional theories of the transnational operate on a “vertical binary” (2012a, 3) that subordinates Indigenous peoples. As we work toward a new model that Allen calls “trans-Indigenous,” we need “to see [Indigenous texts] on their own complex and evolving terms” (3). In this full-length monograph, Allen prioritizes [End Page 195] “the global Indigenous” (2012b, xvii) by juxtaposing Indigenous texts from Native North America, Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and Australia. The point is to engage these texts into close conversations and to “acknowledge the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts” (xiv): Allen investigates Indigenous roots in terms of global routes. Trans-Indigenous configures different channels of crossing. It crosses over different fields of inquiries and offers impressive multiperspectivism, which it terms “scholarship across” (xix). It transcends the grids of genre, form, and media and highlights distinct Indigenous aesthetics that mix poetry, photography, sculpture, carving, textile, and live performance, etc.—“making across” (xxii). The language employed transgresses English-centered ideology, for English and Indigenous languages are engaged on equal terms—“reading across” (xxvi). The authors investigated display complex and diverse identities and connections that are not only tribal, intertribal, and transnational, but also “significantly and increasingly trans-Indigenous” (xxxiii)—“identities cross” (xxxi). And, finally, there are complex and innovative patterns of design, thinking, knowledge systems, theories, and intersections, which are marvelously woven to contribute to the trans-Indigenous scholarship—“patterning across” (xxxiii). In addition to the introduction, there are five chapters organized into two parts. The two chapters in part 1, “Recovery/Interpretation,” focus on Indigenous methodologies in order to light new avenues toward a comprehensive understanding of comparative Indigenous studies. They demonstrate how recovering and reclaiming Indigenous texts that have been consigned to oblivion would necessarily reorient and redirect methods of Indigenous literary interpretation. Allen reflects from the vantage point of his intellectual commitment to American Indian literatures, cultures, and scholarship. He sets out to re-vision “The Indian Today,” the Fall 1965 special issue of Midcontinent American Studies, within contemporary international perspectives. The aim is to interrogate how the settler colonialism practiced within the US may be related to US imperialism at large and to “various manifestations of colonialism” (xxxiii) around the globe, thereby setting up the ground for comparative studies of settlers’ dominance and Indigenous struggles in the transnational context. Part 2, “Interpretation/Recovery,” enacts multiple modes of trans-Indigenous juxtaposition across tribes and beyond nations. Allen is keen on revealing the dynamic power of various texts and, by providing careful and thoughtful close readings of Indigenous literature, art, and technology, he reclaims aspects of the Indigenous archives from North America, Hawai‘i, Australia, and New Zealand and engages them into productive conversations. He begins with three readings of N. Scott Momaday’s brief poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” and associates it with Plains Indian pictographic discourses, and retrieves multimedia events of Native American storytelling. In so doing, he aims to intertwine Indigenous poetics and aesthetics for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts. Using Momaday’s poem as an entry point, in the next chapter he stages multiple juxtapositions of diverse Indigenous texts across historical and geographical [End Page 196] boundaries and across genres and media...

Editors' Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino The Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) began publication in 1998 as the official publication of the Association for Asian American Studies. With the current issue, we are now commemorating the journal's twenty-fifth anniversary and to mark this significant moment, we invited distinguished scholars to comment on what they view as important intellectual developments in Asian American Studies. We had intended these "reflections of the field" essays to provide a focused and timely critique on a given topic that coincides with their own area of research. In their respective essays, Moon-Ho Jung, Professor and the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies in the History Department at the University of Washington, and Martin Manalansan IV, Professor and the Beverly & Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts in the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, did just this and more. Moon-Ho Jung begins with an arresting vignette–lasting a few minutes at most–of an interaction between Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn that occurred in 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq. This fleeting interaction sets the stage for Jung's incisive critique of nationalism and its persistent existence in articulations of Asian American history. Like some of the most significant contributions in Asian American studies, Jung takes a seemingly minute exchange and analytically pulls out a meaningful assertation that lies beneath–that the narrative of "immigrant America" is a nationalistic, sanitizing process that reinforces US empire. Martin Manalansan, takes a different but equally powerful approach in his essay. Following his own (disjointed) career trajectory, Manalansan outlines the experience of exceptionalism and isolation that results from the ways in which Asian American studies and LGBTQ studies have each worked to institutionalize their respective fields. Ever the optimist, Manalansan concludes his essay by providing an analytical key to creating a more expansive, fluid, and [End Page v] coalitional future–it is in fact something we already know as foundational to the beginnings of both Asian American studies and LGBTQ studies. He writes that we need to get back to "street knowledge;" grounded in the "realities of injustices, oppressions, and violence that compel us to act and move beyond institutionalized arrangements and scripted futures." To round out the commemorative section of this issue, Donna Doan Anderson took on the challenge of articulating a history of JAAS. Editorial Assistant for JAAS and graduate student in history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, Anderson contacted past editors of JAAS and sorted through data accumulated over the past twenty-five years to provide a snapshot of the journal and its reflection of the many shifts and tensions in the field. Anderson astutely notes that JAAS exists to "grapple with the field's growing pains" and, while the journal has successfully developed into an important academic resource (top 10 percent of journals viewed on Project MUSE!), questions remain about the costs of institutionalization and the current purpose of Asian American studies. As Editors of JAAS, we view these pressing, difficult concerns as central to the continued relevance of the journal itself. It is why JAAS exists. The next section of this issue is devoted to two research articles. The first is an important contribution by Na-Rae Kim, which focuses on the shifting cultural, legal, and political uses of North Koreans in the US imaginary. Bringing together theoretical critiques of war, militarization, humanitarianism, and critical refugee studies, Kim analyzes memoirs by a North Korean defector and a Korean American journalist about their experiences in North Korea, both published in 2015. Kim argues that 2015 was a pivotal year in which North Korean refugees became assimilable; culminating in 2018, when Donald Trump (who won the presidency based largely on anti-immigration politics) featured Ji Seong-ho, a North Korean defector, as an "American hero" in his State of the Union address. Kim's fascinating interdisciplinary study thoughtfully and engagingly explains how such an incongruent event came to pass. She shows also that the narrative structure of both memoirs are familiar constructions, with deep roots in both US and global literary traditions. Kim summarizes her analysis by reinforcing a foundational lesson in...

Centering Hawai'i:Lessons on and beyond United States Empire Hōkūlani K. Aikau (bio) Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism. By J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 275 pages. $95.68 (cloth). $26.95 (paper). Return to Kahiki: Native Hawaiians in Oceania. By Kealani Cook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 255 pages. $49.99 (cloth). $29.99 (paper). Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood. By Dean Itsuji Saranillio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 282 pages. 100.22 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). In 1993, Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease coedited the collection Cultures of United States Imperialism, a seven-hundred-page volume calling for a shift in American studies toward sustained analysis of US Empire. Kaplan identifies "three salient absences" in the academic study of American Empire and American Exceptionalism, which, she argues, contribute to an "ongoing pattern of denial across several disciplines: the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism."1 The three books under review are excellent examples of contemporary scholarship that heeds Kaplan's call. Their methodological, historical, and analytic breadth illuminates the complex and enduring forces and cultural dimensions of US imperialism. These authors go even further by demonstrating how indigeneity as an analytic category is central to understanding settler colonialism. Just as Kaplan and Pease identify "an ideological disjuncture" in the very foundations of the discipline, at a panel during the 2015 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Robert Warrior reminded the audience that another cognitive gap persists. American studies' ongoing articulation of whiteness with national culture has resulted in the persistent marginalization of Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) within the field. Warrior's [End Page 867] content analysis of the ASA program from 1998 to 2014 found that topics focused on settler colonial studies significantly outnumbered those that featured NAIS topics. The exception was when NAIS scholars were on the program committee or serving as ASA president. Warrior's findings suggest that twenty years on from the publication of Cultures of US Imperialism the cognitive gap persists and has expanded. These three books fill this cognitive gap by centering indigeneity as an analytic and demonstrate how NAIS is essential to any analysis of US Empire and settler colonialism. Another cognitive gap that Native Pacific cultural studies scholars have highlighted is the absence of Oceania from the study of American national culture and politics. As the Chamorro scholar Keith Camacho explained in 2011, Oceania "[plays] a vital role in the making and unmaking of the American empire from the late nineteenth century to the present."2 "Oceanizing American Studies," Greg Dvorak's contribution to the special issue of American Quarterly that inaugurated the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa as the new home of the flagship journal for the ASA, reiterates the need for American studies to center Oceania in research on US imperialism and settler colonialism.3 These three books provide illustrative examples of what can be learned about American Empire, specifically, and coloniality and imperialism generally when Hawai'i is centered methodologically and theoretically. Each book is an exemplar of how NAIS scholars offer analytic tools and methodological insights about American nationalism and US Empire from the viewpoint of those on the front lines of decolonization and anti-imperialism. In a time when the United States is yet again grappling with disease, racism, and antidemocratic legislation, these texts provide crystal clear evidence that this is not new or unexpected. Rather, when the history of US imperialism and settler colonialism in Oceania and Hawai'i are placed at the center of analysis, we learn that "democracy" has been a rallying cry of white supremacy, capitalist greed, and heteropatriarchy all along. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui's book chronologically bookends the historical periods addressed in these three books. As she explains, "Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty … seeks to demonstrate how white American notions of property title, state sovereignty, and normative gender and sexuality become intimately imbricated in aspirations for Hawaiian liberation and in...

Reviewed by: Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 ed. by Theresa Strouth Gaul Michael P. Taylor (bio) Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 Edited by theresa strouth gaul Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014 289 pp. Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 offers to Americanists and Native Americanists alike a versatile collection of perhaps the earliest published Native American woman author in the United States. Until Theresa Strouth Gaul gathered and recontextualized Catharine Brown's (Cherokee) letters and diary alongside other nineteenth-century representations of Brown in Cherokee Sister, scholars had remembered Brown largely through an 1825 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions publication, Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation (1825). As its title suggests, Memoir narrates Brown as unilaterally assimilated into white Protestantism and celebrates her as a model Christian convert. As a result, contemporary scholarship has likewise often reduced Brown to narratives of isolated assimilation rather than placing her either within her specific Cherokee community or within broader conversations with such now-canonized contemporaries as William Apess (Pequot), Elias Boudinot (Cherokee), and Black Hawk (Sauk). By privileging Memoir's oversimplification of Brown over the inherent complexities and contexts of Brown's own writings, scholars have so far, albeit unintentionally, disconnected her from such critical contemporaneous and contemporary issues as Native American sovereignty, land, kinship, and the ongoing epidemic of sexual-colonial violence against Native American women. As Gaul suggests in her carefully constructed editor's introduction, Cherokee Sister responds to the ongoing reduction of Brown by "put[ting] the pen back in her hand" (2). By doing so, Cherokee Sister not only restores autonomy to Brown's [End Page 218] writings, it also reasserts Brown's articulate agency as an early Cherokee woman who interpreted, taught, exhorted, and wrote toward her stated goal to "be useful to [her] people" (73). Beyond republishing the writings of yet another important early Native American woman writer within the growing body of Native American literature, Cherokee Sister will prove valuable to a wide range of college classrooms. Brown's writings directly address issues central to American literary studies, Native American studies, Cherokee studies, religious studies, and gender studies. Gaul's collection also offers ample analytical opportunities for classroom studies of nineteenth-century biography, autobiography, epistolary writing, and diary writing. While Gaul gracefully places Cherokee Sister at the "nexus" of each of these disciplines, however, she places the responsibility onto teachers and students to construct the more comprehensive context(s) necessary in order to situate Brown in a more direct relationship with any one of these disciplinary frameworks (5). In terms of Brown's place within current discussions of Native American or Cherokee studies, for example, Gaul places Brown's writing in conversation with Cherokee scholars Daniel Heath Justice and Jace Weaver in order to emphasize her place within the Cherokee literary tradition. Yet Gaul has not fully reconstructed the relationships between Brown and such contemporaneous Cherokee women writing and community-specific literary activism as the 1817 Cherokee women's petition against Indian Removal. It is likewise up to the teacher or student to analyze Brown in conversation with such broader contemporary currents in indigenous feminism, indigenous literary nationalism, and transindigeneity. Although Gaul could have claimed a greater significance for Cherokee Sister by situating Brown's writing more overtly within the long tradition of Cherokee women writing or within specific branches of current Native American and indigenous studies, Cherokee Sister's ability to speak to so many interconnected contexts and issues will service a range of college classrooms toward a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of agency and adaptation in nineteenth-century Native American literatures. I am eager to work alongside my students to (re)connect Brown further to the intricate networks of early and contemporary Native American women writers as part of my indigenous and American literature classes. [End Page 219] Michael P. Taylor Brigham Young University Michael P. Taylor michael p. taylor is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. He teaches in the fields of indigenous studies, American studies, and nineteenth-century American literature. His scholarship focuses on indigenous literary...

Transnationalism and Asian American Studies as a Migration-Centered Project Madeline Y. Hsu (bio) In this article, I address Asian American Studies' preoccupation with borders—particularly that of the American nation-state as defined by race, by laws, and by institutions. I argue that much of Asian American Studies scholarship is concerned with the multiple roles performed by Asians in the defining and enforcing of America's boundaries—the symbolism of Asians in defining racial and cultural borders, how Asians might rearticulate both those borders and themselves to claim inclusion within, the legal and institutional manifestations of those racial and physical borders, and how deeply embedded the binaristic othering of Asians/Orientals has been in America's nation-building processes. I wish here to explore the contrasting possibilities offered by transnational approaches that permit us to relinquish this nation-based framework and to place migration and migrants—with their complicated sets of negotiations, multilayered realities, and multidirectional orientations—at the center of our discussion. In so doing, I attempt to defuse the seemingly intractable tension and threat associated with the "unassimilable foreigners" and migrants that constitute the bulk of Asian American subjects. Because they do not fit neatly into America's nation-building prerogatives, and because their transnationally constituted communities and circles of activity are so often construed as national threats, Asian Americans have faced a particularly pernicious kind of discrimination. [End Page 185] As described by Eiichiro Azuma, "Whether they were members of the first generation or the second generation, a significant number of historical agents have been omitted from intellectual inquiry and interpretation as personae non grata in history."1 My goal here is to recover some of these "lost lives" and to demonstrate the violence of their disappearance from Asian American history. This article responds to Donna Gabaccia's call "to query the tyranny of the national in the discipline of history," albeit in Asian American Studies.2 In a 1999 essay, Gabaccia critiqued the unidirectional trajectory of "the immigrant paradigm and its well-worn paths of immigration and adaptation to the United States" and directed attention instead to "the continuous, multidirectional, and circular character of migrations."3 The image of America as a "melting pot" or "nation of immigrants" relies upon the monolithic narrative of one-way migration, settlement, adaptation, and ultimately assimilation. Such territorializing conceptualizations of the movement of human bodies tend to dominate the discourse, as described by Wang Gungwu: People were identified by the territory, whether large or small, to which they belonged. Entities like communities, nation-states, confederations, and alliances were studied mainly in terms of the places occupied and fought over. Migration studies were generally placed in the context of local, national, and regional history or international and even an interdependent world history. Each of these approaches reflects a primary concern for the politics of physical space.4 Asian American Studies in its turn has been largely compliant by fitting its scholarship within nation-state prerogatives. Asian American Studies was born as a redemptive project, as a concerted attempt to claim America for once outcast Asian peoples. Redemption required that Asian Americans conform to mainstream norms that for much of American history have centered on the assimilated white, male, heterosexual father and husband as the standard for citizenship. This vision was first articulated by Michael-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur in Letters from an American Farmer in 1782: What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, [End Page 186] which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. . . . Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world...

Issei Buddhism in the Americas makes a unique contribution both to Asian and Asian American studies. The authors premise Issei Buddhism in the Americas as a final stage in bukkyo tozen, the eastward-moving transmission of Buddhism from India traditionally thought to have ended in Japan. Their work is thus a contribution to Asian studies, both in terms of how Japan entered a global age and of extending the analysis of a Japanese religious form to the Americas. Following Eiichiro Azuma, the editors and their colleagues demonstrate that Issei Buddhists lived "between two empires," as their experiences of dislocation from Japan and relocation during the American internment transmitted Buddhism farther into the American interior. This volume's particular strength is in the authors' extensive usage of Japanese language sources, a method that transcends the contemporary historiography's over-dependence on Nisei Christian sources. That said, most of the essays also position first-generation Japanese forms of Buddhism in relation to versions of Christianity found in the Americas.

Introduction John M. Liu and Gary Y. Okihiro The end of certain time periods frequently occasion reflection - assessments of accomplishments, identification of issues yet to be addressed, making resolutions, no matter how unrealistic, and taking strides toward realizing those decisions. With the changeover to a new year, century, and millennium, this certainly seems the appropriate time to engage in such thoughts. Thus, the editors have designated all three numbers of volume three of the Journal of Asian American Studies for the year 2000 as its millennial trilogy. Whether the year represents the end of the second Christian millennium or the beginning of the third, we leave for our readers to decide. Each of the millennial trilogy is dedicated to a specific topic in Asian American studies: number one, pedagogy and community; number two, articulations of race; and number three, cultural productions. The editors developed the initial framework and proposed it to JAAS’s editorial board, which enthusiastically approved the plan. Moreover, several board members volunteered to serve as guest editors. Shirley Hune and Phil Tajitsu Nash have edited this issue on pedagogy and community. The guest editors for number two on the articulations of race are Yen Le Espiritu, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and Nazli Kibria, while Soo-Young Chin, Peter Feng, and Josephine Lee will edit number three on cultural productions. Obviously, these themes far from exhaust the topics currently raised and discussed within the field, and these three special issues can not comprehensively cover the numerous dimensions encompassed within each theme. Nonetheless, the trilogy touch upon many of the questions [End Page 1] that Asian Americanists have confronted as well as the new areas of exploration and explication. The choice of these subject matters is meant primarily to serve as a stimulus for further dialogues among our colleagues, as are the following comments. The first issue on pedagogy and community raises questions about why we teach Asian American studies and for whom. Those questions were critical to the formation of the field and remain so, particularly as Asian American studies becomes increasingly institutionalized on campuses in various regions of the country, despite continued resistance and/or neglect from academia. In the past decade, there has been what appears to be an explosion of academic positions available for Asian Americanist scholars as new programs have been established in geographic areas where Asian American studies has been traditionally strong, such as the Pacific Coast schools, but also on campuses, for instance, in Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, and Texas, places where the field did not foresee establishing a presence at the time of its genesis. This relative cornucopia of academic positions and programs has raised anew questions at whom Asian American studies programs should be directed. Its institutionalization mandates an examination of how far the field has wandered from the impulses that gave rise to Asian American studies. To serve the community was a founding principal in the establishment of Asian American studies programs. Over the past three decades, the complexity of this community has increased with the continuous migration of ethnically diverse Asian populations into an ever-changing U.S. political economy. Some of the political and intellectual currents generated by this development are renewed debates among scholars and activists as to who comprises the community served by Asian American studies? what criteria are to be used and who determines these criteria in assessing the quality and worth of the scholarship now being produced? and what purpose does this scholarship serve? Those were among the key issues confronted by participants during the eventful 1998 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies in Honolulu. Transitory answers to the questions emerging from the new multiplicities of Asian American communities include the greater participation by Asian Americanists in public policy debates and the articulation of new [End Page 2] theoretical orientations to encompass issues such as sexuality and diasporic/transnational cultural identities. New directions and paradigms also necessitate a re-examination of how we teach Asian American studies. Since its inception, Asian American studies has striven to be interdisciplinary, but what does this entail? Being interdisciplinary can be narrowly interpreted as crossing established disciplinary boundaries within either the humanities or social sciences. It...