Curtain Up

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...

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...

The Sage in the Cathedral of Books: The Distinguished Chinese American Library Professional Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee

Guest Editors' Introduction

Walking with Asian American Studies Jason Oliver Chang (bio) January was busy for me. As director of an Asian American studies program, I was prepping a new exhibit on the Filipino nurse diaspora in the University of Connecticut's School of Nursing and getting ready for my spring course on Asian American history. It was at this time that I began learning about the epidemic in Wuhan, China, that would become the COVID-19 pandemic. One of my collaborators at the School of Nursing was a grad student from Wuhan, and we were able to talk about his family's experience in the quarantine. That was the first time I imagined what a widespread quarantine in the United States might look like. My first thought was about how my family's lives might be changed by the public health necessity of quarantine, and my second thought was a feeling of dread that anti-Asian racism was going to surge. The signs that the disease was being characterized in racial terms began to pop up in advance of the virus, because it had clearly arrived in other parts of the world by January. In a conversation with my colleague, Professor Tom Long,1 we discussed the value of collecting reported incidents of pathogen racism as we noted the spread of despicable memes and racist incidents targeting Chinese and Asian-descended people in places that did not have any reported cases of the virus. January was a harbinger of the rest of the semester and most likely the remainder of 2020. It was at this point that I began to walk with Asian American studies in ways I hadn't before. By walking, I mean to say putting Asian American studies to work outside the classroom and finding a public pedagogy. After Lunar New Year, I began to collect the newspaper articles reporting on early incidents of pathogen racism. I collected them in an open-source [End Page 329] Google document, entitled "Treating Yellow Peril." On January 27, 2020, I tweeted out a link asking people to help assemble a robust account of the worldwide reporting on racist persecution, attacks, boycotts and harassment related to the development of the COVID-19 pandemic although at that time it was still considered an epidemic localized in China.I knew that I was not going to be able to stay up-to-date with how fast the news changes, so I felt it was important that the resource remain crowdsourced in the hope that people with different experiences would be able to contribute in meaningful ways. My initial goal was to try to gauge the gravity of the situation. I suspected that this was something that could impact UConn, and I wanted to prepare the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, where I serve as director. We needed to be ready to respond to the mental health and social consequences of anti-Asian racism that could accompany the rise of the virus and potential spread to the United States, which increasingly felt like a distinct possibility. I was surprised by the rapid response to my call for help on social media. The original tweet generated more than 40,000 connections to the resource since May 2020. Reporting from around the world in six languages covering Europe and Anglophone Asia all told the same story: Chinese and Asian-descended people were being targeted for harassment, exclusion, and attacks, and institutions were arbitrarily banning Asian people—many singling out Chinese people. Indeed, this story has always been the same and is well scripted. The racist settler narrative of Yellow Peril was being revived on a global scale at the pace of social media. This early phase of collection of incidents showed some interesting patterns. First, anti-Chinese politics served as political currency across East Asia and Southeast Asia. Second, anti-Chinese politics and policies lumped Taiwan together with mainland China. Third, Hindutva Indian nationalists were leaders in anti-Chinese racism in Asia. These early signs suggested that interpretations of the virus would fuel anti-Chinese racism as the pandemic worsened. While the list of sources grew, so too did the uses of this resource. Unexpectedly, the resource...

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.

Since the late 1960s, Asian American studies began to become a significant discipline and a common response to the immigrant experiences, but most of the discussions unbalancedly focus on reacting against the racial and ethnic discrimination imposed on the minority immigrants; that is why the assertions such as “claiming American” (to quote Maxine Hong Kingston) or “uncovering the buried past (to quote Japanese American historian Yuji Ichioka) are advocated vehemently in their search of an (American) identity. However, the category of Asian American or Chinese American and the position against a hegemonic majority, is no longer sufficient and even not adequate for a more recent and diverse group of emerging Asian immigrants, who may not be primarily concerned with the to-be-or-not-to-be dilemma or worlds-choosing. Since Asian immigrants historically have been considered transnational and diasporic, Asian American studies' focus on either the American experiences of Asian immigrants or the rootedness of Asian Americans in the United States needs to be reevaluated. In other words, what emerges out of the hyphenated-status discussion is the demand to rethink and reconceptualize the original ideal of an Asian American identity rooted in the U.S. experience and the need to include a variety of Asian American experiences that go beyond the national boundary of the United States. Like what Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Arif Dirlik maintain in Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization, important issues, such as how Asian American studies involve more relevance to a transnational and immigrating aspect and also incorporate diasporic linkages in Asian immigrant experiences, need to be emphasized and scrutinized. The thesis is composed of two parts, attempting to incorporate textual analysis with the Chinese translation of the novel. The first part the thesis is composed of four chapters. In the first chapter, I provide a brief account of Chinese immigration history to serve as a background understanding of Chuang Hua’s Crossings. Besides, a succinct introduction of Crossings is presented too, partly to emphasize its significance and its difference from other Chinese immigrant narratives better known, and partly to spell out the issues of identity and exilic status. In Chapter Two of this thesis, my focus is on the protagonist, Fourth Jane, the patriarchal principles she has to obey, and the “system of balances” she is cast in. For this middle child in her traditional family, she experiences cross-cultural narratives about being a daughter and a female in an unyielding familiar structure and in a stagnant love relationship with her unnamed Parisian lover, as well as being a Chinese emigre in Europe in the 1960s. Her own individual displacement is a mobility not merely crossing from homecoming to wandering as a defiant female, but also crossing from England to America to Paris as a Chinese. Furthermore, I argue for a different reading of exile to elucidate the minority mobile subjects’ identities. Conventionally, exile is experienced as a dislocation, both physical and psychic. However, exile may also offer liberating possibilities. Amy Kaminsky notes that the experience of physical and emotional rupture can lead to personal growth and transformation. Through the discovery of an inner capacity “to survive and grow in the new environment” (37), one may find a greater independence and confidence and thus gain a more fulfilling self-affirmation and realization. This act of self-discovery to rebirth can be seen as an emergence of new personhood and subjectivity. The concept of “identity on the move” can also be associated with the immigrant’s position in exile and between worlds, and the unfixed ethnicity should be put within this framework of discussion as well. Chapter Three of the thesis reexamines the framework of “between-worlds” and the search of self under the “Orientalist” stereotype and in dislocation. The feeling of being between worlds, totally at home nowhere is a duality that is characteristic of all people on the move and in a minority position. The feeling of being between worlds is at the core of many ethnic minority writers and, consequently, of the books they write. Superficially, Chuang Hua’s Crossings deal with the “between-worlds” ambiguity fostered in the protagonist’s mind; however, Chuang Hua tries to accomplish more to carve out a new position for Fourth Jane while confronting the “between-worlds” complex and suffering from a personal fragmentedness. The between-world complexity is indeed a paradox, for Fourth Jane the female emigre is simultaneously subordinate and central, victimized and heroic and active. On the one hand, being caught between worlds can be interpreted to mean occupying the space or gulf between two banks; then, one is in a state of suspension, accepted by neither side and therefore truly belonging nowhere, which could lead to identity fragmentation. On the other hand, viewed from a different perspective, being between worlds may be considered as having footholds on both banks and therefore belonging to two worlds at once. One not only has less but also enjoys more. What is interesting is that Fourth Jane entirely experiences the two aspects of being between worlds, and the two aspects seem to be a linear procession from belonging to nowhere to owning both worlds. This is a path to epiphany. The space of alienation and the interstitial position between worlds become the space of self-liberation and self-exploration. Also, in the context of globalization and internationalization, not only the role of Asian American studies but the migrating subjects are going through an identity shift. The duality of the between-world condition and the hyphenated identity definitely need to be reexamined in dealing with narratives by Asians in exile. The traditional negotiation of being between “two” worlds and the embarrassment of hyphenated identity now seem to be limited and inconvincible while we read works of Asian immigrating writers. More and more critics have attempted to redefine the place of these hyphenated Asians, and to describe them in different ways. Sau-ling Wong, for instance, uses the term “denationalization” to explain the easing of cultural national concerns and the shifting from a domestic to a diasporic perspective. Shirley Geok-lin Lim in her essay “Immigration and Diaspora” employs the categories of “immigrant and diasporic” to view U.S. minority literature and cosmopolitan, metropolitan literature (290). These different perspectives could be a help for us to read the narratives of Asian immigrant writers of recent decades without identifying them as merely conventional ethnic minority and immigrants. As an immigrant narrative read within the parameters of Chinese American literature, the transnational and global constituents embedded in the novel can be neglected easily; thus in the concluding chapter, I attempt to discuss whether it is possible to view Chuang’s Crossings as a “global narrative,” with the hope to carve out a different way to read Chinese immigrant literature. In dealing with narratives by Asians in the diaspora, Eleanor Ty contends that “global novelists” or “global writing” is a more accurate term. Crossings, like the global narratives, highlights movement, instability, and the importance of standpoint or location. To a certain extent, it reveals the way transportation/moving, transnational crossing and globalization has shifted and changed the meaning and the signifier “Asian American” or “Asian European.” What I am also interested in looking at in the final section is narratives by Asians in the diaspora whose works fall outside of this hyphenated paradigm of Asian-plus-adopted-country. In the last few decades, Asians in the diaspora have produced books and films which deal not only with immigration or being caught “between worlds” but also with transnational mobility and exile. They contribute to the creation of what D. N. Rodowick calls a “globalized cosmopolitan public sphere,” a “contradictory and heterogeneous transnational space” (14). He argues that “postmodern forces of globalization have shifted or, more precisely multiplied and complicated centers of power so as to diminish the forms of self-identity conveyed or constructed by nationality” (14). Thus mobile identities and mobile citizens, including “expatriate intellectual” and the “new cosmopolitans,” emerge out. Chuang Hua’s Crossings does deal with questions of identity and subjectivity of the Asian subject, but it does not limit the subject in the adopted America or in the native China respectively, but relocates the subject in the suspension and duration of different continents. Chuang in a way brings a global perspective to the otherwise narrowly defined parameters of hyphenated identities of Asian American or Chinese American. I am not arguing for an abolition of the label Asian American or the Asian-plus-adopted-country paradigm per se. What I want to call attention to in this final section is the fluidity of subjectivity and positions available to Asian Americans. Stressing the unstable and cosmopolitan identity aspects of the novel is another way of pointing out the transnational, transcultural, and fluid potential that I think liberating in Crossings and in works by Chinese American or Asian American authors.

Much has been written the cultural alternatives continuity, rapture, or invention in recent years. has become a pervasive thread that runs not only throughout the cultural production ethnic intracultures such as the Asian American one, but also throughout the cultural production the mainstream United States, for, as Oscar Handlin points out, the history immigration is the history America (qtd. in Sollors, Literature 649). All three stances, cultural continuity, rupture, and invention, find an appropriate formal representation in the trope the ritual/ceremony. Taking as the starting point for my argument Alan Wald's differentiation between ritual and ceremony as first implied in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, I intend to deal here with the dialogic tensions between ritual and ceremony in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, in the intertextual context Chinese-American literature. I will consider Jen's problematizing Sollor's binary consent and descent. As Sau-ling Wong points out, (1) at least three new tendencies can be observed in the Asian American critical field: the abatement cultural nationalism, the increasing permeability between Asian and Asian American studies and communities, and, last but not least, the new favouring diasporic domestic approaches to Asian America (1-2). However, the necessary denationalization that draws critics and scholars away from dangerous essentialist stances is often offset by the attendant depoliticization Asian American issues. On the one hand, we ought to bear in mind the risks falling back into narrow understandings identity and nation. Yet, as Wong reminds us, we still have to take into account the urgent need to contextualize and recontextualize the understanding Asian American studies, and, by extension, ethnic studies, in order to avoid constructing a dehistoricized dichotomy (12) between the internationalist, deconstructivist mode and the old cultural nationalism the Aiiieeeee school. We must situate our analysis Mona in the Promised Land in this theoretical framework so as to prevent readers from perceiving the ritual-ceremony binarism, or the alternatives continuity, rupture, or invention, as fixed, chronological choices. What could be suggested instead is the strong likelihood that these two cultural and literary tropes function in a concurrent way. We thus echo Sau-ling Wong's advice regarding the new Asian American state affairs: It would be far more useful to conceive modes rather than phases Asian American subjectivity: an indigenizing mode can coexist and alternate with a diasporic or a transnational mode, but the latter is not to be lauded as a culmination the former (Denationalization 17). The distinction between ritual and ceremony as pointed out by Alan Wald can then be analysed from a diachronic and a synchronic point view. In the first case, we could trace back the essentialist, nationalistic thesis and then describe the responding feminist and deconstructivist antitheses. And yet, it is preferable to keep chronology out the foreground since it would easily mislead us into thinking that, once Kingston and later writers have contested the masculinist and essentialistic agenda cultural nationalism, Asian Americans have got over and grown out of that stage, and no reference to it is needed. Thus, the focus my analysis is not so much on the rise these different perspectives, although we must mention their genesis in passing. Rather, I will focus on the crucial synchronic description the palette that goes, spatially, from the mode ceremony to that ritual, or vice versa, in Mona in the Promised Land. Wald studies Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and discovers new insights that contribute to a more enlightened understanding spirituality. Ceremony is Silko's recording Tayo's spiritual quest with the help a mentor, a heterodox medicine man. …

“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...

Building upon recent work in Asian and Asian American studies, this essay explores dissonance, rather than disinterestedness, and its function and form for literary studies in our present time. It is inspired not only by my rereading of Matthew Arnold’s essay but also the convergence of key events over the course of the last few years, ranging from recent attention to Asian and Asian American cultural production to anti-Asian hate crimes. As an Asian Americanist, I research and teach in a field whose very emergence was tied to activist claims for institutional and disciplinary space. I therefore find it profoundly difficult to imagine our endeavors in American literary studies as “disinterested.” I am less invested in making the case whether or not the study of Asian American literature “matters”; rather, here I explore why Asian American literary studies—a method that seeks out and dwells in dissonance and urgency rather than disinterestedness and patience—might be a model worth continuing.

Insurgency and Asian American Studies in the Time of Black Lives Matter Justin Leroy (bio) Peter Liang has the distinction of being one of approximately a dozen police officers convicted of murder or manslaughter for killing a civilian while on duty since 2005. Liang's victim was Akai Gurley, a black man shot dead after Liang fired his weapon into an empty stairwell of the East New York public housing complex where Gurley lived. A New York Supreme Court justice eventually reduced Liang's charge to criminally negligent homicide and declined to sentence him to serve time in prison. However, the initial charge of second-degree manslaughter could have sent Liang away for fifteen years. Liang was the only NYPD officer convicted in an on-duty shooting in well over a decade; the question of whether he was a racial scapegoat soon emerged. Asian American activists in New York City and beyond mobilized in defense of Liang, in what New York Times staff writer Jay Caspian Kang called "the most pivotal moment in the Asian-American community since the Rodney King riots" more than two decades earlier.1 In response, many young, progressive Asian Americans engaged their families and communities about issues of police brutality and the importance of Black Lives Matter. The authors of a widely translated "Letter for Black Lives" explained that the constant threat of violence black Americans face is not the same as other forms of discrimination, and made the case that the (always incomplete) civil rights protections Asian Americans do enjoy is in large part due to black-led freedom struggles.2 The letter was a tremendous show of solidarity, and served as a template for other groups, such as Latinos and second-generation Africans, to discuss antiblackness with their families as well. Still, the letter is fraught with old tropes. It draws too sharp a distinction between black and Asian racialization, as when the authors write, "It's true [End Page 279] we face discrimination … but for the most part, nobody thinks 'dangerous criminal' when we are walking down the street." Many South Asian, Muslim, and Arab Americans are in fact considered "dangerous" while walking down the street, boarding a plane, or speaking Arabic or Urdu in public. The letter concludes by referencing the American Dream: "The American Dream that we seek is a place where all Americans can live without fear of police violence." It ultimately offers a vision of justice that reinforces discrete forms of racialization, always looking inward toward the nation. But the power of Asian American studies in this moment is not in reconciling narratives of antiblack racism with Asian migration to the United States for the purpose of pressing the nation to uphold its foundational values of colorblind liberty and justice for all. Rather, considering Black Lives Matter through the lens of Asian American studies should shift our gaze to the never-ending wars in the Pacific and Middle East, to the insurgent and insurrectionary moments of resistance to U.S. empire. Asian American studies should force us to reject any notion that continued violence against black Americans is aberrant in an otherwise steady march toward justice. Asian American studies allows us to frame antiblackness as part of a conjoined history of domestic and imperial forms of racial governance. An ever-timely reminder that despite being central to U.S. race relations, antiblack violence always has global stakes. Take, for example, former Attorney General Eric Holder's stance that the U.S. government's targeted drone assassination program could be likened to the police officer's permissible use of lethal force in pursuit of a fleeing felon.3 The gulf between foreign war and domestic policing is bridged by the racialized procedures of state-administered death. Moon-Ho Jung has argued that despite the field's coalescence around histories of migration and exclusion, Asian American history is still wedded to national frameworks and imaginaries. Jung suggests that instead of advocating simply for national inclusion, Asian American history "has the radical potential to dislodge nationalist narratives and, at base, to expose and critique the racial and imperial formations that have made the conception of the United States possible in the...

2 A & Q whose work, institutional locations, geographic foci, and disciplinary training showcase Verge’s range and interests. Bringing together scholars working in disparate fields—including literary studies, history, political science, theater studies, film and media studies, art history, geography, and urban planning—we asked contributors to reflect on the state of their discipline and field at the present time and to consider what they themselves might, knowing what they know now, do differently. Specifically , A&Q participants were tasked with answering one or more of the following questions: 1. What is the idea, your own or someone else’s, whose future most excites you today? 2. If you could go back in time and meet yourself in graduate school, what field or subfield outside your current area of expertise would you encourage yourself to study, and why? 3. To what overlooked book or “outdated” concept of the last two or three decades could your field most benefit from returning with fresh eyes today? To tease out connections as well as possible conflicts, we asked David Palumbo-Liu and Jeffrey Wasserstrom to read over the replies and write responses to them. The lively, eloquent, provocative, and thoughtful approaches demonstrated in the following essays make this A&Q one of the features we’re most excited about for the journal’s inaugural issue. D’où Venons Nous, Que Sommes Nous, Où Allons Nous? David Palumbo-Liu It was hard to resist thinking on Paul Gaughin’s famous Tahitian painting of 1897, conceived at a particular nodal point of Euro-Pacific meandering and cultural production. It is hard to decide where or who the “we” are in that painting, which kinds of psychic or cosmic maps to deploy, what ontological or epistemological frames to impose. In not unlike fashion, the essays collected in this first issue of Verge do all they were asked to do—and that is to reassess where we have come in the past many years in our thinking about Asia, and Asian America, and to (re)imagine the possible connections between these two fields. Verge is aptly named— as a noun, the term verge indicates a border, an edge, a rim; as a verb, it indicates closing in on something, being proximate in character or space. All of the essays collected here verge toward each other from A & Q 3 different angles (largely disciplinary); some meet fairly squarely on similar terrain, others gesture toward one another from a distance, some are faintly resonant, others just exist on different facets of a rim. In commenting on them, from my assigned position—as a meta-reader of these texts and also as someone who began in eleventh-century Chinese poetry and ended up in contemporary Asia Pacific America—I find that we are exploring new concepts and inventing new subfields while still working within the residual disciplinary practices and assumptions in which many of us were brought up. In what follows, I both trace these issues as they exist in Asian studies and in Asian American studies and also show how the two fields, while converging, also diverge in critical ways. This tension between convergence and divergence helps illuminate both fields and also suggests common ways forward. Because we have been invited to be autobiographical, I will take that license to say that my involvement in both Asian and Asian American studies came from a particular personal interest that would probably be mappable via the degraded rubric “identity politics.” A Chinese American growing up in a rigorously all-white community separated from the hot bed of Berkeley by only a twenty-minute drive through the Caldecott Tunnel, I was confounded by the spatial separation rather than the temporal one. One had to drive through a mountain tunnel to get from the intense homogeneity of still-pastoral suburbs to the radical multiracial enclave of Berkeley. My interest in delving into traditional Chinese culture was animated by a desire to legitimize myself as Chinese as much as my desire to join the Asian American movement that was fed by an interest in community activism and what would come to be called multi­ cultural education. This was facilitated by Ling-chi Wang, himself a refugee from the University of Chicago’s...

The concept of duty is overrated (Fire) The swamiji's testicles have grown too big for his loincloth (Fire) It's a dyke thing (Junky Punky Girlz) Eswar Allah tero Naam (Junky Punky Girlz) Before ex...

Becoming Chinese American discusses the historical and cultural development of Chinese American life in the past century. Representing a singular breadth of knowledge about the Chinese American past, the volume begins with an historical overview of Chinese migration to the United States, followed by critical discussion of the development of key community institutions, Chinese-language schools, newspapers, and politics in early Chinese American life. Rather than emphasize experiences of discrimination, the collection focuses on Chinese American community formation that tested the racially-imposed boundaries on their new lives in the United States. Written by noted Chinese American scholar Him Mark Lai, the essays in this volume will be of interest to scholars of Asian and Asian American studies, as well as American history, ethnicity, and immigration.