Decolonizing Intervention for Asian Racial Justice: Advancing Antiracist Art Inquiry Through Contemporary Asian Immigrant Art Practice

Abstract

Drawing on scholarship about decolonization and anti-Asian racism, this article offers a decolonizing mode of thinking that intervenes in and advances antiracist art inquiries and praxis. Refusing a nationalist and fictitious Americanization that focuses on the successful stories of Asian immigrants, this new mode of antiracist art inquiries and praxis challenges the existing paradigm of antiracism for and of Asian immigrants that heavily centers on the communities’ empowerment and inclusion within a multicultural discourse. By viewing racism as a function of settler colonialism, a decolonizing intervention helps to uncover the limitations of forms of Asian American racial justice work that collide with the work of Indigenous survivance while submitting to the development and maintenance of the settler colonial system. Based on a contemporary Asian immigrant artist’s site-specific video performance, this article discusses new orientations of antiracist art inquiries that critique settlers’ colonial representational strategies that manage the racial formation and relations of Asian immigrants/Natives/White settlers to secure White settlers’ supremacy and sovereignty. A critical understanding of Asian American positionalities that explains its roles in the settler colonial framework requires a contextual understanding of the transcultural context where both imperial and settler colonial powers are consolidated to shape Asian immigrants’ settlement and an ethics of relationality for Asian–Indigenous solidarity that sustains Asian American communities’ racial equity and liberation in line with Indigenous survivance.