Editor’s Preface

Abstract

Editor’s Preface Rick Bonus Our first essay in this issue, on the experiences of Arabs/Muslims as “censusless” in U.S. society, opens a conversation about what it means for a group to be considered outsiders by a state or a community. For Loubna Qutami, who writes about the racial classification of Arab Americans in official counts and social discourse, this status is perplexing and paradoxical, reflecting both the targeting of Arabs as suspect subjects especially in the aftermath of 9/11 as well as their continuing designation as “white” in census data. To be sure, Arab “whiteness”—what Qutami calls racial invisibilization—has a tendency to obscure the violence of racisms against these populations while depriving them of their right to self-determination. These are challenging conditions to be in, most remarkably because claiming due recognition in order to arrive at inclusion often leads to greater state surveillance in the service of violent exclusion. Is there any way to escape the double-edginess of exclusionary practices and inclusionary attempts? The answer may prove to be impossible, although referencing what has been done in a moment of legalized Asian exclusion from the 1900s to the 1920s might offer some viable insights. Found in our second essay, “Orientalism and the Orator,” Swati Rana carefully parses the autobiographical work of Dhan Gopal Mukerji, aptly titled Caste and Outcast, to highlight his role as a “soapbox orator” in subverting Orientalist constructs—itself a model for undermining the polarities of East and West. The process of disrupting Orientalism here is ingenious, in Rana’s reading, for it entails the deployment of rhetorical skills in “asserting” then “undoing” and in “exposing” then “undermining.” [End Page v] Fast-forward to the present, and we get a distilled variety of such a strategy of in-and-out intervention in “‘Outsiders No More?’ The Discourse of Political Incorporation of Vietnamese Refugees in the United States (1975–2020).” Here is a fresh take, through a study by Ly Thi Hai Tran, on the realities of boundary making from the perspective of a minority group. It is notable that the essay’s title is in question form, a telling reminder of the vagaries of policing the constitution and edges of any group that seeks to define who is and is not a part of it. Tran is careful not to make an impression that formal representation in conventional politicking, something that many believe Vietnamese Americans have attained already, is the culminating story here. Group interests will remain disputed within and outside of affinities as long as uneven relationships of power exist. We get that similar sense of the ebbs and flows of exclusion/inclusion within social fields of domination and resistance in Meredith Oda’s piece, “’Kikkoman, USA’: The Economic and Residential Integration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Foods.” Narrating a history of fascination with Japanese cuisine in the 1950s and 1960s, Oda is right on cue in considering “outsider” as a status that cannot simply be overturned by inclusion. Otherwise, this formula may just as well be followed with certainty. Interest and access to Japanese foods were indeed made possible through the efforts of key importers, restaurateurs, and opinion leaders. But the mainstreaming of Japanese food cultures, as Oda argues, depended on quite a narrow range of acceptance that emphasized rather than erased the status of Japanese Americans as forever foreigners. In all of these essays, we are reminded of the pains of exclusion. At the same time, we are also encouraged to consider some ways in which adversity can also generate innovative resistance, whether it be through self-generated information campaigns proposed by Qutami or by way of autobiographic troping as interpolated by Rana, representation and recognition as reported by Tran and gastronomic interventions as historicized by Oda. Such an out-of-placeness can have the capacity to produce transformative agency. And quite coincidentally, it is also a fitting refrain that strings together the essays in our reviews section that regard the lives of American Muslim women, the “unnamable” feature of Asian American art, a politics of intraracial desire, an environmental history of Japanese American incarceration, and speculative fiction in relationship to speculative finance. During such a...