Editor’s Preface

Abstract

Editor’s Preface Rick Bonus On behalf of our editorial collective at JAAS, I would like to officially welcome our new associate editors, Diane Fujino and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, both based at the pioneering and distinguished Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Diane’s primary research fields include Asian American social movement history, Black Power studies, and Afro-Asian solidarities, while Lisa’s interdisciplinary work focuses on immigration and welfare policy, feminist theory, and environmental studies. Most definitely, they bring to our editorial table a wealth of expertise and experience, a solid work ethic, and immense supportive energy that all of us stand to gain. Prior to this issue, their names have already appeared in our masthead, along with Lan Dong, our reviews editor, Michelle Dinh, our assistant editor, and members of our editorial board. But their work has already begun in earnest even then, so we are all already benefiting from their labors. Thank you! Memory and representation are two frames I thought about in working on this year’s final issue. But my reference to memory here is not quite about what we remember as “fact” or what we simply mark in historical time and space so that we do not forget. Rather, it is about what historians and cultural studies scholars usually want us to pay attention to: the sources we depend on to construct what we remember, the narratives we choose to enable us to remember, and the interpretive lens we deploy to understand what we are trying to remember. As a demonstration of how thinking about and “doing” memory along these veins can look like, consider our first essay, Heidi Tinsman’s “Narrating Chinese Massacre in the South American War of the Pacific.” In this one, Tinsman employs a variety of sources, takes [End Page v] into consideration multiple and competing voices, and works on distilling narrative detail from the ground with larger transnational racial, class, and gender relations, political agendas, and labor economies. What she ends up writing on is not only a deep and thought-provoking analysis of a set of memories and the purposes they served in obscuring and emphasizing particular stories of anti-Chinese violence in Peru in 1881, but also an extraordinary demonstration of the value of interdisciplinary scholarship across Asian American studies and Latin American studies in comprehending a complex historical event. In “Precarious Memories and Affective Relationships in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do,” Sally McWilliams performs a parallel work on memory production by deciphering a graphic memoir’s interpellation of Vietnamese diasporic identities. Seeking alternative ways to remember war besides the usual discourses of triumph and salvation, Bui’s approach marshals the power of a first-person art form and genre to enable us to grasp deeply traumatizing events in ways that, as McWilliams’s reading signals to us, can lead to an unsettled attitude toward loss while providing a “fresh beginning for the next generation.” It is through these innovative strategies of rereading history that we learn a similar lesson in Cynthia Marasigan’s contribution. Focusing on “Race, Performance, and Colonial Governance,” Marasigan deploys an unconventional examination of the “civilizing mission” of the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines, reading it against the grain of its purported legitimacy touted about during the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Through her essay, we get to be onlookers at the ways in which musicians of the Philippine Constabulary band and their leader, African American conductor Walter Loving, challenged and “exposed the inadequacies and inconsistencies of U.S. colonial rule.” It is a beguiling account of protest and defiant performance against white supremacy in the context of the celebrated exposition that will be of huge interest to scholars of U.S. empire history, Asian American studies, and African American studies. My reference to representation constitutes an allusion to what memory and the technologies that reproduce it construct, obscure, or enable. And what better way to inquire about both representational content and context than to look into contemporary social media, collectively this moment’s powerhouse generator of memory? Here, Leland Tabares’s “Professional Amateurs: Asian American Content Creators in...