Editors’ Preface

Abstract

Editors’ Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino We write this preface at a particularly difficult moment within a particularly difficult year and a half. The targeted deaths of Asian American women in Georgia graphically punctuated the heightened violence against Asian Americans in general during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, there have been numerous public engagements on these incidents as people try to grapple with the larger issues that lie beneath. Overall, these writings and pronouncements brought limited solace. It is our hope that the articles in this issue, which coalesce around matters of alternative knowledges and their potential radical solidarities in the face of profound structural injustices, provide the analytical grounding needed to grasp how we might move forward in ways that unsettle the now-standard resolutions. In addition, we would like to highlight the important work of the new JAAS Podcast (available through the New Books Network), hosted by our reviews editor, Christopher Patterson. The latest episode features a roundtable discussion with organizers and scholars on Asian migrant sex work and is definitely worth a listen. The articles presented here come together in striking and powerful ways. Each focuses on settler colonialism through the vantage point of the Pacific Islands and/or Philippines, but each also brings a distinct analytical and methodological contribution. On their own and collectively, the works presented in this issue push our thinking of the possibilities of Asian American studies. Nadine Attewell and Wesley Attewell’s article focuses on photographs taken by Benedicto Kayampat Villaverde, a Pinoy man from Hawai’i who [End Page v] was a member of the US armed forces and deployed to Vietnam in the 1960s. “War correspondence” of a different sort, Villaverde captured hundreds of images of Southeast Asian women who labored on a US military base. The authors argue that these images are distinct in their banality. These photographs of wartime display the “bright light, blue skies, and puffy white clouds” of a seemingly peaceful afternoon. The authors note that they “encourage us to wonder about the textures of everyday life during wartime for both (Asian) Americans like Villaverde and Southeast Asians alike” and, in so doing, they point towards “alternative orders of knowledge, affinity, and attachment.” In their beautifully written piece, Attewell and Attewell articulate a particular, transpacific circuit of learning structured by empire that is recognized and contested as such by its diasporic subjects. Sony Coráñez Bolton’s article focuses on the complex implications of one such diasporic narrative—a fictional one created by Miguel Syjuco. Here, Bolton considers the “settler ideologies” that adhere to queer diasporic subjects as they engage and absorb knowledges of settler colonies before returning to the homeland. Are we witnessing the formation of a “settler sexuality” created at least in part from liberal cosmopolitan queerness in these imperial movements? In analytically centering the return of a queer diasporic protagonist, Bolton provocatively asks if the ideology of settler colonialism is yet another “remittance” paid by Filipinos. And, a Filipinx American critique, Bolton argues, is key in addressing these connections, or queer intersections, of US imperialism and settler colonialism. The particular queer intersections articulated by Bolton are familiar in the “illegible” imperatives described by Alana Bock in her analysis of the artwork of Crystal Z. Campbell, a Filipina, Chinese, and African American artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Campbell’s creative excavation of public secrets proves to be a fertile space for the author in not only grappling with the “intimacies between imperial violence, (neo)liberalism, and anti-blackness,” but also the radical possibilities of moving squarely into such difficult convergences. Through Campbell’s art, Bock shows how one might embrace illegibility in an effort to imagine, in Attewell and Attewell’s words, alternative affinities. In this way, Bock subverts common understandings of illegibility, or in this specific case, the unknowingness of Filipinx America as an act of failure to make sense. Instead, Bock argues that in Campbell’s work, an unruly Black presence within an already illegible Filipinx America serves to unsettle imperial ideologies in a productive, radical way. In her article, Kim Compoc shifts our attention to another creative form—poetry—as a mode to consider the continued...