Editors' Preface

Abstract

Editors' Preface Diane C. Fujino and Lisa Sun-Hee Park We are pleased to announce the transition of the Journal of Asian American Studies to the University of California, Santa Barbara, with Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino taking up the helm as co-Editors-in-Chief. This issue begins with a special forum that focuses on issues of utmost importance and complexity and using an innovative format for an academic journal. We would like to think that this anticipates the continuing growth of the journal and expansion into thinking, writing, reading, and exploring in ways that intertwine critical analysis with experimentation and praxis to advance knowledge in our field and society writ large. This will require us to fill big shoes—both those developed in Asian American Studies across more than 50 years and those built by the outgoing editor-in-chief, Rick Bonus. We extend our deep appreciation to Rick for his vision, his ethos of democratic and liberatory practice, his fierce organization, and his caring ways. Our thanks also go to the Association for Asian American Studies Board of Directors; Reviews Editor Lan Dong, Assistant Editor Thaomi Michelle Dinh, the JAAS Editorial Board, and the Johns Hopkins University Press editorial staff. We wish to introduce the journal's new editorial team, which includes Christopher B. Patterson as Reviews Editor and Donna Anderson as Assistant Editor. This issue begins with erin Khuê Ninh and Shireen Roshanravan's co-edited special forum, "#WeToo: A Reader." This daring collection of writings focuses on racialized sexual violence, but not in ways that create any easy divide between perpetrator and survivor. The articles examine the multiple forms of violence and ongoing traumas caused by active aggressors and [End Page vii] enabled through the silencing, denial, and complicity of men and women. The narratives reveal unmistakable acts of violence as well as the ambiguous. They address interlocking systems of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, and intergenerational trauma, both structural and interpersonal, that impact the lives of Asian Americans. The authors self-identify as cis, queer, and trans of various Asian and multiracial ancestry. Together, the pieces seek to address, as the co-editors write, "a research question, or maybe a riddle: "What do you get when you cross model-minority racialization and rape culture?" In ways unusual for scholarly journals, this one included, this forum includes primarily poetry, fiction, memoir, and graphic novel, as well as scholarship. Yet, the ways it intersects with scholarly knowledge is clear. It explores the richness, nuances, and contradictions of inner life, "theory in the flesh" that too often disappears in academic writings. It engages honesties and vulnerabilities of a personal nature that require courage and a steady pen. It is intended as a "reader" and we, like so many other readers of JAAS, will recognize the need for such a compilation of writings to assign, bravely, in our classes, to offer language to break the model minority silence around sexual violence in Asian American communities, and to support our students and perhaps ourselves as well. This issue further includes two scholarly articles outside the special forum. Constancio Arnaldo's article, "'We're just as good and even better than you': Asian American Female Flag Footballers and the Racial Politics of Competition," examines the workings of racialized gender and the Asian American feminine body in sports. Based in ethnographic research, Arnaldo shows flag football as a site where Asian American women athletes perform identities that are both constrained by and contest constructions of Asian American women as hyperfeminine and hypersexual. Their agility and athleticism are seen in spectacular spin moves, touchdowns, and defensive maneuvers, and yet, they face the ongoing invisibility so familiar to Asian Americans in sports. Arnaldo reveals the Asian American women athlete's off-the-court maneuvers to assert identities and performances on their own terms. Balbir Singh's article, "'Anchorless Unknown': Reading and Feeling the Komagata Maru Beyond Repair," expands the notion of the archive to read feelings into a historical incident through textual analyses of two state apologies and a poem. In 1914, the Canadian government refused the disembarkment of 376 mainly Sikh, but Muslim and Hindu migrants as well...