Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric (review)

Guest Editors' Introduction

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Insurgency and Asian American Studies in the Time of Black Lives Matter Justin Leroy (bio) Peter Liang has the distinction of being one of approximately a dozen police officers convicted of murder or manslaughter for killing a civilian while on duty since 2005. Liang's victim was Akai Gurley, a black man shot dead after Liang fired his weapon into an empty stairwell of the East New York public housing complex where Gurley lived. A New York Supreme Court justice eventually reduced Liang's charge to criminally negligent homicide and declined to sentence him to serve time in prison. However, the initial charge of second-degree manslaughter could have sent Liang away for fifteen years. Liang was the only NYPD officer convicted in an on-duty shooting in well over a decade; the question of whether he was a racial scapegoat soon emerged. Asian American activists in New York City and beyond mobilized in defense of Liang, in what New York Times staff writer Jay Caspian Kang called "the most pivotal moment in the Asian-American community since the Rodney King riots" more than two decades earlier.1 In response, many young, progressive Asian Americans engaged their families and communities about issues of police brutality and the importance of Black Lives Matter. The authors of a widely translated "Letter for Black Lives" explained that the constant threat of violence black Americans face is not the same as other forms of discrimination, and made the case that the (always incomplete) civil rights protections Asian Americans do enjoy is in large part due to black-led freedom struggles.2 The letter was a tremendous show of solidarity, and served as a template for other groups, such as Latinos and second-generation Africans, to discuss antiblackness with their families as well. Still, the letter is fraught with old tropes. It draws too sharp a distinction between black and Asian racialization, as when the authors write, "It's true [End Page 279] we face discrimination … but for the most part, nobody thinks 'dangerous criminal' when we are walking down the street." Many South Asian, Muslim, and Arab Americans are in fact considered "dangerous" while walking down the street, boarding a plane, or speaking Arabic or Urdu in public. The letter concludes by referencing the American Dream: "The American Dream that we seek is a place where all Americans can live without fear of police violence." It ultimately offers a vision of justice that reinforces discrete forms of racialization, always looking inward toward the nation. But the power of Asian American studies in this moment is not in reconciling narratives of antiblack racism with Asian migration to the United States for the purpose of pressing the nation to uphold its foundational values of colorblind liberty and justice for all. Rather, considering Black Lives Matter through the lens of Asian American studies should shift our gaze to the never-ending wars in the Pacific and Middle East, to the insurgent and insurrectionary moments of resistance to U.S. empire. Asian American studies should force us to reject any notion that continued violence against black Americans is aberrant in an otherwise steady march toward justice. Asian American studies allows us to frame antiblackness as part of a conjoined history of domestic and imperial forms of racial governance. An ever-timely reminder that despite being central to U.S. race relations, antiblack violence always has global stakes. Take, for example, former Attorney General Eric Holder's stance that the U.S. government's targeted drone assassination program could be likened to the police officer's permissible use of lethal force in pursuit of a fleeing felon.3 The gulf between foreign war and domestic policing is bridged by the racialized procedures of state-administered death. Moon-Ho Jung has argued that despite the field's coalescence around histories of migration and exclusion, Asian American history is still wedded to national frameworks and imaginaries. Jung suggests that instead of advocating simply for national inclusion, Asian American history "has the radical potential to dislodge nationalist narratives and, at base, to expose and critique the racial and imperial formations that have made the conception of the United States possible in the...

The concept of duty is overrated (Fire) The swamiji's testicles have grown too big for his loincloth (Fire) It's a dyke thing (Junky Punky Girlz) Eswar Allah tero Naam (Junky Punky Girlz) Before ex...

Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these seemingly positive changes, how can we engage the continued production of novels that fixate upon damaged Asian American subjects? How does racism get configured in today's age of unparalleled legislative inclusion? If the model minority stereotype merely represents the flip side to the yellow peril (Okihiro 142), then Asian American racial formation continues to revolve around a subtle dialectic in which oppression and prejudice emerge in more insidious ways. We can thus read the work of contemporary Asian American fictions through their illumination of the malleable contours of racial formation, as it has changed during the post-1965 period. Since 1966, the predominant racial formation attached to Asian Americans has been that of the model minority. Presumed to be astute, hardworking, and obedient, Asian Americans have been promoted as the minority ideal. However, South Asian Anglophone and South Asian American fiction writers have been incisive in their attention to racial formation, as it was re-scripted in the post-9/11 moment and as civil liberties [End Page 232] began to erode in light of the war on terror. In a range of novels, the South Asian American body transforms into a site of racial anxiety that manifests in acts of prejudice and violence. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes a prominent place within this grouping, which includes Marina Budhos's Ask Me No Questions, Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been, H. M. Naqvi's Home Boy, Nafisa Haji's The Writing on My Forehead, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams. But Hamid's status as a transnational author has moved critical considerations of his work largely into the purview of postcolonial and global studies. Though published in 2007, the novel has already received widespread critical attention in dozens of articles, book chapters, reviews, and conference papers. Some scholars read the novel as exemplary of a global or world novel (Medovoi; Morey, "'The Rules of the Game Have Changed'") or as a postcolonial narrative boasting a trenchant critique of American imperialism and globalization (Singh; Haider; Keeble). Others focus on its unique combination of formal elements and social contexts (Adami; Mandala White). My article builds upon the work of Anna Hartnell, who argues that the novel reveals the complicated dynamics of religion and racial formation. As Hartnell notes, "The fact that America hosts a far more assimilated and upwardly mobile population of Muslims and Arabs than any European country suggests" (340) a form of privilege that some minority groups could not claim, at least prior to 9/11. Hartnell's larger point is that the novel critiques the melting pot formulation precisely because America's racial and religious minorities rarely inhabit the same positions in social hierarchies and are often positioned against one another. I extend Hartnell's argument by emphasizing the shift in American ethnoracial and religious alignments that repositions South Asians alongside Arabs and Muslims in the period following 9/11. The novel's depiction of a Pakistani transnational necessarily places this text within the purview of Asian American Studies, its attendant critical methodologies, and its central thematics (such as racial formation). At the same time, this novel encourages further interdisciplinary dialogues. With respect to US ethnic studies after 9/11, Ibrahim G. Aoudé provocatively considers how "Ethnic Studies, especially Asian American Studies, is compelled to deal with Arab American issues if it wants to remain a relevant field and revitalize its traditional commitments" (144). [End Page 233] Nadine C. Naber notes the affiliations between Asian American and "Arab/South Asian/Muslim American(s)" in that same period through the germination of activist coalitions (217–27). In light of the heightened paranoia, Shireen Roshanravan investigates how the targeting of Filipino airport screeners after the terrorist attacks demonstrated a large-scale attack on civil liberties in the name of...

Reviewed by: National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stag. By Karen Shimakawa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. For the past decade, we have seen a burgeoning of scholarly production in Asian American theater and performance studies. Archival and theoretical projects on Asian American theater and performance simultaneously developed at the end of the twentieth century.1 In one decade, we witnessed the publication of groundbreaking anthologies like Between Worlds, edited by Misha Berson, Politics of Life, edited by Velina Hasu Houston, and Unbroken Thread, edited by Roberta Uno. Other publications include collections of Asian American theater work such as Asian American Drama, edited by Brian Nelson, Tokens, edited by Alvin Eng, and But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise, also by Velina Hasu Houston. The presence of Asian American theater work in such recently emergent multi-genre literature anthologies like Bold Words edited by Rajini Srikanth and Esther Iwanaga also testify to the liveliness of the field. At the same time, scholarly publications of and that include Asian American theater and performance began to proliferate: James Moy's Marginal Sights, Josephine Lee's Performing Asian America, Dorinne Kondo's About Face, Yuko Kurahashi's Asian American Culture on Stage, Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place, and Meiling Cheng's In Other Los Angeleses, are among the most notable of such critical studies. A welcome addition to the expanding list of scholarly inquiry into the Asian American stage is Karen Shimakawa's National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage. National Abjection is an important intervention, primarily in the fields of performance/theater studies and Asian American Studies. While Shimakawa deploys a range of theories including postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, it is Julia Kristeva's notion of "abjection" that is the primary theoretical anchor grounding her analysis of Asian American work. Shimakawa's coupling of the psychoanalytic dimension of the "abject" with U.S. racial formation [End Page 73] and national concerns enriches the possibilities for interpreting and understanding Asian American theater, performance, and arguably Asian American cultural production in general.2 "Abjection," as defined by Kristeva and deployed in this text by Shimakawa, is "a state and a process," "a national/cultural identity-forming process, as a way of 'reading' Asian Americanness in relation and as a product of U.S. Americanness—that is, as occupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of consistent element and radical other" (3). In other words, the deployment of "abjection" to understand Asian Americanness helps us to see the place of Asian Americans in U.S. (cultural, political, and social) hegemony, and illuminates Asian Americanness, albeit produced as abject, as constitutive of U.S. nation formation. Shimakawa's discussion of various works by Asian American theater artists, including Yankee Dawg You Die by Phillip Kan Gotanda, 12-1-A by Wakako Yamauchi, The Year of the Dragon and Chickencoop Chinaman by Frank Chin, Talk-Story by Jeannie Barroga, Tea by Velina Hasu Houston, and Deshima and Chinoiserie by Ping Chong, elucidates her thesis of Asian American abjection. In her introduction, Shimakawa analyses critical historical moments in Asian American history to delineate how Asian Americans have been made abject within the U.S. national context. Her discussion of the internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans in World War II and the U.S. government's denial of citizenship (and hence benefits) to Filipinos who fought for the U.S. government in World War II sets up her argument of Asian Americans as abject vis-a-vis U.S. nation formation. This engagement with historical events is important given the underlying questions that animate National Abjection: "what is the connection between histories of nationalization/racialization/gendering, and theatrical performance? What can being attentive to the processes of national abjection tell us about performances that take place within the nation? Conversely, what can performance tell us about national abjection? And perhaps most important, what can performance do to/about that process?" (163). Throughout her analysis of the very emergence of contemporary Asian American theater and various play texts, Shimakawa decisively demonstrates how Asian American artists have mobilized the...

Reviewed by: Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 “Asian Donorgate” Controversy in Perspective Pei-te Lien Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 “Asian Donorgate” Controversy in Perspective. Michael Chang . ( Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.) Aptly titled, this book has a singular purpose to help readers understand the conditions, facts, and meanings surrounding the 1996 campaign finance scandal to Asian (and other) Americans. Through a critical reading of the various discourses and the associated political practices related to the "Asian Donorgate," Chang produces a solid and inspiring contribution to the growing literature on the contemporary political experiences of Asian Americans. The book offers not only a rare treat to the politically concerned about the paradoxical and situational racial status of Asians in American politics, but a candid discussion of the dilemmas for community political organizing and empowerment given the opportunities and pitfalls that arise from globalization and the availability of transnational capital. Specifically, the author deconstructs events and discourses in the four-year period that begins with allegations of illegal campaign money raised by John Huang and several other naturalized Chinese Americans for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during President Clinton's reelection campaign in 1996. His research ends with the release of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized Taiwan-born nuclear scientist who was laid off and jailed for 9 months because of unfounded espionage charges. The choice of the two time-points was to reveal the pattern of shifting discourses and the consequences the former had on the development of the latter. By analyzing the ways that Asian American citizens were racialized as perpetual foreigners during this time period, the author shows "how citizenship and race in globalization play a critical role in locating Asian Americans as simultaneously marginal and central to mainstream American ideologies of nationhood" (3). The discreetness of the author in his approach to the sensitive subject matter is evinced by the opening pages, when he scrupulously defines the increasingly popular but much abused and often misunderstood terms of globalization, flexibility, transnationalism, flexible citizenship, diaspora, and hybridity. The same kind of prudence is seen in the organization of the book, which has a section on [End Page 111] research design and another on conceptual framework, and a "map" within subsequent chapters to prevent readers from getting lost in the jungle of complex ideas. Built upon themes of "shifting discourses," "neo-orientalism," "transnational citizenship," and "political agency and the public sphere," the book clearly articulates the flexible meanings of citizenship and challenges to community incorporation and empowerment regarding a highly transnationally-affiliated population. Besides the main methodology of discursive analysis, the author adopts sociological and anthropological approaches to data collection which involve elite interviews and archival research of governmental reports and news media coverage. The book's primary theoretical framework is critical transnationalism, which specifically opposes celebratory discourses of transnationalism that wishfully foresee the end of world divisions and inequality in the era of globalization. Rather, as informed by prior conceptions of transnational citizenship, racial formation, and dual-domination and extraterritoriality, the author views as inevitable the emergence of new forms of power hierarchies that may transcend national borders but still maintain the structures of inequalities within each nation-state and other social and political boundaries. In addition to critiquing the traditional Eurocentric "foreignizing" discourses adopted by mainstream American media and politicians in the "Asian Donorgate" events that deny the possibility of dual citizenship and loyalties to the majority-immigrant community, the book expresses serious concern about the deepening class and political divisions as a result of unequal access to transnational capital and transborder mobility in the post-1965 Asian American community and the challenges that this reality imposes on community-organizing and strategies for sovereignty and empowerment. Herein lies the value of the theory of a progressive sense of citizenship, which exposes the problems of distinguishing "aliens" from "citizens" in the assimilationist notion of normative citizenship in the age of globalization and proposes an alternative model of citizenship that appreciates the multicultural diversity brought in by individuals who maintain transnational affiliations. Whereas the author delivers powerful and repetitive attacks against the utility of the assimilation paradigm and the...

We examined associations between different forms of self-reported racial discrimination and current substance use (i.e., smoking, alcohol use, and controlled substance use) among Asian Americans living in Arizona. The data are from 271 Asian American adults participating in the 2008 Asian Pacific Arizona Inititative (APAZI) Survey, which is part of a larger collaboration between community members, organizational leaders, and researchers. Asian Americans treated like they were not American because of their race were at increased risk of tobacco use, after controlling for covariates, including age, gender, education, family income, health insurance, nativity status, and language, and other types of racial discrimination. Also, individuals treated differently because of their race were at increased risk of alcohol use and controlled substance use, after controlling for covariates and other types of racial discrimination. The results indicate that Asian Americans experience a wide range of racial discrimination types and some forms of racial discrimination may have greater associations with tobacco, alcohol, and controlled substance use than others.

Asian American religions have dramatically increased their presence in the United States. Partly, this is a function of the increasing population of Asian Americans since 1965. Asian American is a name given to the United States residents who trace their ancestry back to the area of Asia from Pakistan in the west to the Pacific islands east of the Asian landmass. There are over 18 million Asian Americans in the United States (about 6 percent of the national population), and Asians are immigrating to the country at rates that far exceed those for any other group. Other names have been taken, given, or forced upon Asian Americans. Such terms as “Chinese or Japanese imperial subjects” heightened a unity of political and religious obedience to a divine emperor. “Oriental” started as a French idealization of the Confucian state before descending to the level of being an epithet for backwardness. Immigrants come with nationalities like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and so forth that often intervene into religious discourses (see an example of this process in the Chinese American experience as described by Fenggang Yang (Chinese Christians in America. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). In the 1970s the name Asian American was popularized by West Coast intellectuals in order to gather forces at the barricades of political and racial movements. Some scholars like Michael Omi and Howard Winant (Racial Formation in the United States. From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994) claimed “Asian American” as a racialized reality, which was the result of racial conflicts innate to American society. Others saw the identity as an ethnic claim to assimilation into American cultural reality. Asian immigrants and their progeny find ways to balance out the religious, national, ethnic, racial, and other identities from their homeland, new nation, and religion. “Asian American” has also become a common-sense meaning that was institutionalized by the U.S. census. But one should remember that many layers of names sit upon Asian American houses of worship as so many barnacles telling tales of ancestral honors, woes, and self-reflections. Over three-quarters of Asian Americans profess a religious faith. About a quarter say that they are “religious nones,” that is, either having no particular religious faith or identifying as agnostic or atheist. About half of the “nones” actually have religious beliefs and ethics and practice them as an intrinsic part of Asian American culture, not as something that is “religious.” Two-thirds of religious Asian Americans are Christians. This is not surprising when we take into account the rapid growth of Christianity in the non-European world. Asian Americans are contributing to the “de-Europeanization” of American Christianity and signal the increasingly religious direction of the 21st century. Other Asian American religions include Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroasterism, new Japanese religions, and many more. The history of Asian American religions involves a dynamic interplay of the United States and Asia, global politics, democratic revolutions, persecution in Asia, racism in the United States, Supreme Court cases, and religious innovation. The largest Asian American groups, those with 1–4 million people each, trace their ancestry back to Japan, China, Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Korea. Seven smaller groups have over 100,000 people each: Bangladeshis, Burmese, Cambodians, Hmong, Laotians, Pakistanis, and Thais. And there are many more smaller groups. The diverse ethnic and national origins of Asian Americans means that their religions have a kaleidoscope of religious styles and cultures.

A Success Worse Than Failure Minh-Ha T. Pham (bio) I already had failure on my mind when Timothy Yu’s blog post “Has Asian American Studies Failed?” appeared on my Facebook news feed. That was around the same time I bought and began reading J. Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure after listening to a podcast of Halberstam on The Critical Lede. To paraphrase Halberstam, failure is a counterintuitive mode of knowing and doing that refuses the normalizing models of success that often have the effect of disciplining us into heterosexist capitalist structures of knowledge, feelings, and ideas about the world and ourselves. Understood in this way, failure potentially offers a unique set of rewards including “escape [from] the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development,” the preservation of “some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood,” and an “opportunity to . . . poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” in which promises of happiness and success function paradoxically as implicit threats of personal misery and failure.3 Reading beyond Yu’s blog post title, I soon realized that I had misread failure. Yes, I had failed at “failure.” Yu’s “failure” is a diagnosis of the state of Asian American studies rather than a narrative of Asian Americanist practices. Still, I think my initial misreading of Yu’s title may not be all bad. It might be one of those times in which, in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s words, “the accidental becomes essential.”4 This unintentional misreading, I suggest, begins a long overdue discussion about failure that reaches beyond evaluation toward a more speculative and suggestive inquiry about Asian Americans’ historically fraught relationship to “failure” and “success.” As readers of this journal are no doubt aware, Asians in the United States have long been perceived as failures. In the imperializing logic of nineteenth-century Orientalism, it was the “failure” of Asian cultural and political structures to survive or thrive in the modern age that served as a rationale for the legacy of informal and institutionalized discrimination and exclusion brought to bear on all Asian groups in complex and uneven ways. Such Oriental failures gave rise to an array of other failures: Asians’ failure to assimilate, their failure to learn English, and their failure to achieve the trappings of white American middle-class life including a nuclear family. By the mid-twentieth century, of course, the general perception of Asian Americans had dramatically shifted. Splashy media stories hailed Asian Americans not as failures but as quintessential American success stories. Well-known articles published in 1966 trumpeted Japanese Americans as “better than any other group in our society, including native-born whites” (New York Times Magazine)5 and Chinese Americans as “a model of self-respect and achievement” (US News & World [End Page 330] Report).6 Asian Americans’ putative family values, work ethic, and thriftiness were cited as explanations for their success. By the 1980s, the Asian American model minority stereotype, or what Fortune magazine called “America’s Super Minority,”7 was well established in the popular discourse about U.S. race relations. It served as a liberal alibi for the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and political power among whites and nonwhites and, in the process, pitted Asian Americans against other racialized minorities. Thus, even “Asian American success” is a kind of failure—what Frank Wu aptly describes as “a race relations failure.”8 The success/failure apparatus of Asian difference operates differently for different Asian ethnic groups. The “success story” of South Asian Americans, for example, is articulated through the construction of the model minority as ideal worker. Vijay Prashad explains in Karma of Brown Folk that the desi model worker stereotype is a double-edged sword that is wielded against South Asian Americans who, as a racial “solution” to a labor problem, must accept that “we are only wanted here for our labor and not . . . our lives” and against African Americans who are blamed for their “inability to rise of their own volition.”9 For Southeast Asian Americans, “success” is bound up with the trauma and disillusionment of the failures of the wars in Southeast Asia and their identity as war’s “losers...

A Study of Paradigms and Theoretical Key Words of Asian American Literary Criticism

Th e impact of the COVID- 19 global pandemic to American communities extends beyond physical health problems to include political, economic, education, business, mental health, and social relation impacts. This essay, based on a summer and fall 2020 place-based research project collaboration between Purdue Honors College students and the Purdue Asian American and Asian Resource and Cultural Center, examines impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to the Asian and Asian American communities. Th e research asks what the impacts of COVID-19 are to Asian/American communities, how COVID-19 anti-Asian racism is unique or not unique, how the Asian American communities have collectively responded to the racism connected to the pandemic, and how Asian American communities displayed solidarity with other communities during this difficult time in public health and racial justice. Th e essay connects extensive media and archival research to detail COVID-19 impacts in the areas of health and wellness, job security, and social/racial justice. The essay then documents the persistent history of stereotyping and racism to Asian/American communities particularly in the midst of larger changes in political, national security, or public health situations. The next part of the essay provides an analysis of the rising number of reporting centers utilizing different platforms to counter the experience of racism. Finally, with the tragic deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd that sparked forms of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, the essay examines specific online and offline eff orts in regard to Asian and Asian American solidarity.

Latina/os and Asian Americans have lived in what is now the United States for hundreds of years, yet they are often considered foreign in the national imaginary. Legally, through acts excluding Latina/os and Asians from citizenship, and socially, through targeted anti-immigration rhetoric, both groups have been racialized in the United States as outsiders. This form of racial discrimination, also called “nativistic racism,” forms the basis of several intersections of Latina/o and Asian American literature. Latina/o and Asian American literary works counter nativistic racism by emphasizing multiracial histories within the United States, by drawing attention to racial injustices, and by employing tropes of loyalty and betrayal to highlight the selective ways that the United States has defined citizenship and belonging along racial lines. Latina/o and Asian American texts may also recognize the US military interventions that brought Asians and Latin Americans to the United States as (post)colonial subjects, Cold War allies, and refugees. Some of these texts counter national narratives such as American exceptionalism and Cold War bilateralism; others protest the erasure of military actions overseas from dominant histories of the United States. In addition to suggesting comparative intersections, Latina/o and Asian American literatures also depict literal interactions when Latina/o characters feature prominently in Asian American texts and vice versa. Literature set in California and other areas with high Asian American and Latina/o populations portrays both the significant contact and common political interests between Latina/os and Asian Americans. This long history of contact appears in early texts that center on Asian American and Latina/o farmworkers; it continues in more recent literature featuring Latina/o and Asian American friendships, partnerships, and rivalries. Some Filipino texts emphasize cultural commonalities with Mexican Americans, including Spanish-language surnames and Catholicism. A final intersection of Latina/o and Asian American literature occurs in texts by authors who are both Asian and Latina/o, including Peruvians, Cubans, Mexicans, and other Latin Americans of Asian descent. Written in both English and Spanish, this literature draws attention to the transpacific connections between Asia and the Americas. While it is crucial to acknowledge the historical particularities of Latina/o and Asian American literature, as well as the diversity within each of these groups, recognizing the ways in which these literatures intersect is important to understanding cross-racial alliances of the past and potential solidarities for the future.

This chapter reflects on the author’s identity formation growing up in the slums of Chicago in a patriarchal Chinese family, moving to a “white” neighborhood and encountering racism for the first time, and embarking on the fraught academic journey toward the complicated guild of biblical studies. It discusses the various influences in her development, first, as a feminist, and then as an Asian American feminist, circling back to her roots in poverty to devote her current energies to examine and critique the inequalities and injustice that are endemic to our global capitalist society. She will examine her debt to Asian American feminist scholarship on race that helps her recognize the particular forms of racism, under which Asian Americans suffer, and her bonding with different communities of Asian and Asian American women (and men), such as Pacific, Asian, North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry and the Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium.