Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies: Thinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.

Reviewed by: POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies Kamala Visweswaran POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies.” Edited by Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe. Durham: Duke University, 1997. The journal Positions was founded in 1993 with the objective of providing “a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.” Its mission statement identified intensifying global flows of labor and capital in the late 20th century as central concerns, and asked its readers to reflect on how these transformations might recast priorities in scholarship, teaching, and criticism. It is therefore in keeping with the intellectual tradition already established by the journal, that a special edition on “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies” explores emerging relationships between Asian and Asian American studies. [End Page 308] Positions, over the last few years, has published groundbreaking articles on questions of colonialism and modernity in East Asia, and explored the distinct perspectives post-structuralist and postcolonial theory might bring to area studies. This issue of the journal asks what ethnic studies might bring to area studies, and conversely establishes the importance of linking ethnic studies to critical area studies, or more particularly, of linking the contradictory, but mutually constitutive relations between Asians and Asian Americans. Guest editors Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe make it clear that such a relationship must account for “the long history of dissymmetry between the fields...the differences in their institutional locations, and the large gaps between the subjects and knowledges posited by each field” (viii). Yet they also establish the necessity of forging such a relationship. They remind us that Asian Americans are formed simultaneously within U.S. national and global frameworks. The return of (Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean) immigrants to the imperial center means that their racialization under terms of the U.S nation-state can’t be understood without understanding histories of colonialism and capitalist development in Asia. Such an approach disrupts the master narrative of becoming a national citizen for Asian American subjects, and productively recasts the relationship of Asian American studies with American studies. This special issue of Positions is, therefore, a timely and important collection of essays that significantly contributes to, and expands upon national discussions about the shape of Asian American studies east of California, reflected in other edited collections over the last decade: Gary Okihiro’s Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies (1988), Shirley Hune’s (1990) Asian Americans; Comparative and Global Perspectives, and Robert Lee and Lihbin Shao’s (1994) Building Blocks for Asian American Studies: Proceedings of the 1992 East Of California Asian American Studies Conference. Thus, Kim and Lowe tie the emergence of theoretical “new formations” in Asian American studies to “new immigrations”— by which is meant not only the inclusion of more recent post-1965 immigrant groups such as Koreans, Indians, and Vietnamese, but the multiple, back and forth migrations of such groups resulting from U.S imperial and economic policies. They identify and enumerate four major pressures (ix) that shape the questions to be posed as part of these new formations: 1. the ‘post-Fordist’ restructuring of global capitalism that employs ‘mixed production’ and ‘flexible accumulation’ and permits the exploitations of Asian workers both in Asia and the United States; [End Page 309] 2. the changed demography of the Asian American population as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which increased and diversified Filipino, Korean, Southeast Asian, and South Asian communities in the United States; 3. the colonial and neocolonial role of the United States in the Asian states from which these new Asian American communities emigrate; and 4. the failure of citizenship and civil rights to guarantee equality of opportunity and resources to poor, racialized and gendered communities in the United States. Editors Kim and Lowe have done an excellent job of laying out the parameters of this new relationship by including articles that address the politics and dynamics of the new immigration. Essays by Peter Kiang and Anuradha Advani reaffirm the field’s historic focus on community studies by examining relationships between community groups...

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another.

“To ‘P’ or Not to ‘P’?”:Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies Vicente M. Diaz (bio) I stole this title from a great Pinoy joke told to me by Gus Espiritu. Its humor comes from the particularities of Filipino rearticulation of Shakespeare's famous question (the joke also resonates among Carolinian speakers from Micronesia, and perhaps among many other Austronesian-based Pacific Island language speakers), but I also want to suggest that its stronger force likewise comes from a kind of lightness of being that self-mockery can make of ontological fundamentalism. Self-mockery is a serious weapon of cultural resilience and resistance—and as someone waiting in line, somewhat impatiently, I want to re-aim the line of "P's" trajectory in the direction of another culturally and historically specific mode of becoming. The converted question, "To P or not to P?" becomes, then, my way of marking the present territory, a slippery, even sticky sea of historical, political, and cultural determinations that exists between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in a more turbulent ocean of United States imperialism and colonialism. Choppy too, of course, is the no less innocent world of institutionalized study of these struggles, no matter how noble the motives may be. In this essay, I want to address the tensions raised by the "P Question" in relation to Asian American Studies from the vantage point of one who has been located in Pacific Studies as viewed from the Islands, particularly from Guam in Micronesia, where I was born and raised, and where I taught in the 1990s. But, I was also trained at the University of [End Page 183] Hawai'i, and though I did my doctorate in California, Hawai'i—through tremors that rocked the field of Pacific Studies as it intersected and was led by scholars housed at the UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS), the East West Center, and especially Kanaka Maoli scholars at the Center for Hawaiian Studies—continues to be generative in and of my own intellectual, political, and scholarly development. A robust and busy crossroad as well as homeland, Hawai'i draws up and projects out theoretical, cultural, and political movements from across the Pacific Island region and beyond the seas to make it a particularly fruitful location for intellectual and political production, especially for the kind that pays specific attention to the nuances of travel and mobility in relation to the staunch determinations over land that anchor Indigenous struggles.2 But lest my attempts at nuance fail, let me make one thing absolutely clear: for whatever productive dialogues there may be between Pacific Islander Studies and Asian American Studies, under no circumstance should Pacific Islanders, or Pacific Islands Studies, be subsumed under the institutional framework of Asian American history and experiences. Though I'm sure nobody wishes this to be the case, the question of just how Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies are articulated together will always raise the specter of unequal power relations. At the same time, however, I think it is vital, in order to maintain the integrity of our respective struggles and projects, that our resolve to keep the differences clear and equal not reify in any way any of the categories in question. To avert this unwanted outcome, I want to highlight the various sites or locales from which we practice our respective crafts. These different, differential, and differentiating sites of and for the situatedness of knowledge and politics, I believe, not only make a world of difference in our work, but are also themselves as much constituted by as they help constitute that work. Thus, I want to emphasize at the outset that the critiques of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies look very different from within the shores of the various Pacific Islands. But, I also want to assert that an Asian American inquiry must strive to comprehend the kinds of historical and political struggles that Native Pacific Scholars are trying to articulate, just as Native Pacific Scholars need to understand the specificities of Asian histories as they are bound up with the American [End Page 184] imperial project among and amidst Native Pacific Islanders in...

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...

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...

Reviewed by: Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies ed. by Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith Susan Savage Lee Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith, eds. Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 390 pp. Paper, $30.00. In Alternative Contact, Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith have compiled a volume that draws attention to Indigeneity across geographical borders as well as the compartmentalized disciplines of academia. The [End Page 263] contributors to this volume seek to challenge the boundaries of their own fields of specialization such as American, ethnic, Indigenous, Asian American, and postcolonial studies by emphasizing "alternative contact," or contact apart from narratives heavily centered upon European/ Indigenous binaries. By "search[ing] for that renewal of thought 'from and for the margins' of Indigenous spaces" (3), the contributors make possible a transnational approach, with Indigeneity as its main perspective. Having removed the "first contact" narratives as the traditional opening into their argument, the authors off er academics in a variety of disciplines an opportunity for the reconsideration of such loaded terms as "imperialism" and "globalism." The impetus for Alternative Contact is the seemingly inherent connection between Indigeneity and the dominant culture so apparent in contemporary scholarship, particularly when investigating the eff ects of colonization and modernization. However, the contributors to this work suggest that by removing the binary of dominant/marginalized and focusing instead on the areas of alternative contact between Indigenous peoples, new critical possibilities emerge for scholarship as well as political activism. At the same time, by analyzing the intricacies of alternative contact, scholars can take these new perspectives and reapply them to the dominant/marginalized argument, thus complicating previous scholarship pertaining to Indigenous peoples. The authors achieve their goals in a variety of ways, but key to their argument is the connection between politics, race, law, identity, and economics at once, rather than unpacking one field at the expense of another. Judy Rohrer, for example, in "Attacking Trust: Hawai'i as a Crossroads and Kamehameha Schools in the Crosshairs," explores how racial identity becomes a legal problem through the concept of a "color-blind" ideology. The color-blind ideology in question pertains to the whites (haoles) living in Hawai'i who desire to send their children to the Kamehameha Schools, schools that are only meant for the Kanaka Maoli. According to Rohrer, when white parents turned to lawsuits as a means of gaining entry into the Indigenous schools, they explained that the Kanaka Maoli were ignoring what it means to be Hawaiian by employing "segregationist" tactics. The reality of the situation involves many years of discrimination against the Kanaka Maoli by whites, thus making it necessary for Indigenous Hawaiians to initiate their own schools in order for their children to have the same opportunities as white children. [End Page 264] Rohrer suggests that the lawsuits against the Kamehameha Schools are the most recent endeavor by whites to "erase" or "vanish" Indigenous culture. Furthermore, the color-blind ideology discussed in Rohrer's essay can be applied to other Indigenous people outside of Hawai'i whose cultural survivance faces stagnation because of a pejorative ideology masked in positivist terms. Andrea Smith's "Decolonization in Unexpected Places: Native Evangelicism and the Rearticulation of Mission" examines an often-discussed topic through a new lens: the missionization of Native peoples. Smith recognizes that Indigenous people worldwide have suff ered the eff ects of missionization; however, many Native Americans in the United States turn to evangelicism as a means of decolonization. Because of this, Smith positions Native evangelicals as theorists rather than as objects of study in order to produce an ethnography that accounts for the advantages and pitfalls of Native evangelical communities. In this way, Smith, much like the other contributors to this volume, approaches topics such as decolonization and Native "authenticity" by avoiding overly simplistic binaries. JoAnna Poblete Cross's "Bridging Indigenous and Immigrant Struggles: A Case Study of American Samoa" provides a well-needed crossover between Indigenous and Asian American studies. Poblete Cross links an Asian immigrant struggle with Indigenous Samoans through the topic of labor. While Poblete Cross recognizes that the intent of each group diff ers, she gracefully...

Much has been written the cultural alternatives continuity, rapture, or invention in recent years. has become a pervasive thread that runs not only throughout the cultural production ethnic intracultures such as the Asian American one, but also throughout the cultural production the mainstream United States, for, as Oscar Handlin points out, the history immigration is the history America (qtd. in Sollors, Literature 649). All three stances, cultural continuity, rupture, and invention, find an appropriate formal representation in the trope the ritual/ceremony. Taking as the starting point for my argument Alan Wald's differentiation between ritual and ceremony as first implied in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, I intend to deal here with the dialogic tensions between ritual and ceremony in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, in the intertextual context Chinese-American literature. I will consider Jen's problematizing Sollor's binary consent and descent. As Sau-ling Wong points out, (1) at least three new tendencies can be observed in the Asian American critical field: the abatement cultural nationalism, the increasing permeability between Asian and Asian American studies and communities, and, last but not least, the new favouring diasporic domestic approaches to Asian America (1-2). However, the necessary denationalization that draws critics and scholars away from dangerous essentialist stances is often offset by the attendant depoliticization Asian American issues. On the one hand, we ought to bear in mind the risks falling back into narrow understandings identity and nation. Yet, as Wong reminds us, we still have to take into account the urgent need to contextualize and recontextualize the understanding Asian American studies, and, by extension, ethnic studies, in order to avoid constructing a dehistoricized dichotomy (12) between the internationalist, deconstructivist mode and the old cultural nationalism the Aiiieeeee school. We must situate our analysis Mona in the Promised Land in this theoretical framework so as to prevent readers from perceiving the ritual-ceremony binarism, or the alternatives continuity, rupture, or invention, as fixed, chronological choices. What could be suggested instead is the strong likelihood that these two cultural and literary tropes function in a concurrent way. We thus echo Sau-ling Wong's advice regarding the new Asian American state affairs: It would be far more useful to conceive modes rather than phases Asian American subjectivity: an indigenizing mode can coexist and alternate with a diasporic or a transnational mode, but the latter is not to be lauded as a culmination the former (Denationalization 17). The distinction between ritual and ceremony as pointed out by Alan Wald can then be analysed from a diachronic and a synchronic point view. In the first case, we could trace back the essentialist, nationalistic thesis and then describe the responding feminist and deconstructivist antitheses. And yet, it is preferable to keep chronology out the foreground since it would easily mislead us into thinking that, once Kingston and later writers have contested the masculinist and essentialistic agenda cultural nationalism, Asian Americans have got over and grown out of that stage, and no reference to it is needed. Thus, the focus my analysis is not so much on the rise these different perspectives, although we must mention their genesis in passing. Rather, I will focus on the crucial synchronic description the palette that goes, spatially, from the mode ceremony to that ritual, or vice versa, in Mona in the Promised Land. Wald studies Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and discovers new insights that contribute to a more enlightened understanding spirituality. Ceremony is Silko's recording Tayo's spiritual quest with the help a mentor, a heterodox medicine man. …

A & Q 11 6 Works Cited Blyth, Mark. 2006. “Great Punctuations: Prediction, Randomness, and the Evolution of Comparative Political Science.” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4: 493–­ 98. Cumings, Bruce. 1997. “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations , and Area Studies during and after the Cold War.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, 261–­ 302. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Hero, Rodney E. 2016. “American Politics and Political Science in an Era of Growing Racial Diversity and Economic Disparity.” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1: 7–­ 20. Jaschik, Scott. 2010. “Should Political Science Be Relevant?” Inside Higher Ed, no. 8. Johnson, Chalmers, and E. B. Keehn. 1994. “A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies.” The National Interest, Summer, 14–­22. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 2005. “The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World,” PerspectivesonPolitics 3, no. 1: 5–­14. Schmitter, Philippe C. 2009. “The Nature and Future of Comparative Politics.” European Political Science Review 1, no. 1: 33–­ 61. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. “Still Blowing in the Wind: The American Quest for a Democratic, Scientific Political Science.” Daedalus 126, no. 1: 253–­87. The Study of Asian American Politics in the United States Janelle S. Wong Is there a place for ethnic studies, and specifically Asian American studies, in political science? Ethnic studies is an interdisciplinary field that places race and racialization at its center. It strives to understand the ways in which racial categories are created and maintained and their consequences for representation, resource allocation, and identity. As such, the concerns of ethnic studies overlap with the concerns of political science and the study of governance, the state, and the institutionalization of social and economic power. Ethnic studies scholarship would argue, for example, that political institutions and the distribution of social and economic power reflect state-­supported racial formations. Hence ethnic studies has advanced the concept of “the racial state” (Omi and Winant 2014). Asian 12 A & Q American studies is a subfield of U.S. ethnic studies, focusing on the experience of members of the Asian diaspora residing in the United States. Over the course of my career, I have come to believe that there is, in fact, an important place for Asian American studies in political science. Importantly, Dr. Don Nakanishi, a Harvard-­ trained political scientist (PhD, 1978), played a central role in establishing both the subfield of Asian American politics and the multidisciplinary field of Asian American studies . He did this both through research and through institution building. For example, he was on the Executive Board of the Asian Pacific American Caucus of the American Political Science Association, eventually receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the association’s Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and he served for twenty years as the director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the oldest and largest Asian American studies center in the nation. Nakanishi’s research and field development created intellectual connections across political science and Asian American studies. In 1976, for instance, Nakanishi and several other scholars of the Asian American experience published a series of essays in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Gee 1976). In this collection, several authors documented and analyzed the participation of Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Chinese immigrant communities in the United States in leftist and nationalist movements. The authors emphasized the development of a distinct Asian immigrant politics in the United States informed by both international affairs in the immigrants’ countries of origin and the deep discrimination that Asian immigrants were facing in their daily lives in the United States in the era of Asian exclusion. In a chapter in this volume titled “Minorities and International Politics,” Nakanishi (1976) forwarded a critique of the traditional political science international relations literature with a claim that while it addressed inequalities between nation-­ states, it failed to consider the fact of white supremacy. Similarly, he critiqued the literature on race relations in the United States because it failed to take into account power differentials between the United States and the home countries of Asians in the United States. Over the course of the next forty years, the study of international politics, comparative politics...

Beyond Nation and Empire Leo T. S. Ching (bio) Every discursive formation has its own institutional itinerary and condition of possibilities, and Asian studies and Asian American studies are no exceptions. Asian studies emerged out of American Cold War policy that divided the world into delimited regions. The underlying logic was that a region formed a complex whole that was unique and bounded, and could be distinguished from other regions by its sociocultural particularities. Asian American studies was institutionalized in response to the civil rights movement in the late 1960s United States as a politics of recognition and to create a broad coalition with African American studies and ethnic studies programs. Despite their common origins in the American Empire, abroad and at home, Asian studies and Asian American studies, until recently, have remained largely insulated from each other. This disengagement, for example, has obscured the parallelism between modernization theory as applied to Japan and later other East Asian countries and the model minority myth that aimed to divide Asian Americans from other underrepresented populations, specifically Black and brown peoples. Reading modernization theory and the model minority myth contrapuntally allows us to apprehend American imperial design as a dialectical process of expansion and domestication under the ideology of postwar liberalism. As a process of decolonizing American studies, one needs to be more attentive to this liberal imperial dialectic by opening itself to the seemingly non-American histories, aspirations, and polemics. This forum provides a much-needed conversation to deepen our understanding of this transpacific entanglement with a focus on Taiwan and Taiwan/America. This collection of essays intervenes not only in the critique of American empire but also the complicity of Taiwan's desire for a "normative" nation-state status. Unlike the conventional understanding of nation and empire as antithetical—the nation is homogeneous, egalitarian, and particular, whereas empire is diverse, hierarchical, and universal—Taiwan's aspiration for national independence and the disavowal of its settler colonialism tell another story. Instead of oppositions, nation and empire are seen as alternative or complementary expressions of the same phenomenon of power. Unlike earlier [End Page 383] scholarship that has lamented the marginalization of Taiwan, hence the desire for recognition and inclusion that often finds itself having to choose between Chinese and American empires, younger scholars included here resolutely refute this discourse of victimhood and false choices. Taiwan's long history within global coloniality, or what Arif Dirlik has referred to as "the land colonialisms made,"1 its ambiguous nation-state status, and fledging digital democracy offer possible alternatives to imagine a different relationship to nation and empire. Wendy Cheng's account of the arrest and prosecution of Chen Yu-hsi highlights the entanglement of Taiwanese/American history and the hypocrisy of American liberalism in adjudicating freedom and unfreedom that in turn silences voices of those prosecuted under Cold War anticommunism. Cheng's critique of American freedom reminds us of the long history of liberalism's intimate relationship to imperialism and colonialism. One only needs to recall that the founding of American freedom is on the backs of the unfreedom of others: the dispossessions of the indigenous population and the enslavement of people from Africa. The "rescue" of Chen Yu-hsi from the silencing of Taiwan/American history reveals the complicity of American hegemony and the institutionalization of area studies. While the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i was ostensibly established as an instrument of Cold War policy, the transpacific network of scholars and allies mobilized in support of Chen opens up the possibility of resistance to state-sanctioned violence. Cheng demonstrates that the freedom to speak and the freedom to remain silent concomitantly enables and incapacitates, includes and excludes, certain inconvenient narratives. Cheng implores us to resist this "silencing of the past" and to expose the complicity between state power and institutional formation. If Chen Yu-hsi's case represents the "silenced" history of Taiwan/America, Yukari Yoshihara's George H. Kerr and his transpacific traversing constitutes the dominant history of American studies' institutionalization in Asia. At the same time, Yoshihara alerts us to the "forgotten" imbrication of Asian studies and American studies in Asia. As a proficient Asianist trained...

Walking with Asian American Studies Jason Oliver Chang (bio) January was busy for me. As director of an Asian American studies program, I was prepping a new exhibit on the Filipino nurse diaspora in the University of Connecticut's School of Nursing and getting ready for my spring course on Asian American history. It was at this time that I began learning about the epidemic in Wuhan, China, that would become the COVID-19 pandemic. One of my collaborators at the School of Nursing was a grad student from Wuhan, and we were able to talk about his family's experience in the quarantine. That was the first time I imagined what a widespread quarantine in the United States might look like. My first thought was about how my family's lives might be changed by the public health necessity of quarantine, and my second thought was a feeling of dread that anti-Asian racism was going to surge. The signs that the disease was being characterized in racial terms began to pop up in advance of the virus, because it had clearly arrived in other parts of the world by January. In a conversation with my colleague, Professor Tom Long,1 we discussed the value of collecting reported incidents of pathogen racism as we noted the spread of despicable memes and racist incidents targeting Chinese and Asian-descended people in places that did not have any reported cases of the virus. January was a harbinger of the rest of the semester and most likely the remainder of 2020. It was at this point that I began to walk with Asian American studies in ways I hadn't before. By walking, I mean to say putting Asian American studies to work outside the classroom and finding a public pedagogy. After Lunar New Year, I began to collect the newspaper articles reporting on early incidents of pathogen racism. I collected them in an open-source [End Page 329] Google document, entitled "Treating Yellow Peril." On January 27, 2020, I tweeted out a link asking people to help assemble a robust account of the worldwide reporting on racist persecution, attacks, boycotts and harassment related to the development of the COVID-19 pandemic although at that time it was still considered an epidemic localized in China.I knew that I was not going to be able to stay up-to-date with how fast the news changes, so I felt it was important that the resource remain crowdsourced in the hope that people with different experiences would be able to contribute in meaningful ways. My initial goal was to try to gauge the gravity of the situation. I suspected that this was something that could impact UConn, and I wanted to prepare the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, where I serve as director. We needed to be ready to respond to the mental health and social consequences of anti-Asian racism that could accompany the rise of the virus and potential spread to the United States, which increasingly felt like a distinct possibility. I was surprised by the rapid response to my call for help on social media. The original tweet generated more than 40,000 connections to the resource since May 2020. Reporting from around the world in six languages covering Europe and Anglophone Asia all told the same story: Chinese and Asian-descended people were being targeted for harassment, exclusion, and attacks, and institutions were arbitrarily banning Asian people—many singling out Chinese people. Indeed, this story has always been the same and is well scripted. The racist settler narrative of Yellow Peril was being revived on a global scale at the pace of social media. This early phase of collection of incidents showed some interesting patterns. First, anti-Chinese politics served as political currency across East Asia and Southeast Asia. Second, anti-Chinese politics and policies lumped Taiwan together with mainland China. Third, Hindutva Indian nationalists were leaders in anti-Chinese racism in Asia. These early signs suggested that interpretations of the virus would fuel anti-Chinese racism as the pandemic worsened. While the list of sources grew, so too did the uses of this resource. Unexpectedly, the resource...

Curtain Up

Guest Editors' Introduction

Editor’s Preface Huping Ling Asian Pacific Americans (APA) make up 2.3 percent of the midwestern population, or about 1.45 million people, according to the 2000 census. The growth in the APA population in the Midwest was an astounding 86.5 percent from 1990 to 2000. To reflect the rapid population growth and the recent academic development in the Midwest, the journal’s special issue this year is devoted to the topics on Asian American studies in the Midwest. The essays of the issue were edited by guest editor Pawan Dhingra of Oberlin College, who organized and chaired a megasession panel entitled “The Heart(land) of Asian American Studies: Approaches in the Midwest” at the 2008 annual conference of the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) in Chicago, from which the special issue evolved. The four excellent essays as well as the introduction in this issue challenge the conventional notions on Asian Americans in the Midwest, with sound research and evidence, keen observation, provocative arguments, and insightful suggestions. All contributors to the issue are accomplished writers and/or past awardees or honorable mention recipients of the Book Awards by the AAAS, and are situated at universities and colleges in the Midwest teaching and/or directing Asian American studies programs at their respective institutions. Representing academic disciplines of anthropology, English, history, and sociology, and combining longtime scholarship and professional and personal experiences at Midwest campuses and in Asian American communities of their locales, they collectively provide [End Page v] us with compelling testimonies as practitioners of Asian American studies in the Midwest, and pose a burning question to the dynamic and ever-growing Asian American studies: where is the “heart” of Asian America? Erika Lee’s essay examines the recent growth in Asian American studies in the Midwest and raises central questions that have framed that growth: What does Asian American studies scholarship, pedagogy, and outreach look like in the Midwest? How does a Midwest focus complicate existing narratives, approaches, and canons of the field? What particular questions, histories, and ethnic groups emerge from a Midwest perspective, and how might they transform the field more generally? She also reviews recent academic writings on Asian American studies in the Midwest, with a focus on Minnesota-based scholarship. Josephine Lee’s essay describes the genesis and current state of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Asian American Studies Consortium (CIC-AASC). Founded in 2007, the CIC-AASC brings together faculty, staff, and students involved in Asian American studies from twelve major research universities. Recognizing the challenges of establishing and nourishing Asian American studies in a time of fiscal crisis and uncertain support for ethnic studies, the CIC-AASC moves toward a model of intercampus collaboration to encourage cooperation and collaboration, provide opportunities for mentoring and networking, and emphasize new and distinctive understandings of Asian American communities, histories, and cultures, particularly in the Midwest. Andrea Louie’s ethnographic study examines the constraints shaping American adoptive parents’ approaches to their children’s Chineseness within the broader context of U.S. racial and multicultural politics. Based on thirty-five interviews in the St. Louis area with adoptive parents, and an additional twenty-five interviews in the San Francisco Bay Area with white and Asian American adoptive parents and teens adopted from China, Louie points out the possibilities that “some parents can come to new, more nuanced understandings of how race affects their children’s lives and that there is and should be a place for culture in the lives of adoptive families, even in its more essentialized forms.” Pawan Dhingra’s essay complicates the “ethnic community” by moving beyond the typical setting of large metropolises. How do immigrants form [End Page vi] community when the few coethnics locally are their economic competition? This is the dilemma facing Asian Indian American motel owners in Ohio. Owners stretched the boundaries of what is considered “local” to include more peers. Moreover, they relied on ritual encounters to create camaraderie with local coethnics despite competitive relations. Both strategies result more in the “possibility of community” than a deep one. The essay more broadly explains how immigrants handle environments that, as is often the case, are both welcoming and standoffish...

Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory Christopher Lee (bio) In 1974, the newly established Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, submitted “A Proposal for the Establishment of the College of Third World Studies” to the university’s Provost. In its proposed structure for a major in Asian American Studies, the committee recommended that students concentrate on one of three areas in addition to taking a set of core courses: community studies, social sciences, or humanities. While the first two concentrations are clearly designed to contribute “to the body of direct experimental knowledge of the conditions in the Asian American community” (A18) and promote “service to the Asian American people” (A17), the humanities concentration is marked by a noticeable lack of content and cohesion. Only two courses, one on Asian American literature and a creative writing workshop, are listed in the proposal, and this lack of structure is reflected in its provisional tone: That Asian students be encouraged to venture into the humanities is obvious; what form self-expression will take in the context of the Asian American experience and Asian American Studies is yet to be seen. It is certain that the student with a concentration in the humanities will be given the freedom to explore Asian American and Third World literature, art and dance, and creative writing. At the same time, however, the same amount of rigor and depth of understanding [End Page 19] of the Asian American experience expected of the major in the other two areas of concentration will be asked of the student in the humanities. The proposal goes on to clarify the role of the arts in Asian American Studies: “Of particular importance will be the student’s responses to the question of the flow and interchange between life and art. This last point is of considerable importance since it will help to give the individual the clarity of vision necessary in delineating between what is truly an Asian American assertion and what is a replica of what exists, clothed in Oriental paraphernalia” (A21). Even while the proposal embraces the arts as a means of actualizing the emancipatory goals of Asian American Studies, it seems unsure of what constitutes suitable artistic content and identifies the humanities as an area in which courses and methodologies remain to be developed. In charting future directions for research and teaching, it suggests that barriers between the study and production of culture need to be broken down, a task that resonates with their desire to integrate theory and practice. Moreover, the proposal argues that art and literature must not be “only for the purposes of glorifying the individual writers or artist” but rather must “serve the broader needs of our people.” To this end, it insists that the humanities must be driven by political commitment in order to oppose the colonial legacies that have “denied the right [of Third World Peoples] to express themselves in creative ways” (A26). In short, it is only by entrenching the humanities within a larger political project that it can acquire the “clarity of vision” needed to dismantle Orientalist and racist misrepresentations. Reading this report some thirty-five years later, one cannot help but notice the contrast between its tentative engagement with the humanities and the current status of the humanities within Asian American Studies. Asian American cultural criticism, of which a large portion is concerned in some way or another with literary expression, has flourished in the last two decades and constitutes one of the largest components of an interdisciplinary field. New scholarship on the humanities is being produced at a healthy rate, while courses in Asian American literature are regularly offered at many universities and colleges, which in turn affects the training and hiring of new faculty with expertise in literary and cultural studies. These developments have reconfigured the relationship between the humanities and the social sciences, producing an ongoing tension between methodologies that emphasize theoretical speculation and textual analysis on the one hand and empirical analysis on the other. Yet the issues raised by the 1974 Berkeley proposal continue to be relevant for Asian American literary studies today. After all, [End Page 20] students and scholars...