Positions, Special Issue: "New Formations, New Questions, Asian American Studies" (review)

Meeting Asian/Arab American StudiesThinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S. Sunaina Maira (bio) and Magid Shihade (bio) I am the witness of the massacre I am the victim of the map I am the son of simple words . . . —Mahmoud Darwish, from "Poem of the Land"1 Speak, your lips still have their liberty Speak, still yours is the spoken word . . . Speak, for the truth is alive even now Speak, say all you wish you had said. —Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from "Speak" (1941)2 Why link Asian and Arab American Studies? Why should we speak of Arab American studies in Asian American studies, or have a conversation in ethnic studies about points of convergence and divergence between these two areas? Is it in order to recognize an emerging ethnic studies field in the U.S., with all the limitations that a politics of recognition based on multiculturalism entails? Is it to extend a comparative ethnic studies approach that is increasingly transforming Asian American studies while raising questions about the definition of ethnic and racial boundaries? In our view, the answer is all of these, but much more. We argue here that speaking of Arab and Asian [End Page 117] American studies in the same breath is ultimately valuable because it illuminates a broader and more urgent issue: the need to develop a fuller analysis of U.S. empire. The meeting of Asian American and Arab American studies has been increasingly highlighted in discussions after 9/11 as it has become apparent that Asian American—particularly South Asian—and Arab American communities as well as Muslim Americans more generally, have similar experiences as targets in the "war on terrorism" waged by the United States. The question of how to produce intellectual and political knowledge to respond to the everyday crisis of empire is urgent at this particular moment, but we want to point out that it has always been so—the conjuncture between Asian/Arab American studies helps to situate U.S. empire in a much longer historical trajectory that links movements in, and out of, Asia and the Middle East. Imperial power operates by obscuring the links between homeland projects of racial subordination and minority co-optation and overseas strategies of economic restructuring and political domination. This link between the domestic and global fronts of empire can be exposed only if we expand our frame of analysis to consider the ways in which categories of subjects such as "Asian American" and "Arab American" are positioned in relation to U.S. empire. Ethnic studies has focused in large part on documenting, understanding, and challenging the construction of ethnic and racial boundaries as they intersect with other axes of domination, such as gender, sexuality, and class, within the nation. However, there has also been a movement in Asian American studies to acknowledge the transnational dimensions of Asian communities and histories, on the one hand, and the paradoxes and pitfalls of a multiculturalist identity politics, on the other. So the meeting of Arab/Asian American studies highlights the question of borders, and the political and epistemological work of boundaries in shaping our understanding of power and resistance. It helps us to locate the issue of ethnic and racial borders within the larger frame of U.S. empire, and to understand that the question facing Asian American studies today is how to intellectually and institutionally confront imperial, not just national or ethnic, politics. This has always been the challenge for ethnic studies, which has often remained confined within a national frame. [End Page 118] The purpose of linking Asian and Arab American studies is not to colonize Arab American studies within an ever-expanding rubric of pan-Asian ethnicity, but to do the opposite: to challenge the ever-expanding borders of an imperial project that operates through direct as well as proxy wars, neo-colonial occupation, and client states. Ultimately, it is for Arab Americanists themselves to decide where they want to be situated in the academy and how Arab American studies should be introduced into the curriculum. Research on Arab Americans is growing and gaining more academic recognition through new faculty hires and programs, though it continues to occur in...

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...

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...

Guest Editors' Introduction

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...

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. …

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...

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...

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...

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...

Introduction John M. Liu and Gary Y. Okihiro The end of certain time periods frequently occasion reflection - assessments of accomplishments, identification of issues yet to be addressed, making resolutions, no matter how unrealistic, and taking strides toward realizing those decisions. With the changeover to a new year, century, and millennium, this certainly seems the appropriate time to engage in such thoughts. Thus, the editors have designated all three numbers of volume three of the Journal of Asian American Studies for the year 2000 as its millennial trilogy. Whether the year represents the end of the second Christian millennium or the beginning of the third, we leave for our readers to decide. Each of the millennial trilogy is dedicated to a specific topic in Asian American studies: number one, pedagogy and community; number two, articulations of race; and number three, cultural productions. The editors developed the initial framework and proposed it to JAAS’s editorial board, which enthusiastically approved the plan. Moreover, several board members volunteered to serve as guest editors. Shirley Hune and Phil Tajitsu Nash have edited this issue on pedagogy and community. The guest editors for number two on the articulations of race are Yen Le Espiritu, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and Nazli Kibria, while Soo-Young Chin, Peter Feng, and Josephine Lee will edit number three on cultural productions. Obviously, these themes far from exhaust the topics currently raised and discussed within the field, and these three special issues can not comprehensively cover the numerous dimensions encompassed within each theme. Nonetheless, the trilogy touch upon many of the questions [End Page 1] that Asian Americanists have confronted as well as the new areas of exploration and explication. The choice of these subject matters is meant primarily to serve as a stimulus for further dialogues among our colleagues, as are the following comments. The first issue on pedagogy and community raises questions about why we teach Asian American studies and for whom. Those questions were critical to the formation of the field and remain so, particularly as Asian American studies becomes increasingly institutionalized on campuses in various regions of the country, despite continued resistance and/or neglect from academia. In the past decade, there has been what appears to be an explosion of academic positions available for Asian Americanist scholars as new programs have been established in geographic areas where Asian American studies has been traditionally strong, such as the Pacific Coast schools, but also on campuses, for instance, in Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, and Texas, places where the field did not foresee establishing a presence at the time of its genesis. This relative cornucopia of academic positions and programs has raised anew questions at whom Asian American studies programs should be directed. Its institutionalization mandates an examination of how far the field has wandered from the impulses that gave rise to Asian American studies. To serve the community was a founding principal in the establishment of Asian American studies programs. Over the past three decades, the complexity of this community has increased with the continuous migration of ethnically diverse Asian populations into an ever-changing U.S. political economy. Some of the political and intellectual currents generated by this development are renewed debates among scholars and activists as to who comprises the community served by Asian American studies? what criteria are to be used and who determines these criteria in assessing the quality and worth of the scholarship now being produced? and what purpose does this scholarship serve? Those were among the key issues confronted by participants during the eventful 1998 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies in Honolulu. Transitory answers to the questions emerging from the new multiplicities of Asian American communities include the greater participation by Asian Americanists in public policy debates and the articulation of new [End Page 2] theoretical orientations to encompass issues such as sexuality and diasporic/transnational cultural identities. New directions and paradigms also necessitate a re-examination of how we teach Asian American studies. Since its inception, Asian American studies has striven to be interdisciplinary, but what does this entail? Being interdisciplinary can be narrowly interpreted as crossing established disciplinary boundaries within either the humanities or social sciences. It...

Social Science Hung Cam Thai, Chair Committee Members: Pensri Ho, Dina Okamoto [End Page 352] Winner: Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions, edited by Rhacel Parrenas and Lok Siu Honorable Mention: Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities, by Pawan Dhingra Legacies of Struggle: Conflict and Cooperation in Korean American Politics, by Angie Y. Chung The Social Science Book Award Committee judged this year’s books on four main criteria: originality, theoretical contribution, methodological soundness, and innovation. Parrenas and Siu masterfully collected a series of original essays, fulfilling these four criteria and demonstrating groundbreaking research in the areas of Asian diasporas and globalization. In doing so, they underscore the ways in which the prevailing “transnational” perspective in Asian American studies has been limited in framing the lives of Asians across the globe. The introduction by the editors, together with original essays by twelve authors focusing on different diasporic approaches, highlights the relationship between contemporary Asian American issues and the post–Cold War “area studies” paradigm that dominates research about displacements of Asian populations; the importance of the “sending” communities in homeland geopolitics on Asian diasporic lives, but not necessarily only in binary terms between “sending” and “receiving” countries that most other social science research has emphasized; the legacy of colonialism in shaping contemporary Asian diasporic communities; and the clarification of the definition of diaspora to involve not only ties between “sending” and “receiving” countries but also connections between different receiving societies. Prior to this book, all claims of “diaspora” studies mistakenly described a mere transnational connection between the United States and the sending country in Asia as “diaspora,” losing sight of the definition of diaspora as referring to the dispersion of one group to multiple destinations. In short, the book reminds us that diaspora involves ties between destinations and not only transnational ties between homeland and hostland, which is an important reminder as the term “diaspora” has come to be loosely thrown around and used to refer to anything transnational. We believe this book advances our thinking on Asian diasporas by building on, but also providing fresh conceptions to, previous groundbreaking works on transnational studies in Asian American studies. [End Page 353] This year’s entries were impressive, making the decision quiet difficult to choose from nearly thirty books. We awarded an honorable mention to two books: Legacies of Struggle, by Angie Y. Chung, and Managing Multicultural Lives, by Pawan Dhingra. Chung examines how two Los Angeles 1.5 and 2nd generation Korean American community organizations have the capacity to bridge the sometimes competing interests of ethnic immigrant elites and mainstream funding institutions for social justice endeavors within an increasingly racially diverse Koreatown. Her book combines theoretically grounded research with a community activist sensibility that harkens back to a major founding principle of Asian American studies, where students and faculty shared a commitment to and engaged in collaborative social justice efforts in and for disenfranchised Asian American communities. Chung provides a compelling example of how such engaged scholarship continues within our discipline. Dhingra’s ethnographic study of Korean American and Indian American professionals in Dallas, Texas, examines the complexities of heterogeneity and multiculturalism through the lens of hybridity. A focus on Asian American professionals foregrounds socioeconomic class status in shaping racial experiences in ways that significantly differ from working-class ethnics. At the same time, his book challenges dominant theoretical frameworks that focus on understanding the adaptation of Asian Americans as either model or marginalized minorities in American society, and instead provides a new understanding of how Korean Americans and Indian Americans navigate challenges to their identities as American, Asian, and ethnic. [End Page 354] Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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...

The Why and Whither of Asian American StudiesToward a Reckoning Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (bio), Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai (bio), and Paul Spickard1 (bio) Ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack, a crack in everythingThat's how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"2 Remember that consciousness is power. Consciousness is education and knowledge. Consciousness is becoming aware. … Tomorrow's world is yours to build. —Yuri Kochiyama (1921–2014) On March 11, 2020, roughly three months after the first death attributed to the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus was confirmed in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization elevated its characterization of the ensuing outbreaks from "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC) to global pandemic. Despite then-President Donald J. Trump's assurances of contagion containment via China-focused travel restrictions, concomitant dismissals of disease severity, and predictive assertions that the virus would simply "go away," the United States would—by the end of March 2020—surpass China and the world in confirmed COVID-19 cases. Situated against a chaotic backdrop of nationally declared emergency, inconsistent masking protocols, ventilator [End Page vii] shortages, and personal protective equipment (PPE) scarcities, what was previously considered unthinkable in terms of business shutdown and statewide lockdown would become both normal standard operating procedure and de rigueur reality. As contemporaneously significant and retroactively predictable, the COVID-19 pandemic as health crisis would on the one hand promulgate a politics of divisiveness that was part and parcel of the Trump administration; on the other hand, the remorseless racist characterization of "China viruses" and "Kung flus" by the forty-fifth commander-in-chief would foment an all-too-familiar resurgence in anti-Asian/Asian American violence. The recent pandemic past (along with the persistence of COVID-19 in the present) inadvertently yet productively foregrounds this special issue's "reckoning" focus. To briefly recap and further clarify: this special issue was originally born out of a conversation we as editors began in 2018, at the annual convening of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) in San Francisco, California. Acknowledging that almost fifty years had passed since the 1968 West Coast institutionalization of ethnic studies as a distinct discipline while simultaneously noting that 2019 marked the fortieth anniversary of the AAAS as an identifiable academic organization, we initially used "reckoning" as a means of contemplating the hopeful visions of past activists in order to reconcile a contradictory present of neoliberal institutions and academics. Yet, as 2020 and beyond make clear, past is not necessarily causal prologue; instead, the past more often than not assumes the accretive dimensions of a coda, a contrapuntal endpoint that paradoxically makes urgent other connections, possibilities, and resonances. Accordingly, we editors, along with the contributors to this special issue, acknowledge from the outset that the formation of Asian American studies—along with ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies—was first and foremost a paradigmatic endeavor, one that, as Lisa Lowe productively characterizes it, remains "key to thinking in comparative relational ways about race, power, and interconnected colonialisms."3 Despite such analytical capacities and activist potentialities, we return to a question of relevance in order to highlight what gaps remain and what still must be done to reconcile the interdiscipline's aspirational vision and social justice agenda. Such reckoning uses as a first premise what Leonard Cohen in the above epigraph notes is the recognition of "cracks" as sites for hope and optimism. What operates as a productive through-line for the essays included in this special issue is the worthwhile assumption that consciousness is, as Yuri Kochiyama maintains, intimately fixed to an institutional and interdisciplinary "tomorrow" that has yet to be built. To surmise and summarize: Is there a reason for Asian American studies? What are its preoccupations, its problems, and its possibilities in our present moment, more than fifty years on from our [End Page viii] beginnings, in a time fraught with nativism and racial conflict? What ought Asian American studies be doing as we go forward? These are the master questions for this introductory essay and this issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies. Asian...