Race in Translation, Translation as Anti-racist Praxis

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...

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...

2 A & Q whose work, institutional locations, geographic foci, and disciplinary training showcase Verge’s range and interests. Bringing together scholars working in disparate fields—including literary studies, history, political science, theater studies, film and media studies, art history, geography, and urban planning—we asked contributors to reflect on the state of their discipline and field at the present time and to consider what they themselves might, knowing what they know now, do differently. Specifically , A&Q participants were tasked with answering one or more of the following questions: 1. What is the idea, your own or someone else’s, whose future most excites you today? 2. If you could go back in time and meet yourself in graduate school, what field or subfield outside your current area of expertise would you encourage yourself to study, and why? 3. To what overlooked book or “outdated” concept of the last two or three decades could your field most benefit from returning with fresh eyes today? To tease out connections as well as possible conflicts, we asked David Palumbo-Liu and Jeffrey Wasserstrom to read over the replies and write responses to them. The lively, eloquent, provocative, and thoughtful approaches demonstrated in the following essays make this A&Q one of the features we’re most excited about for the journal’s inaugural issue. D’où Venons Nous, Que Sommes Nous, Où Allons Nous? David Palumbo-Liu It was hard to resist thinking on Paul Gaughin’s famous Tahitian painting of 1897, conceived at a particular nodal point of Euro-Pacific meandering and cultural production. It is hard to decide where or who the “we” are in that painting, which kinds of psychic or cosmic maps to deploy, what ontological or epistemological frames to impose. In not unlike fashion, the essays collected in this first issue of Verge do all they were asked to do—and that is to reassess where we have come in the past many years in our thinking about Asia, and Asian America, and to (re)imagine the possible connections between these two fields. Verge is aptly named— as a noun, the term verge indicates a border, an edge, a rim; as a verb, it indicates closing in on something, being proximate in character or space. All of the essays collected here verge toward each other from A & Q 3 different angles (largely disciplinary); some meet fairly squarely on similar terrain, others gesture toward one another from a distance, some are faintly resonant, others just exist on different facets of a rim. In commenting on them, from my assigned position—as a meta-reader of these texts and also as someone who began in eleventh-century Chinese poetry and ended up in contemporary Asia Pacific America—I find that we are exploring new concepts and inventing new subfields while still working within the residual disciplinary practices and assumptions in which many of us were brought up. In what follows, I both trace these issues as they exist in Asian studies and in Asian American studies and also show how the two fields, while converging, also diverge in critical ways. This tension between convergence and divergence helps illuminate both fields and also suggests common ways forward. Because we have been invited to be autobiographical, I will take that license to say that my involvement in both Asian and Asian American studies came from a particular personal interest that would probably be mappable via the degraded rubric “identity politics.” A Chinese American growing up in a rigorously all-white community separated from the hot bed of Berkeley by only a twenty-minute drive through the Caldecott Tunnel, I was confounded by the spatial separation rather than the temporal one. One had to drive through a mountain tunnel to get from the intense homogeneity of still-pastoral suburbs to the radical multiracial enclave of Berkeley. My interest in delving into traditional Chinese culture was animated by a desire to legitimize myself as Chinese as much as my desire to join the Asian American movement that was fed by an interest in community activism and what would come to be called multi­ cultural education. This was facilitated by Ling-chi Wang, himself a refugee from the University of Chicago’s...

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.

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...

The three essays that comprise this section of this issue began as conference papers delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2008, Washington, D.C. The panel was organized by Professor Samuel Yamashita of Pomona College, a longtime advocate of forging links between the fields of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. In his usual gentle way, Sam Yamashita brought the panelists together, took care of the panel proposal, and then stepped aside and let these younger scholars take the floor. Over drinks after the panel, we all came to realize that Madeline Hsu and Catherine Ceniza Choy had both been students of Sam's as undergraduates. Charles Hayford approached Sam about creating a special issue of this journal based on the panel, and I, as the panel's discussant would serve as guest editor. Charles later suggested that we dedicate this issue to Sam as a token of our appreciation for his scholarship and mentorship. And we do so with great pleasure.

Based on the articles in this “Global Asias” forum, this essay proposes that in order to build a meaningful bridge between Asian studies and Asian American studies, we must first face what needs to be critically overcome in Asian studies itself: persistent white male domination of the field, on the one hand, and historical role that the United States has played in Asia, on the other. One possibility is to adopt a transnational Asian studies approach, which advocates bringing Asian studies and Asian American studies together while also envisioning radical interdisciplinarity across Asian studies and African American studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian American studies. The key to pursuing such an approach would be to create a teaching and research environment of inclusion and collaboration.

Issei Buddhism in the Americas makes a unique contribution both to Asian and Asian American studies. The authors premise Issei Buddhism in the Americas as a final stage in bukkyo tozen, the eastward-moving transmission of Buddhism from India traditionally thought to have ended in Japan. Their work is thus a contribution to Asian studies, both in terms of how Japan entered a global age and of extending the analysis of a Japanese religious form to the Americas. Following Eiichiro Azuma, the editors and their colleagues demonstrate that Issei Buddhists lived "between two empires," as their experiences of dislocation from Japan and relocation during the American internment transmitted Buddhism farther into the American interior. This volume's particular strength is in the authors' extensive usage of Japanese language sources, a method that transcends the contemporary historiography's over-dependence on Nisei Christian sources. That said, most of the essays also position first-generation Japanese forms of Buddhism in relation to versions of Christianity found in the Americas.

25 Interface Adeline Koh Digitizing Chinese Englishmen: Creating a Nineteenth-Century “Postcolonial Archive” One existing challenge to digital Asian and Asian American studies within the United States is the lack of specific funding for recovery efforts, specifically for digital work that concentrates on populations outside of North America. Of the 141 Digital Humanities Start-Up grants awarded by the National Endowment of the Humanities from 2007 to 2010, only 29 were focused on diverse communities and 16 on diverse community texts. Additionally, no specific funding program is available for the digitization and recovery of Asian texts. This lack of support leads to problematic representations of the past in the digital archive and of the interconnections between different parts of the world in earlier time periods. In a previously published essay (Koh 2014), I documented that very little digital work is available on the nineteenth -century British Empire and its colonies and argued that the form of existing digital projects tends to obscure the connections of England to its empire. This article elaborates on an attempt to address this neglect— Digitizing Chinese Englishmen,1 an archival project on Anglophone writing in Southeast Asia—and shows how this project attempts to address racial bias both in content (through making available nineteenth-century Anglophone writing by people of color) and in form (by encouraging public commentary). Ultimately, Digitizing Chinese Englishmen addresses a Eurocentric bias within digital work in its attempt to “recover” work through creating a postcolonial digital archive. The term Chinese Englishmen refers to a particular part of the Anglophone Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, located specifically in Singapore and Malaysia. Under British colonialism, this group of Chinese subjects experienced the tensions of being torn between two Empires: 26 Interface the Qing Empire, which was under siege with the multiple Opium Wars, and the British Empire, under which they were considered British subjects . Although the “Straits Chinese” trace their history in Singapore and Malaysia back to the fifteenth century, they played a critical role in affirming colonial authority under the British, who, from 1874, established a system of “indirect rule” over Malaya. This system involved the establishment of a privileged class of non-Europeans who would serve as intermediaries between the British and the general masses. The British found this privileged class both in the Straits Chinese and in local Malay nobility. The Straits Chinese were ideally suited to functioning as a “comprador class” because they had developed a separate culture and identity from the local Malay inhabitants and new immigrants to the region from China and India. As a class, they enjoyed access to English education, positions within the new British Civil Service, and substantial business connections that were enough to create a solid mercantile class. I call these Straits Chinese the “Chinese Englishmen” because of the intense relationship of these Chinese subjects with the British Empire. Being part of the British Empire, they often termed themselves the “King’s Chinese” and largely adopted late-nineteenth-century Victorian norms, values, and modes of dress, and they considered themselves loyal subjects to the British Crown. The magazine published poems in tribute to Victoria’s 1897 Jubilee, which contain lines such as “All hail Victoria ! / Hail to her Jubilee! / Well may all the nations conspire / To praise her Sovereignty!” (Straits Chinese Magazine 1897b), and, upon her death, featured a black-bordered editorial. Philip Holden (1998, 86) notes that “if we look for an anti-colonial consciousness, the Straits Chinese Magazine is frustrating.” But at the same time, many Straits Chinese cultural norms exemplify what Homi Bhabha has termed a type of mimicry and hybridity, a mixture between colonial and “national” cultures.2 Digitizing Chinese Englishmen focuses on the digitization and commentary from the Straits Chinese during this period, when they were colonized by the British and compelled to negotiate between two foreign and competing empires. In particular, I focus on how these tensions were represented in the Straits Chinese Magazine, a journal that appeared in Singapore from the late nineteenth century, 1897–1907, containing a mixture of news, editorials, essays and short stories that were modeled after the British periodicals Blackwoods and Macmillians. Unlike previous periodicals, the Straits Chinese Magazine sought to give...

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...

Abstract: Drawing on Black French studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and imperial history, this essay focuses on Charles Baudelaire's mixed-race lover, Jeanne Duval, in order to ask how racial dynamics shaped one of the earliest versions of the decadent aesthetic gaze in nineteenth-century Europe. I analyze Baudelaire's racialized engagements with visual culture and a small sample of poems that he wrote about Duval in Les Fleurs du Mal ( Flowers of Evil ) (1857), concentrating in particular on how he perceives Blackness and what Anne Anlin Cheng has theorized as "ornamentalism." I conclude by reflecting on Duval's fate once Les Fleurs circulated in the British Isles and reached Algernon Charles Swinburne in 1860.

Becoming Chinese American discusses the historical and cultural development of Chinese American life in the past century. Representing a singular breadth of knowledge about the Chinese American past, the volume begins with an historical overview of Chinese migration to the United States, followed by critical discussion of the development of key community institutions, Chinese-language schools, newspapers, and politics in early Chinese American life. Rather than emphasize experiences of discrimination, the collection focuses on Chinese American community formation that tested the racially-imposed boundaries on their new lives in the United States. Written by noted Chinese American scholar Him Mark Lai, the essays in this volume will be of interest to scholars of Asian and Asian American studies, as well as American history, ethnicity, and immigration.

This essay argues that Chang-rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life exemplifies both the conceptual gains and the potential pitfalls of current Asian American literature’s transnationalism. The first section of the essay discusses the interlocking of psychoanalytic theory and political philosophy, specifically Freud’s uncanny and Arendt’s banality of evil, in Lee’s portrait of the psychology of criminal repression. The second section juxtaposes Lee’s novel against real-life comfort women’s survivor testimonies to probe broader questions of historical memory, politicized historiography, and the modes of circulation and authority in contemporary international comfort women discourse. The final section, which recontextualizes Lee’s novel within current debates in Asian and Asian American Studies, argues against a paradigm of alterity vis-à-vis the comfort women and proposes instead a transnational aesthetic premised on the human.

On the Enunciative Boundary of Decolonizing Language:The Imagined Camaraderie of Poets Itō Hiromi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Lee Friederich (bio) On the surface, Itō Hiromi (b. 1955) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) are writers who do not belong in the same category. Although Itō now lives in the United States, she writes in Japanese. Cha was a Korean American writing in English. Both women, however, are experimental poets who defy categorization and who can be seen as “borderline artists” who, in the words of Homi K. Bhabha, “perform . . . a poetics of the open border between cultures . . . display[ing] the ‘interstices’ . . . that [are] part of the history of those peoples whose identities are crafted from the experience of social displacement.”1 Inhabiting personal and poetic spaces outside of the national boundaries within which they were born and initially claimed citizenship, Itō and Cha also trouble the boundaries of their respective national feminisms by traversing and going beyond the realms of “universal, feminist humanitarianism” and “ethnic nationalism” in their works. They refuse any single voice through which to explore the transformation of colonized subjects, making use of multi-vocal narrators instead. In this essay I analyze one such work by each writer. In her 1993 work “Watashi wa anjuhimeko de aru” (I am Anjuhimeko), Itō uses the voice of the miko, or spiritual medium. In Cha’s 1982 Dictée, the female narrator, or diseuse, is taken from French drama. [End Page 24] Drawing from these distinctly feminine storytellers, Itō and Cha meet on the common ground of the mythical, inventing voices to express new forms of female-female empathy teased out of old, androcentric stories. Ueno Chizuko’s comments about Itō hold true for Cha as well: “Borrowing voices and rhythms from old traditional narratives,” these poets “successfully transform” their “own personal tragedies into the universal suffering of everyday life.”2 And yet, as this essay shows, in addition to the transcendental expressions of personal suffering that each of their pieces display, both poets are also attuned to the particular issues of racial ethnicity and displacement wrought by colonialism and its aftermath on the contentious borders between cultures. At the heart of both “Watashi wa anjuhimeko de aru” and Dictée is a sense of physical and national indeterminacy that extends to the lives of these poets as well. Born in Pusan, South Korea, in 1951, Cha’s family settled briefly in Seoul, where she attended elementary school before moving permanently to the U.S. when she was eleven. Returning “home” to Korea for the first time in 1979, just three years before her untimely death in her early thirties, Cha traveled again to Korea (and Japan) a year later to work on a film with her brother. This trip, however, was cut short because of the siblings’ need to flee Korea in the aftermath of President Park Chung-hee’s murder.3 This reflection of Cha’s “dislocation—cultural, geographic and social—embodied by immigration” appears not only in Dictée but also in her performance pieces and short films. As Constance M. Lewallen, curator of Cha’s retrospective exhibit “The Dream of the Audience,” writes, Cha employed “slow fadeouts, repetition and subtle shifts of words through the use of closely allied meanings and cognates to reveal a sense of displacement and fragmentation which she likened to memory and the experience of the immigrant.”4 Published in 1982 only a few days before her untimely death, Dictée is divided into nine sections named for the Greek muses, imposing the illusion of order upon this highly experimental piece. Entwining stories of the revolutionary Korean martyr Yu Guan Soon (1902–1920) and Cha’s mother, Hyung Soon Huo, born to Korean parents exiled to Manchuria, Cha also inlays fragments of poetry in both English and French, photographs, a map of North and South Korea, Chinese characters, handwritten notes and letters, and diagrams of the bodily organs used to produce speech. This enigmatic tour de force—which has been described as a novel, poetry, a memoir, and auto-ethnography—has captivated college campuses, where it is studied in Asian and Asian American Studies, Creative Writing, and Women’s...