Rethinking the center from the margins

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...

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...

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.

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

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...

The Protestant and the Catholic: Dimensions to Asian American History Lon Yuki Kurashige (bio) Brian Masaru Hayashi. “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren”: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism Among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. xvi + 217 pp. Tables, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. Gary Y. Okihiro. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. xvii + 203 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $13.95 (paper). We all know about them, the hard working, high achieving Asian American students who have gained a reputation in American education reminiscent of the Jews of an earlier generation. The American media has dubbed them “whiz kids”; their peers know them as “curve wreckers” or “grinds”; but no representation of them has been more celebrated or debated than the accolade “model minority.” Many scholars have questioned the ideological assumptions and statistical data that inform the notion that Asian Americans are ideal citizens for blacks and other racial minorities to emulate. Indeed, if specialists in Asian American Studies agree on anything, it is that this argument both exaggerates and romanticizes Asian American achievement. Yet what we learn in two recent books by historians Brian Masaru Hayashi and Gary Y. Okihiro might surprise even the most ardent critic of the model minority myth. Brian Hayashi, assistant professor of history and American studies at Yale University, introduces us to Asian Americans whose civic virtues were anything but exemplary. In the first chapter of “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren” we meet two Japanese Protestants who disavowed ties to the United States to serve in the Japanese military during World War II. We also learn about the violent rebellions that erupted in the concentration camps that housed Japanese Americans. These stories, and the broader narrative of which they are a part, round out the complexities and contradictions of Japanese American identity before and during World War II. In doing so, they question the prevailing image of Japanese Americans as model American [End Page 663] patriots, willing to die for their country and accept the injustice of internment. Further, they challenge generations of research pronouncing that Christians, better than any other group in Japanese America, conformed to Anglo-American values and culture. “[I]f Christianity was such a powerful conveyor of American values to Japanese American converts,” Hayashi asks, “then why did some Christians support Japan during the war years?” (p. 20). His goal is to explain the ethnic retention and Japanese nationalism of persons, who by all accounts, were thought to have been unequivocally American. The analysis of Protestants tests the hypothesis of assimilation that, in the end, the author finds lacking. His thesis contends that the Protestants “were clearly not at the forefront of Japanese American cultural assimilation in the prewar period” and that they “were often highly nationalistic in their sentiments toward Japan and far less positive about American culture than had been assumed” (p. 6). Hayashi focuses on the period between the world wars (1918–1942) to understand the nationalist sentiments of a significant number of Japanese immigrants. His findings are drawn largely from two types of sources: (1) archival collections pertaining to Japanese immigrants and American Protestants, and (2) the private records of three Protestant Churches in the Los Angeles Japanese American community. Hayashi’s book has a minimalist appeal: clear storyline, concise argument, and economical prose. The thesis is presented as a puzzle in six parts, each of which highlights a different reason why Japanese American Protestants in Los Angeles retained ethnicity. In so doing, Hayashi analyzes the Japanese Protestants’ class background, material interests, ideological and theological beliefs, gender, generation, and social context. He reveals that they blamed their white brethren for the 1924 exclusion of Japanese immigration, and thus began to refuse their financial support. So it was that the Japanese Protestants embraced more firmly the ethnic community that in the 1930s, encouraged by the expansion of the Japanese empire, became increasingly anti-assimilationist. The Protestants even adapted Christian theology to suit the precepts of Japanese nationalism. Christ’s rejection of worldly possessions, for example, became transformed into an appreciation of the selfless...

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...

“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...

Transnationalism and Asian American Studies as a Migration-Centered Project Madeline Y. Hsu (bio) In this article, I address Asian American Studies' preoccupation with borders—particularly that of the American nation-state as defined by race, by laws, and by institutions. I argue that much of Asian American Studies scholarship is concerned with the multiple roles performed by Asians in the defining and enforcing of America's boundaries—the symbolism of Asians in defining racial and cultural borders, how Asians might rearticulate both those borders and themselves to claim inclusion within, the legal and institutional manifestations of those racial and physical borders, and how deeply embedded the binaristic othering of Asians/Orientals has been in America's nation-building processes. I wish here to explore the contrasting possibilities offered by transnational approaches that permit us to relinquish this nation-based framework and to place migration and migrants—with their complicated sets of negotiations, multilayered realities, and multidirectional orientations—at the center of our discussion. In so doing, I attempt to defuse the seemingly intractable tension and threat associated with the "unassimilable foreigners" and migrants that constitute the bulk of Asian American subjects. Because they do not fit neatly into America's nation-building prerogatives, and because their transnationally constituted communities and circles of activity are so often construed as national threats, Asian Americans have faced a particularly pernicious kind of discrimination. [End Page 185] As described by Eiichiro Azuma, "Whether they were members of the first generation or the second generation, a significant number of historical agents have been omitted from intellectual inquiry and interpretation as personae non grata in history."1 My goal here is to recover some of these "lost lives" and to demonstrate the violence of their disappearance from Asian American history. This article responds to Donna Gabaccia's call "to query the tyranny of the national in the discipline of history," albeit in Asian American Studies.2 In a 1999 essay, Gabaccia critiqued the unidirectional trajectory of "the immigrant paradigm and its well-worn paths of immigration and adaptation to the United States" and directed attention instead to "the continuous, multidirectional, and circular character of migrations."3 The image of America as a "melting pot" or "nation of immigrants" relies upon the monolithic narrative of one-way migration, settlement, adaptation, and ultimately assimilation. Such territorializing conceptualizations of the movement of human bodies tend to dominate the discourse, as described by Wang Gungwu: People were identified by the territory, whether large or small, to which they belonged. Entities like communities, nation-states, confederations, and alliances were studied mainly in terms of the places occupied and fought over. Migration studies were generally placed in the context of local, national, and regional history or international and even an interdependent world history. Each of these approaches reflects a primary concern for the politics of physical space.4 Asian American Studies in its turn has been largely compliant by fitting its scholarship within nation-state prerogatives. Asian American Studies was born as a redemptive project, as a concerted attempt to claim America for once outcast Asian peoples. Redemption required that Asian Americans conform to mainstream norms that for much of American history have centered on the assimilated white, male, heterosexual father and husband as the standard for citizenship. This vision was first articulated by Michael-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur in Letters from an American Farmer in 1782: What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, [End Page 186] which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. . . . Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world...

Reviewed by: Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings ed. by Lon Kurashige Yuki Obayashi Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings, edited by Lon Kurashige. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017. Vii + 275 pp. $68.00 cloth. ISBN: 978-0-8248-5576-5. Since Yunte Huang's 2008 publication, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, the transpacific has been used to redefine traditional area studies of Asian studies, Asian American studies, and American studies, as observed in Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo's The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society (2012) and in Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen's Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (2014). In Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossing, editor Lon Kurashige rearranges the [End Page 120] Eurocentric world order through the transpacific historical scope as globalization, he claims, evokes a need to view the world differently, with fresh eyes. In this project, Kurashige argues that uneasiness and uncertainties through multiple conflicts between different races and cultures, which he calls "fear" (2), are witnessed in transpacific history. Therefore, Kurashige positions the transpacific as a space to question and articulate such discordances buried in the history. Pacific America consists of four parts: "China and Ocean Worlds," "Circuits and Diaspora," "Racism and Imperialism," and "Islands and the Pacific Rim." Part 1, "China and Ocean Worlds," introduces the pre- and early modern periods before the United States began colonial expansion into the Pacific in the late nineteenth century. John E. Wills Jr.'s chapter "A Very Long Early Modern? Asia and Its Oceans, 1000–1850," on Chinese trade in the Pacific beginning in the eleventh century, describes the historical continuity before multiple empires claimed the Pacific Islands as territories. In "Transatlantic and Transpacific Connections in Early American History," Kariann Akemi Yokota argues that Americans expressed freedom and independence through trading on the Pacific vis-à-vis the British prohibition of its colony's interactions with other countries. Part 2, "Circuits and Diaspora," introduces the interactions of the United States with various Asian Pacific countries—Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Vietnam—through trading, education, immigration, and politics. Madeline Y. Hsu's chapter, "Chinese and American Collaborations through Educational Exchange during the Era of Exclusion, 1872–1955," challenges previous notions regarding the Chinese Exclusion Act, which hindered Chinese from migrating to the United States. Hsu succinctly argues that the U.S. and Chinese governments collaborated to send Chinese to the United States for higher education during the exclusion era. These Chinese elites, who participated in the educational program, contributed to the notion of model minority later on. Part 3, "Racism and Imperialism," not only highlights the U.S. empire on the Pacific in the twentieth century but also expands the arguments to the Japanese empire, which decentralizes traditional Eurocentric imperial studies by introducing transpacific perspectives. Augusto Espiritu's "Inter-Imperial Relations, the Pacific, and Asian American History" and Eiichiro Azuma's "Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism and the Construction of a US National Security Regime against the Transborder 'Yellow Peril'" are interconnected in that both describe how Asian Americans took part in constructing the U.S. empire. Espiritu explains that Asian Americans whose homelands were targeted by Japanese colonial expansion supported the U.S. empire in opposition to Imperial Japan, what he calls "inter-imperial relations" (180). Beyond focusing on single ethnicity, Espiritu urges us to look at Asian Americans as a holistic entity to understand how the empires were contested on the Pacific, which [End Page 121] also suggests today's power struggle between the United States and China. Furthermore, Azuma observes that racism in California pushed Issei out to Mexico, but they ironically adapted U.S. settler colonialism to their new home. The Pacific Islands, which are often underrepresented in transpacific studies, are included in Pacific America to fill what Kurashige terms "a gaping hole in the middle" (10). The last part of the book, "Islands and the Pacific Rim," shows the editor's efforts to strike a fairer balance by including Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, and the Mariana Islands. While the chapters in Part 4, "Islands and the Pacific Rim," include diverse locations with insightful arguments, the topics are white American racial politics in the annexation of Hawaii...

Reviewed by: Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu Hong Zeng Patricia Chu. Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return. Temple UP, 2019. ix + 255 pp. Patricia Chu's Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return breaks new ground in Asian American studies in the following senses. First, it is the first book to devote itself exclusively to the study of diasporic Asian American narratives of return, specifically, the narratives of later-generation Asian Americans who visit their parents' and ancestors' homeland. Previously, Asian American studies predominantly focused on diasporic Asian American assimilation efforts, in the vein of postcolonial study: "Asian American Studies, focused on immigration and social justice within the United States, has historically marginalized the stories of educated Chinese who studied here and returned to China" (6). Second, the book's methodology is syncretic and uniquely combines postcolonial study, Sigmund Freud's and Franz Fanon's theories [End Page 593] on melancholy and mourning, and genre studies of autobiography and travel writing. Third, the book explores important critical terms such as racial melancholy, postimperial and postcolonial melancholy, and countermemory and postmemory. The book also discloses the relevance of these terms to Asian American narratives of return. Last, the book provides new insight into Chinese history and Asian American history through its unique lens of the narratives of return, written by diasporic Asian Americans who possess a double vision of two cultures. As a result, the book helps to decolonize the study of Asian history and draw global attention to Asian American culture and identity. An overview of chapters bespeaks the originality of Chu's materials and syncretic research approach. Chapter 1 establishes this syncretic method and introduces the narrative of return as a genre of literary memorial related to other transnational or global Asian American studies. It discusses genre, racial melancholia, postcolonial melancholia, types of return migration, and conventions of travel narration. Chapter 2 studies the historian Josephine Khu's 2001 collection of personal essays written by the children of diasporic Chinese settled around the world. It examines these writers' evolving sense of self, culture, and identity through meeting family in China. Chu perceptively analyzes these narrators' racial melancholia, which arise from conflicts between their cultural legacies and personal choices. Chapter 3 examines Lisa See's On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, a memoir about the multiple generations of See's mixed-race family. Chu underscores the fictional narrative tools that See employs to distill imagination and personality into the historical archive of family members she had not seen. According to Chu, See's work manifests the typical migration patterns and "Chineseness" (74) of merchant-class Chinese. Chapter 4 and 5 explores the family memoirs of Denise Chong and Winberg and May-lee Chai. Chu studies how Chong's work manifests the racial melancholy that, after arising from her grandparents' (Canadian Chinese laborers) inability to achieve oversea success—by being excluded based on gender from fulfilling careers and being trapped in household chores—was passed onto their descendants. The text both registers and combats this melancholia through narration and countermemory. The Chais' intergenerational story examines the postcolonial melancholy of the narrator's parents. Their parents, educated in the US, went back to China to help with the construction of the country but found that the liberal democratic [End Page 594] ideas they learned from the US could not be applied to China in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, so they ultimately returned to the US. However, their attachment to China formed a chasm with their solely American-educated daughter. Thus, the Chais' parents represent the cultural identity and postcolonial melancholy of diasporic Chinese culture elites. Chapter 6 studies the 1909 memoir of Jung Wing, the first Chinese graduate of an American university, a diplomat who organized the late Qing study-abroad movement. According to Chu, Wing exhibits a deimperialization in his attack of Qing government, as well as a decolonization in his criticism of Western imperialism. Chu argues incisively that Wing's melancholia is...

In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a technology then just seven years old, to capture community celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment. Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee.The subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play, Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark realities of life in the camps.Also contributing to the book are: Jasmine Alinder is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she coordinates the program in public history. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press). She has also published articles and essays on photography and incarceration, including one on the work of contemporary photographer Patrick Nagatani in the newly released catalog Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani--Works, 1976-2006 (University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2009). She is currently working on a book on photography and the law.Lon Kurashige is associate professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His scholarship focuses on racial ideologies, politics of identity, emigration and immigration, historiography, cultural enactments, and social reproduction, particularly as they pertain to Asians in the United States. His exploration of Japanese American assimilation and cultural retention, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002), won the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2004. He has published essays and reviews on the incarceration of Japanese Americans and has coedited with Alice Yang Murray an anthology of documents and essays, Major Problems in Asian American History (Cengage, 2003).Bacon Sakatani was born to immigrant Japanese parents in El Monte, California, twenty miles east of Los Angeles, in 1929. From the first through the fifth grade, he attended a segregated school for Hispanics and Japanese. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, his family was confined at Pomona Assembly Center and then later transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945, his family relocated to Idaho and then returned to California. He graduated from Mount San Antonio Community College. Soon after the Korean War began, he served with the U.S. Army Engineers in Korea. He held a variety of jobs but learned computer programming and retired from that career in 1992. He has been active in Heart Mountain camp activities and with the Japanese American Korean War Veterans.

Reviewed by: Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage, and: But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays Gregory Choy Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage. By Josephine Lee. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays. Ed. Velina Hasu Houston. Foreword by Roberta Uno. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. With the publication of Performing Asian America, by Josephine Lee, and But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise, edited by Velina Hasu Houston, Temple University Press adds to its rapidly expanding Asian American History and Culture series. It is a valuable addition as Lee’s book is the first critical study to cover the broad scope of Asian American drama. In six of her seven chapters, she offers engaging analyses of no less than seventeen works by a dozen Asian American playwrights. Her analytical focus at first glance seems ambitious, almost overarching, if not altogether evasive. The imagined common ground of Asian America—as it’s envisioned in the plays examined in this book—is not located solely in resistance [End Page 303] to racist stereotypes. Nor does it reside in similar historical experiences of immigration, racism, or assimilation, or in a shared cultural background. Instead, these plays presume a more complex imagining of how ‘Asian America’ is performed, individually and collectively. (p.19) Must one assume, then, as have other critics within Asian American studies, that the previously mentioned “imaginings” are shopworn and shallow? Does “a more complex imagining” promise new and deeply theoretical gleanings in Asian American drama criticism? Lee unfolds her strategic answers to this question in chapter one which illuminates the ties between Asian American history, the founding and formative years of Asian American theater, and the development of “a newer pan-Asian sensibility” as Asian American theaters were “forced to cope with new questions about the nature of individual and collective identity.” As a result, “the many different ways in which ‘Asian America’ can be conceived provide a tension that drives theater practice” (p.17). One of the ways Asian America has most noticeably not been conceived, at least by those engaged in the practice of Asian American drama criticism, Lee claims, is as an audience. Lee addresses the concept of “The Asian American Spectator” in the second so titled chapter. The cleaving to dramatic realism by Asian American playwrights and critics raises questions about who is watching the plays and creates a stricture by which plays are praised on the ambiguous merits of “authenticity” or “realness.” The “masculine spectator’s privileged position,” (i.e., that of the historically presumed audience in theatrical realism) critiqued by feminist theorists Laura Mulvey and Jill Dolan, and modified in James Moy’s seminal work as “the persistent desire for the Other and the subsequent commodification of Chinese bodies made into spectacles for the American public” (p.40), is a paradigm that leaves no room for the Asian American spectator without making such a subject position complicitous in its own oppression. Lee raises a series of critical questions in an attempt to realign, if not subvert, the a priori constructs of realism: How do Asian American dramatists rework the existing paradigm of realism to suit their own needs? What dimensions of their use of realism might be considered strategic and political? How must some of the existing arguments regarding realism, spectatorship, and power be revised when dealing with Asian American versions of theatrical realism? (p. 36) [End Page 304] In formulating her responses, Lee adopts as her test texts Frank Chin’s Year of the Dragon and David Henry Hwang’s Family Devotions. Chapter three, “The Chinaman’s Unmanly Grief,” recapitulates and recontextualizes Frank Chin’s attempts to redeem the image of the Asian American male in a comparative reading of his The Chickencoop Chinaman and R. A. Shiomi’s detective mystery Yellow Fever. Interestingly, though Lee is all too keenly aware of Chin’s masculinist posturings, she resists the urge to simply pinpoint his misogyny and have done with him. Chin is aware, more so perhaps than any of the playwrights whose works Lee analyzes, that his audience is composed...

Introduction Susie J. Pak (bio) and Elda E. Tsou (bio) The purpose of the following collection of essays is to analyze the epistemologies of the field of Asian American studies through the disciplines of literature and history. The interdisciplinary focus of this volume emerges from a set of political and methodological obligations shared by both disciplines as "Asian American" bodies of knowledge. Specifically, this involves what we are calling an "epistemology of the given," defined by an approach toward representation that regards it as self-evident. The process of naturalizing representation implies an epistemology that commands a "metaphysics of presence," an erasure of the historicized process of signification such that the meaning of the sign appears immediately "present" to itself without mediation.1 For history, this epistemology occurs as the "body" of the Asian American subject; for literary criticism, it occurs as an instrumental approach to literature such that its relationship to "Asian America" appears present to itself. Collectively, these essays ask: How might Asian American history be constructed without an Asian American body? How might a literature called "Asian American" be reterritorialized without the content-driven tether of "Asian America"? In the four decades since the inception of Asian American studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the question of the body has been a central issue. But for just as long, scholars have problematized the coherence, the utility, and the limitations of an "Asian American" body. From [End Page 171] the beginning, the field understood its intervention as a two-part project for the recovery and invention of the Asian American subject, the effects of which produce a critique of dominant hegemonic frameworks and institutions.2 Working against a history of exclusion, absence, and misrepresentation, Asian American scholars concentrated on accounts of Asian American experience that rectified the omissions and errors of the past by featuring prominently Asian American voices, bodies, and points of view. Literary critics emphasized the authenticity of literary counternarratives, while historians focused on oral histories and ethnographies. Terms like "excavation" and "discovery" served as indices of an Asian American "body" of knowledge conceived as a visible, empirical, and self-evident proof of Asian American presence. In the ensuing decades, as scholars noted more than twenty years ago, the parameters of the field have drastically shifted from "claiming America" as changes in immigration, a rising professional middle class, and profound economic, social, and political transformations have altered the landscape of "Asian America."3 Nevertheless, even in a vastly reshaped terrain where terms like "difference," "diaspora," "transnational," and "comparative" have replaced the cultural nationalism of the 1970s, something like the old essentialism still persists as the reigning epistemology of the field. Asian American historiography and literary criticism continue to depend on Asian American "bodies" as the primary means of identifying Asian American knowledge. By "body," we mean not only the bodies of actual Asian American subjects but also a reliance on the immediacy of representation itself such that some form of an Asian American subject, whether conceptual, empirical, or synecdochical, acts to secure the identity of the field. Historically, Asian American studies has been strongly marked by a narrative of the body and its various iterations (voice, agency), perceived as cognates for presence (truth, experience, knowledge). This narrative involves the recuperation and the representation of an Asian American presence that has been negatively defined by the exclusion, expulsion, and exploitation of Asian bodies; that is, by absence. But the significance attached to the body in Asian American studies has resulted in an epistemological attitude assuming the transparency (or at least lack of complication) [End Page 172] of the representational apparatus itself, referring to the "body" of knowledge or the Asian American "body" as self-evident entities without historicizing or problematizing their representation. This special issue seeks an interdisciplinary engagement with these questions. What we are calling the "epistemology of the given" occurs in both disciplines as the following: first, as a critical tendency to devalue the apparatus of representation, such that the content under analysis appears self-evident; second, as a narrative of social transformation justifying the field's continued existence by connecting its increasingly institutionalized subject matter to its so-called subjects, a connection figured...