The Study of Asian American Politics in the United States

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...

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

The Challenge of Providing Culturally Competent Services

Presidential Studies QuarterlyVolume 41, Issue 3 p. 437-441 Editors' Introduction JON R. BOND, Corresponding Author JON R. BOND Texas A&M UniversityJon R. Bond is a professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He is coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena and coeditor of Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, and numerous articles in professional journals. He was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He has served as coeditor of the Journal of Politics, president of the Southern Political Science Association, and president of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society. Richard Fleisher is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is coeditor of Polarized Politics and American Political Parties: Decline or Resurgence, coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena, and the author or coauthor of articles in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and the American Journal of Political Science.Search for more papers by this authorRICHARD FLEISHER, Corresponding Author RICHARD FLEISHER Fordham UniversityJon R. Bond is a professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He is coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena and coeditor of Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, and numerous articles in professional journals. He was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He has served as coeditor of the Journal of Politics, president of the Southern Political Science Association, and president of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society. Richard Fleisher is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is coeditor of Polarized Politics and American Political Parties: Decline or Resurgence, coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena, and the author or coauthor of articles in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and the American Journal of Political Science.Search for more papers by this author JON R. BOND, Corresponding Author JON R. BOND Texas A&M UniversityJon R. Bond is a professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He is coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena and coeditor of Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, and numerous articles in professional journals. He was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He has served as coeditor of the Journal of Politics, president of the Southern Political Science Association, and president of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society. Richard Fleisher is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is coeditor of Polarized Politics and American Political Parties: Decline or Resurgence, coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena, and the author or coauthor of articles in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and the American Journal of Political Science.Search for more papers by this authorRICHARD FLEISHER, Corresponding Author RICHARD FLEISHER Fordham UniversityJon R. Bond is a professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He is coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena and coeditor of Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era, and numerous articles in professional journals. He was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He has served as coeditor of the Journal of Politics, president of the Southern Political Science Association, and president of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society. Richard Fleisher is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is coeditor of Polarized Politics and American Political Parties: Decline or Resurgence, coauthor of The President in the Legislative Arena, and the author or coauthor of articles in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and the American Journal of Political Science.Search for more papers by this author First published: 04 July 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2011.03880.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume41, Issue3September 2011Pages 437-441 RelatedInformation

Convergence 2 A & Q A&Q Political Science and the Study of Global Asias It is certainly desirable for a social science to be rigorous, empirical and seek general rules of human behavior. But as Aristotle explained, it should not try to achieve a rigor that goes beyond what is possible given the limitations inherent in the subject matter. In fact, most of what is truly useful for policy is context-­ specific, culture-­ bound and non-­ generalizable. The typical article appearing today in a leading journal like the American Political Science Review contains a lot of complex-­looking math, whose sole function is often to formalize a behavioral rule that everyone with common sense understands must be true. What is missing is any deep knowledge about the subtleties and nuances of how foreign societies work, knowledge that would help us better predict the behavior of political actors, friendly and hostile, in the broader world. —­ Francis Fukuyama, “How Academia Failed the Nation: The Decline of Regional Studies” (2004) What does or should an “area studies political scientist” do? Within the past two decades, this question has at times led to heated debates. For some, area studies research is at best the source of footnotes that more analytically oriented political scientists may employ fruitfully and effectively. For others, “political science” embodies pompous pretense in its own name and, at its worst, profoundly misrepresents politics as real human beings ordinarily understand it, experience it, and believe it. These two caricatures could be readily dismissed if they were to have no impact on careers, appointments, funding decisions, or collegiality within universities. —­ Jorge I. Domínguez, “Don’t Stay Home: The Utility of Area Studies for Political Science Scholarship” (2009) Southeast Asian studies and political science are compatible. It will always be possible to define these two fields in exclusionary ways. At the extreme, they can be made to refute one another, methodologically and epistemologically. Yet there is no reason why one cannot study an area and do political science at A & Q 3 the same time—­ and satisfy criteria for quality research on both sides of that polemicized divide, depending on what those criteria are.­ —­ Donald K. Emmerson, “Southeast Asia in Political Science: Terms of Enlistment” (2008) 1. Do you perceive any conflicts or even incompatibilities between (1) the methods commonly used in political science and the study of specific Asian regions and/or (2) the methods commonly used in political science and the study of specific Asian diasporic populations ? If so, what might this suggest about the relationship between (1) disciplinary and area knowledges and/or (2) disciplinary and cultural knowledges? 2. Conversely, in what ways can distinctive epistemological and methodological approaches work together to create new models for both political science and the study of Asia and various Asian diasporas? 3. Certain institutional presuppositions and conditions of knowledge formation can enable or block, facilitate or discourage, productive interchanges between political science and area studies and/ or ethnic studies. In what ways have you had to negotiate field and subfield, discipline and area study, in your own research on specific Asian regions or specific Asian populations? Working on the Boundaries of Political Science and Ethnic Studies Fred Lee My claim is a rough parallel to a claim Donald Emmerson makes in the introduction to this A&Q: there is no reason why one cannot do both ethnic studies and political science well, depending on how one articulates the boundaries and relationships between them. Now, I do not want to overstate the case for differentiating them, but I do conceive of these fields as relatively distinctive, epistemologically and methodologically speaking . We might even find a polemicized divide between political science and ethnic studies, one analogous to the distinction Francis Fukuyama’s epigraph draws between political science and area studies. But we would have to look harder to find it, especially if we turn to the (once again 4 A & Q relative) distinction between Asian studies as an area studies and Asian American studies as an ethnic studies. Political science engages more with Asian studies than Asian American studies due to the interdisciplinary orientations of its subfields.1 Scholars of comparative politics and international relations who specialize in Asian countries or regions have...

Au Etats-Unis, les immigres Philippins resistent a differentes formes de discrimination a travers l'affirmation de certaines specificites culturelles. Par exemple, la chastete des femmes avant le mariage est presentee comme une resistance au modele de la societe dominante blanche americaine, mais ceci se fait au prix de l'autonomie des femmes et renforce le pouvoir patriarcal dans ces communautes

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

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.

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

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

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement This special issue was originally conceptualized as the ‘International Workshop on Asian American Studies in Asia’ hosted by the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica, Taipei, on June 4–5, 2010. The Institute's director, Te-hsing Shan, and staff have offered generous support for this event, and the workshop participants—most especially Mie, Kun Jong, Kim Tong, Amie, Candace, Gayle, Wing Tek, Hyungji, Rika, and Lisa—have all contributed to this project with much labor, patience, and friendship. Of course, this issue would not appear without Kuan-Hsing's support and Chia-Hsuan's professional assistance. I thank you all cordially for making this possible. Notes On the debate on ‘denationalization’ in Asian American criticism and the responding criticisms, see Wong (1995) Wong, Sau-Ling. 1995. Denationalization reconsidered: Asian American cultural criticism at a theoretical crossroads. Amerasia Journal, 21(1&2): 1–27. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Koshy (1996) Koshy, Susan. 1996. The fiction of Asian American literature. The Yale Journal of Criticism, 9: 315–346. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Dirlik (1998) Dirlik, Arif. 1998. “The Asia-Pacific in Asian-American perspective”. In What is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, Edited by: Dirlik, Arif. 283–308. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. [Google Scholar]; Chuh (2003) Chuh, Kandice. 2003. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique, Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; and most recently, Sohn et al. (2010) Sohn, Stephen, Lai, Paul and Goellnicht, Donald C. 2010. Special issue on ‘Theorizing Asian American Fiction. Modern Fiction Studies, 56(1) (eds)[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. For a theoretical historicization of American modernity and Asian immigration, see Palumbo-Liu (1999) Palumbo-Liu, David. 1999. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar], especially Part 1. On the critique of settler colonialism, see Fujikane and Okamura (2008) Fujikane, Candace and Okamura, Jonathan Y. 2008. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai'i, Edited by: Fujikane, Candace and Okamura, Jonathan Y. Honololu: University of Hawai‘i Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. At the International Workshop on Asian American Studies in Asia, held at Academia Sinica, Taipei, in June 2010, Lum's recital of his Nanjing poems instigated a heated debate among the participants on Japan's war responsibility. Apparently, the scar of war and imperialism runs deep and is hard to heal in Asia and the Pacific. For the emergence and development of ethnic studies in Hawai‘i, see Aoude (1999) Aoude, Ibrahim. 1999. The Ethnic Studies Stories: Politics and Social Movements in Hawai'i: Essays in Honor of Marion Kelly, Edited by: Aoude, Ibrahim. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. [Google Scholar]; and Trask (1993) Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1993. From a Native Daughter, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. [Google Scholar], especially Part IV. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChih-ming WangContact address: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, 128 Yanjiuyuan Rd., Section 2, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan.

“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...

Guest Editors' Introduction

Performing Race, Speaking the Body