The Third World Strikes and Asian American Studies as an Institutional and Intellectual Project

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...

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.

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...

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

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...

Toward a "Subjectless" Discourse: Engaging Transnationalist and Postcolonial Approaches in Asian American Studies Nhi Lieu (bio) Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique . By Kandice Chuh. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 215pages. $59.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Inspired by Avery Gordon's evocative envisioning of a transformative social existence, Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwiseanalytically employs Asian American literature to unravel and reflect upon the complex dimensions of the category "Asian America." 1This productive enterprise questions the underpinnings of Asian American studies itself. As a field undergoing theoretical self-reflection, contemporary Asian American studies has often been characterized by the controversy over its representational politics. Since the field's inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Asian American studies scholars have been struggling with the epistemological question of its object of knowledge. Chuh "advanc(es) a critical approach to the study of Asian American literatures that conceives of that work as theoretical devices that help us apprehend and unravel the narrative dimensions of naturalized racial, sexual, gender, and national identities" (x). In so doing, Chuh questions the relationships between power, subjectivity, racial structures, historicity, and legal categories. Imagine Otherwisebegins by recounting the controversy that erupted at the 1998 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference when the organization awarded Lois Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging(1997) the prize for best fiction. Set in Hawai'i, Blu's Hangingdirectly defies preconceived notions about the islands as a perfect paradise by grappling with dark themes such as poverty, despair, violence, and the loss of innocence. Yamanaka's stark portrayal of physical abuse sets three young Japanese American children against a Filipino American sexual predator. Some members of the Asian [End Page 491]American Studies Association charged this representation with being racist against Filipinos and perpetuating negative stereotypes about Filipino men as sexual deviants. While Blu's Hangingconfronted many difficult and delicate issues within the Asian American community, the intra-ethnic conflict that would ensue at the association's meeting nonetheless surprised many. Chuh observes that "this controversy functioned as a crucible for testing the politics and practices of the association and its membership, dramatically highlighting marginalization and exclusionary knowledge politics within Asian American studies" (2). Using this test case as a starting point, Chuh brilliantly takes apart assumptions about "Asian America" in order to further a "subjectless analysis" that challenges Asian American representation as uniform, stable, monolithic, and essentialist. Chuh unravels the limits of an identity-based paradigm as the foundational basis for Asian American studies and suggests that "critique" replace the subject as the object of inquiry. Using literary and legal texts, Chuh displaces cultural nationalism as a political objective in identity-based categories and provides a productive analysis of race and sexuality in order to dispel the idea of a uniform subjectivity. Through critical readings of Carlos Bulosan's novel America Is in the Heartand Bienvenido Santos's short story "Immigration Blues," Chuh argues for a need to rethink the U.S. colonization of the Philippines as a racialized and sexualized historical project that contributes to Filipinos/Filipino American subject formation (38). As she asserts, the domination of the Philippines by the United States not only demonstrated the virility of white masculinity, but also created conditions that contradicted American principles of liberty and justice. In particular, U.S. law prohibited colonized subjects of the nation-state from being incorporated as citizen-subjects. Chuh carefully examines literary productions and legal cases filed by Filipino Americans who sought citizenship through military service. Despite their legal status as U.S. nationals, Filipino immigrants remained ineligible for citizenship because of their racial status and perceived threatening masculinity. Chuh argues that these incoherent legal and cultural positionings of Filipino Americans refuse categorization within the framework of a singular nationalist discourse and thus function as "a critique rather than identity" (56). Chuh uncovers the problem of privileging race as the primary analytical category and urges readers to think about other possibilities for organizing Asian American studies. The construct of "Filipino America" is promising precisely " becauseof its categorical flux" (57, her emphasis). Asian American studies may thus emerge "as a discourse critical of identity, of...

Carlos Bulosan's The Laughter of My Father:Adding Feminist and Class Perspectives to the "Casebook of Resistance" Marilyn Alquizola (bio) and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi (bio) In this essay we focus on a cycle of twenty-four short stories published in 1944 by Filipino American poet and author Carlos Bulosan entitled The Laughter of My Father.1 Although this work is less commonly treated than Bulosan's novels, we draw from one of the most compelling analyses to date, presented by literary critic L. M. Grow.2 In an article published in 1995 Grow proposed that Laughter could be read as a kind of casebook, illustrating peasant resistance against the colonial structures and the comprador class found in northern agricultural areas on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Here we propose that it is possible to expand critically on Grow's analysis by adding feminist and class perspectives to Grow's interpretation. This in turn reveals that Bulosan had more to say about Filipino women than has been suggested in the published literature on the author and his work to date.3 Specifically, by sifting though each of the stories in Laughter, it is possible to elucidate lessons regarding gendered social relations based on the specific manifestations of male domination encountered by the women in a neocolonial social formation. Through an analysis of the individual stories, as well as the book as a whole, an assessment can be made of the work's lessons regarding possible responses to male domination vis-à-vis interpersonal relationships, the family, and social institutions. Why Bulosan? Why The Laughter of My Father? For any reader who is not familiar with the life and work of the late Filipino author Carlos Bulosan, we should start with a quick overview. Although not widely known in the larger domain of North American popular culture, Bulosan, the writer and the activist, is iconic within the field of Asian American studies. Controversies during his lifetime, however, and criticism of his most famous book, America Is in the Heart, over the last two decades may have served to limit his audience.4 [End Page 64] Bulosan, who remained a Filipino national even though he spent his entire adult life in the United States, was a new Asian immigrant who landed in the port of Seattle in 1922.5 As an immigrant he was a prolific, well-recognized author for his age and educational background. A little more than a decade after his untimely death, Bulosan's legend exploded in the late 1960s. His work as a poet and author, as well as a prolabor militant, was foregrounded in the earliest classes in Asian American history, literature, and the Filipino American experience, after Asian American studies classes and programs were established at the university level circa 1968-69. Carlos Bulosan's writing, especially his semiautobiographical novel America Is in the Heart, had a special significance in Asian American and ethnic studies for a wide variety of reasons. First, and perhaps most important, Bulosan developed a race and class perspective on behalf of his compatriots, the generation of Filipino migrant workers known as the Manongs (or "respected elders") who worked in the fields, fisheries, and canneries up and down the West Coast during the 1920s and 1930s.6 America Is in the Heart, especially, was widely used in Asian American studies courses across the country because many of the field's founders thought that this book, in particular, most explicitly exposed the racial prejudice and discrimination that the Manongs faced before World War II. What differentiates Bulosan from most other prewar Asian immigrant authors is that, along with race, Bulosan was highly focused on the local and global class dynamics that also shaped the Filipino immigrants' labor experiences and tribulations.7 In this same sense Bulosan was also able to position the Filipino laborers' plight within an international context, rare in terms of nonfiction Asian immigrant authors of the time. In America Is in the Heart, specifically, Bulosan spends chapters developing the portrait of how American colonial intervention in the Philippines created the macrodynamic that forced peasants from the collapsing agrarian sector in the northern Philippines to consider international migration as a...

Asian American Studies and LGBTQ StudiesHorizons of Intersectional Alliances Martin F. Manalansan IV (bio) This essay is a brief reflection on the rich intersectional history of Asian American Studies and LGBTQ studies through an autoethnographic account. It focuses on the emergence of productive conjunctions between the two fields as framed by my own career trajectory in academia and community activism. I want to note that this is not an ego-boosting attempt to locate myself as an exemplary case, but I will unabashedly admit that I was a fortunate witness to and an avid participant in the provenance of the continuing fruitful alliances between the two fields. I map these historical and theoretical meeting points as products of historical and biographical encounters and conditions. I believe the "state" of the fields should not be considered as a description of a present condition but rather, as critical assessment of a process, a persistent unfolding, and a continuous voyage of several communities of scholars. At the heart of this essay is not just a story or a history but rather a reflection on enduring questions that have propelled this intellectual crossroad. I offer an invitation or provocation to scholars to take risks, and to listen more closely and sensitively to the evolving world and to lives on the ground. The "roots" of this intersectional history of the two fields are a product of sensitive, activist, and community responses to problems on existing social injustices. As I will point out later, there is a danger in the institutionalization and official recognition of the works coming out of these conjoined fields, especially around the initial impulse for such collaborations which was taking responsibility to engage with ever-increasing and continuing crises of racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and extreme economic disparities. At [End Page 11] the end, I briefly gesture to the problems of institutionalization and suggest kernels of a possible future. STREET KNOWLEDGE When I was in graduate school studying for a doctoral degree in anthropology, I was trained as a Southeast Asian Studies scholar. Like many fields in area studies, some countries and cultures were "trendier," more "fundable" or deemed more strategically important than others. My kind dissertation adviser, who conducted fieldwork in the Philippines, very seriously told me that to be a "marketable" Southeast Asian Studies scholar in anthropology (a region already disparaged for its lack of strategic relevance especially after the Vietnam war) that I should focus on Indonesia since it was the treasure trove of anthropological curiosities. The turning point that marked my shift from traditional anthropological area studies to both Asian American and LGBTQ studies was the major turn in the AIDS pandemic in the late 1980s. By that time, the pandemic started devastating communities of people of color, poor people, drug users, and immigrants. After years of living in a bucolic university town in western New York, the sense of safety and distance from the ongoing epidemic slowly fell apart. By 1986, several of the Filipino gay men I met in New York City were coming down with AIDS, some of whom died within the next two years. It was that moment that spurred me to change my dissertation topic from Islamic education in Sumatra, Indonesia, which was a matrilineal society (where the lineage was traced through mother line)–a classic ethnographic topic if there ever was one. I told my adviser that I wanted to study AIDS among Filipino gay men first in San Francisco, then, due to lack of funding, I chose New York where I already had a network of Asian American, primarily Filipino American, gay men. My adviser was naturally disappointed, but like all generous dissertation advisers, he cautioned me that I would be unemployable and that I was taking a major risk that may damage my professional future. Nevertheless, he allowed me the freedom to explore unchartered intellectual and social landscapes despite the dangers and risks involved. When I arrived in New York City to supposedly start my fieldwork in 1989, I became involved in GAPIMNY (Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York) and I helped found Kambal sa Lusog, a Filipino American gay and lesbian group. To fund my research...

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

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...

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

In Defense of Asian American Studies: The Politics of Teaching and Program Building, by Sucheng Chan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 248 pp. Hardcover, $55.00; paper, $25.00. ISBN 0252030095. Since the 1990s, university and college campuses across the United States have witnessed a surge in the growth of Asian American Studies Programs (Monaghan, 1999; Sengupta, 1999). The field of Asian American Studies (AAS) has come a long way since its birth from the 1968 San Francisco State and 1969 University of California-Berkeley student strikes that demanded more diverse perspectives in the university curriculum. Despite growing pains over its past 35-plus years, AAS has become institutionalized in the academy. A few scholars have examined the history of AAS and its development (Chang, 1999; Endo & Wei, 1988; Espiritu, 1992; Wei, 1993). Additionally, essays in edited volumes have analyzed the theoretical and institutional challenges to developing this field that balances academic, community, and political missions (Butler, 2001; Nakanishi & Nishida, 1995; Okihiro, Hune, Hansen, & Liu, 1988). Sucheng Chan, professor emeritus of Asian American Studies and Global Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a pioneer in the field of AAS, offers an important contribution to this sparse literature with her collection of writings, In Defense of Asian American Studies: The Politics of Teaching and Program Building (2005). In this anthology, Chan showcases a rich collection of primary documents--essays she wrote between 1974 and 2003 (some published, some unpublished) as she labored in the field of AAS as a teacher, scholar, and administrator at UC-Berkeley, UC-Santa Cruz, and UC-Santa Barbara. These writings speak volumes to the field's development at different historical moments. Chan's critical appraisal of the institutionalization of AAS reveals important insights for anyone interested in building AAS and understanding its history, current challenges, and future directions. This work covers three areas: conducting research, teaching, and program building. Part 1 (Justifying Our Existence) includes Chan's work identifying primary research sources, establishing an academic association, creating a scholarly book series on Asian Americans, and developing an undergraduate degree in AAS. Chan embraces the importance of research, but she does so with a clear awareness of the academy's limited definitions of scholarship and mindful of the Asian American movement's community roots. Faculty who spend unseen (and unrewarded) hours of labor building AAS programs and who value their community connections often cannot prioritize the research that is so central to the tenure process. These scholars often also engage in interdisciplinary work that is more difficult to assess and might be charged with being biased for researching their own communities. Part 2 (The Politics of Teaching) focuses on pedagogy, where Chan shares her experience teaching verbal and composition skills to limited English proficient (LEP) students. Debunking stereotypes, she reminds readers that LEP students at the University of California are bright (having met stringent UC admissions standards) and stresses the importance of creating comfortable classrooms that facilitate LEP student learning. Included in this section is her essay On the Ethnic Studies Requirement (1989), which details with great acumen the challenges of teaching ethnic studies courses when the majority of students are non-Asian American and who might resent having to take an ethnic studies course. Part 3 (Empowering Ourselves) details the various power levels in the university that can be used to advance Asian American issues. While she acknowledges that some earlier critics have charged these writings as being too accommodating, Chan clearly outlines her strategy to change the institution from within, and she advises readers to be selective about the battles they wage. …

Notes on Contributors.Acknowledgments.Asian American Studies in Its Second Phase: Kent A. Ono (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).PART I: Representations.1 What is the Political? American Culture and the Example of Viet Nam: Viet Nguyen (University of Southern California).2 Ethnography, the Cinematic Apparatus, and Asian American Film Studies: Peter Feng (University of Delaware).3 Culinary Fictions: Immigrant Foodways and in Indian American Literature: Anita Mannur (Wesleyan University).PART II: Identities.4 Foregrounding Native Nationalisms: A Critique of Anti-Nationalist Sentiment in Asian American Studies: Candace Fujikane (University of Hawaii).5 A World Make-Over? An Asian American Queer Critique: Martin Manalansan IV (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).6 Asian American Studies Through (Somewhat) Asian Eyes: Integrating Mixed Race into the Asian American Discourse: Cynthia Nakashima (University of California at Berkeley).PART III: Disciplines and Methodologies.7 Asian American Studies and the Pacific Question: J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Wesleyan University).8 Planet Youth: Asian American Youth Cultures, Citizenship, and Globalization: Sunaina Maira (University of California, Davis).9 The Problematics of History and Location of Filipino American Studies within Asian American Studies: Helen Toribio (San Francisco State University).10 Rethinking Asian American Victimhood: Understanding the Complexity of and Citizenship in America: Taro Iwata (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).Index