The Why and Whither of Asian American Studies: Toward a Reckoning

Abstract

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