Asian American Movement Research Articles

“Same Struggle, Same Fight”: Yellow Seeds and the Asian American Movement in Philadelphia's Chinatown

“Same Struggle, Same Fight”: Yellow Seeds and the Asian American Movement in Philadelphia's Chinatown

Black Militants and Asian American Model Minorities: Contesting Oppositional Representations; or, On Afro-Asian Solidarities

There is a longstanding assumption that Asian Americans gain mobility through nonpolitical means. This is usually explained through reference to cultural values or historical experiences. From a cultural perspective, Asian values are posited to coincide with American middle-class values, such as respect for authority, diligence, self-discipline, and high motivation for achievement, thus facilitating Asian American success. I contend that the invisibility of Asian American political activism is not primarily the result of cultural values, but rather of differential racialization, or ways that particular kinds of racial meanings are imputed to different groups. That in the first half of the twentieth century Japanese Americans were viewed as hyperpolitical and hyperaggressive yellow-peril threats points to the ways that racialized images change over time. They have been influenced by transformations in the political economy and international political alliances, rather than remaining a static feature of culture. Moreover, the fact that the images of Japanese Americans and African Americans were historically inverted suggests the social constructedness of the representations themselves. This difference speaks not only to the way racism operates but also to the very construction of US society. By the late 1960s, Asian American activists were creating self-images: promoting community empowerment rather than individual mobility, they drew heavily from Black Power politics and consciously forged Afro-Asian solidarities. I examine the writings of a leading Asian American Movement (AAM) organization, the Asian American Political Alliance, to explore the ways the AAM worked to create this new racial paradigm. I conclude with a focus on the recycling of assimilationist theories to discuss race and politics in today’s age of multiculturalism and so-called “postracial” politics.

Activism, identity and service: the influence of the Asian American Movement on the educational experiences of college students

This article emphasises two major themes that address the influence of the Asian American Movement: (1) encouraging students to broaden the discourse on race and ethnic relations by redefining categories and challenging prevalent assumptions; (2) an increased tolerance and frequency in course offerings that examine and centralise the histories, literature and political underpinnings of Asian Americans and ethnic (i.e. Japanese) specific communities, which has equipped students to engage in discourse and community action. Countering dominant narratives through unification and education is the means by which Asian American students fought for representation and fair treatment.

D'où Venons Nous, Que Sommes Nous, Où Allons Nous?

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...

Multidimensional Silence, Spirituality, and the Japanese American Art of Gardening

Multidimensional Silence, Spirituality, and the Japanese American Art of Gardening Brett Esaki (bio) Japanese American Artworks, such as origami, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music, are riddled with complex silences. Many Japanese American artists create silences to express experiences of being silenced by various forms of marginalization. In order to exercise agency within contexts of racism, some immerse themselves in an internal silence that allows them to focus on crafting the art. They also create art that communicates cultural and religious ways of being silent. As I discovered in interviews and site visits, these layers of silence are essential to Japanese American gardeners and the gardens they design. This article examines three generations of Japanese American gardeners in the Central Coast of California. Political, discursive, and religious silences have been infused into this lineage’s silent practices of art as they negotiated economic marginalization and American Orientalism. A primary strategy to negotiate racism—called outward assimilation—was to transform religious resources within gardening to appear nonreligious; in recent decades, Asian Americans often accomplish this by identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” Together, multidimensional silence and spirituality are strategies of resistance that have sustained Japanese American gardeners through cycles of racism. [End Page 235] Introduction to Multidimensional Silence and a Lineage of Gardeners Political, discursive, religious, and artistic silences fused within gardening to create multidimensional silences in response to a history of anti-Japanese racism. In order to understand multidimensional silence, it is helpful to compare it to common conceptions of silence. Silence according to a Western definition is the absence of sound, and in this sense is negative, deep, and dark. Asian American studies has typically utilized this definition because it matches the experience of having one’s political and subjective voice muffled and distorted; this applies to all Asian Americans and involves more layers for women and those of nonnormative sexualities. The preference for this definition can be traced to the historical roots of the Asian American movement in “breaking the silence” and “speaking truth to power” and the theoretical roots of Asian American studies in Marxist class analysis. Similarly, Asian American studies has addressed cultural tendencies to avoid discussing issues of sexuality and not to seek counseling and other mental health services.1 Other Asian American silences have been traced to the legacy of colonialism—two exemplars of this critique are Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and Edward Said’s Orientalism.2 Generally, in this line of analysis, Asians are colonial subjects, and their voices are transformed through epistemic violence into colonial discourse, information to be ignored, or affirmations of the colonialist assumption that Asians have nothing to contribute to Western civilization. As Said expresses, “[I]n discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence.”3 In these ways, the definition of silence as the absence of speech has been useful to illustrate the lack of full civic inclusion and the muffled presence of Asian American voices, and to contest the stereotype of Asians as passive, inactive, diminutive, and (feebly) feminine—or in other words without power. While this definition provides strong analyses of discourse and society, it tends to overlook other forms of silence that Asian Americans engage, and this has the potential to skew the image of Asian Americans toward the perfectly silent victim or the perpetually shouting protester. Literary scholar King-Kok Cheung articulated this dilemma in Articulate Silences, where she argued that “monocultural criteria of competence and even feminist antipathy toward silence may run roughshod over the sensibilities [End Page 236] of some ethnic groups. While the importance of voice is indisputable, pronouncing silence as the converse of speech or as its subordinate can also be oppressively univocal.”4 To be clear, this is not to assert that Asian Americans are not silenced and that Asian Americans should not speak out regarding their oppression, but that focusing on either side of the binary of speaking or voicelessness overlooks many silences that Asian Americans utilize. For example, Asian Americans have cultural silences for deference and respect, and religious silences of meditation and of awe in the presence of the divine; these silences may be used to oppress, but not always. In order...

Saving Japantown, Serving the People: The Scalar Politics of the Asian American Movement

This paper uses the case of the Committee Against Nihonmachi Eviction's mobilization against urban renewal in San Francisco's Japantown to examine the scalar politics of the Asian American Movement (AAM) between the late 1960s and early 1980s. The AAM was born on West Coast campuses as part of multiracial struggles to establish ethnic studies departments and create community-oriented higher education. It drew its influences from the antiwar movement, Third World decolonization struggles, the women's movement, and the Black Power Movement. Like other antiracist movements of color at this time the AAM eventually shifted its activism from campuses to include struggles in racialized communities. The AAM's politics, however, were focused on more than the local or community scale. Instead, the AAM attempted to broaden its struggle, ie, ‘jump scale’, through its alliances, worldview, and organizing tactics and was ultimately enmeshed in a larger network of late-1960s and 1970s progressive mobilization and revolutionary nationalism that operated at multiple scales.

The Oriental obscene: violence and racial fantasies in the Vietnam era

The Oriental Obscene is a sophisticated analysis of Americans’ reactions to visual representations of the Vietnam War, such as the photograph of the “napalm girl,” news footage of the Tet Offensive, and feature films from The Deer Hunter to Rambo: First Blood Part II . Sylvia Shin Huey Chong combines psychoanalytic and film theories with U.S. cultural history to explain what she terms the oriental obscene: racialized fantasies that Americans derived largely from images of Asians as the perpetrators or victims of extreme violence. Chong contends that these fantasies helped Americans to process the trauma of the Vietnam War, as well as the growth of the Asian American population after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the postwar immigration of Southeast Asian refugees. The oriental obscene animated a wide range of political narratives, not only the movements for and against the war, but causes as diverse as the Black Power movement, law-and-order conservatism, second-wave feminism, and the nascent Asian American movement. During the Vietnam era, pictures of Asian bodies were used to make sense of race, violence, and America’s identity at home and abroad.

Rethinking the Asian American movement

Rethinking the Asian American movement

Imagining a Transpacific and Feminist Asian American Archive

A brief moment in karen tei yamashita's recent novel i hotel (2010) resurrects a crucial fragment of asian american literary history. Yamashita's book—part send-up and part recounting of actual events—pays homage to and reimagines the multiple paths that were critical to the late-1960s and 1970s Asian American movement. In a small yet important scene, I Hotel highlights how the development of an Asian American literary canon was entwined with the production of heroic masculinity. Three men drive four hundred miles to visit Dorothy Okada, widow of the author John Okada, on a mission of archival recovery and masculinist “heroics” (96). Their adventure begins when one of the men discovers Okada's 1957 novel No-No Boy (now a canonical work) and a letter that mentions the possible existence of an unpublished manuscript by Okada. Ultimately, the trip is unsuccessful. “What happens next,” the narrator tells us, “is history” (97). Confronted by the lack of public interest in Okada's work, Dorothy has burned his papers, and the disappointed men can only ask ridiculously inappropriate questions about the couple's marriage and sexual relationship. In this story, the men who set out to become heroes of Asian American literary studies are thwarted by a woman's failure to preserve the text, and they reduce Dorothy to a supporting role. Yet in recapturing the gendered division at the heart of this defining moment in Asian American literary history, I Hotel also reminds us of other narrative, methodological, and theoretical paths. “As time drags on,” the narrator muses a few pages earlier, “other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option” (95).

Gender and science in Hiroshima's aftermath: a cross-cultural approach

A comparative study of Japanese and Japanese-American survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 suggests that there is much to be gained by looking at the history of the Bomb as a cross-cultural history. Issues of science and gender in survivors' experiences and memories illuminate three key features of the trans-Pacific history: a Japanese female author's literary responses to the Bomb, the Japan-U.S. relationship after the war that shaped Japan's antinuclear movement, and Japanese-American survivors' effort to gain governmental recognition and medical care in the U.S. within the context of the Asian American movement. Using variety of sources--literature, popular political discourse, congressional hearings, and oral histories--this article shows the volatile diffusion of political and cultural ideas revealed by a trans-Pacific perspective.

The Yellow Press

This article analyzes the highly politicized Asian American newspaper Gidra as a way of expanding our conception of ethnic media beyond mainstream publications to include radical ethnic media. In contrast to the notion that ethnic communities might shy from exposing the internal conflicts that jeopardize their own community’s stability, Gidra demonstrates three different kinds of conflict: external conflict, internal conflict, and conflict that is produced by the paper itself. Through this exploration, the different ways that Asian American identities were created and discussed during the late 1960s and early 1970s are also assessed, as the radical contingent of the Asian American Movement used print publications to redefine what it meant to be Asian in America.

Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America (review)

Reviewed by: Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America Jeremy Leong Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America. By Su Zheng. (American Musicspheres.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. [xxiii, 422 p. ISBN 9780195134377. $65.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, appendices, bibliography, filmography and discography, index. An engaging work, Claiming Diaspora examines the musical culture of Asian/ Chinese America from the second half of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. This book fills a critical lacuna in the knowledge of Chinese American and Asian American musics, with the exception of Asian American jazz, in the United States as they have been much neglected in the examination of Asian American history and cultural identities by Asian Americanists. Furthermore, music in Asian/Chinese America represents an essential signifier that generates complicated and at times contradictory cultural meanings. Yet despite its roles in affirming the heterogeneity of Asian cultural heritages (including the conveyance of sonic vestiges of colonialism and Westernization), in being a part of racialized Asian American history fraught with diasporic cultural politics, and in its cultural signification "to link the two sides of the Pacific" (p. 7), it still eludes the attention of mainstream American media. In Asian American studies, two somewhat interrelated cultural paradigms have taken hold: (1) the concept of "claiming America" that has its roots in the Asian American movement started in the 1960s that supported the power of solidarity among different Asian communities to stand against racism and to foster the spirit of an antithetical culture to help better the lives of Asian Americans; (2) the notion of European immigrants who, through the process of assimilation, adopted a new life, distanced themselves from the "Old World" and their musical traditions, and gradually became an integral part of American musical heritage. In her book, Su Zheng skillfully unravels the debates that marred these two models. Claiming Diaspora offers an alternative view to "claiming America" by acknowledging the mutable and evolving nature of music in Chinese America as a [End Page 522] sociopolitical platform in discussing current cultural struggles while also paying homage to the history of Asian exclusion in the United States. Furthermore, Zheng also advocates new models for Asian American music scholarship that demonstrate that the path music-making in Asian American communities has taken differs from that of European immigrants. She also challenges the traditional perception of non-Western music as conventional and immobile by highlighting the diasporic experiences of Asian Americans within the context of space, place, and displacement: The transnational quality of the Chinese American experience and its musical expression, I contend, is conditioned by constant multilevel interactions and negotiations between the host country, the homeland(s), internal cultural conflicts, historical consciousness, and the aspirations of individual musicians. . . . Chinese American musical culture interacts with these forces at the same time it is shaped by them. The local manifestation of music and cultural politics draws on regional, national, and transnational resources, and its transpacific resonance reaches far beyond not only city limits, but also national borders. (p. 14) The opening pages of the first chapter (introduction) report on the strong musical participation of Asian Americans and Chinese Americans in a series of cultural events held from 1989 to 1996 in order to illustrate changing demographics throughout the United States. These events also highlighted the struggles faced by Asian Americans to gain full rights to participate in the formation of the country's political and cultural landscapes. However, as Hawaii, New Mexico, California, and Texas had become "majority-minority" states by 2007 and as "Caribbean New York" has become a concept, one may speak of the "browning" of America (p. 6), a process that will likely continue in forging a new America. So, in light of the country's increasingly multifarious population, what constitutes an American cultural identity? How should we perceive contemporary Asian American cultural identity and Chinese American cultural identity separately and together? How are Asian American musical activities affected by local, national, and transnational cultural politics and histories? What is their place in cultural America? The book attempts to examine these salient questions and other related ones on different levels. Scholars in Asian American studies view...

The snake dance of Asian American activism: community, vision, and power

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Chapter 1. Exploring the Asian American Movement Using Social Movement Theory Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Background to the Formation of the AAM Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Swelling Rhythm: The 1960s Era and the Conditions for Change Chapter 5 Chapter 4. The Birth of the Movement: Stepping Toward New Values and New Community Chapter 6 Chapter 5. The Mature Movement (1976-1982): Weaving through New Surroundings Chapter 7 Chapter 6. From Vincent Chin to Jesse Jackson (1983-1989): The Horned Snake Rattles Chapter 8 Chapter 7. Last Dance and a New Motion in a Tube of Bamboo (post-1990) Chapter 9 Conclusion

Entropic Designs: A Review of Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes and Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970 at the de Young Museum

Entropic Designs: A Review of Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes and Asian/American/Modern ArtShifting Currents, 1900-1970 at the de Young Museum Susette Min (bio) Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes. Organized by the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, April 22-September 3, 2006; Contemporary Museum, St. Louis, September 7-December 30, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, March 29-June 30, 2008; de Young Museum, San Francisco, October 25, 2008-January 18, 2009; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 14-July 12, 2009. Curated by Richard Andrews. Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970. Organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Asian American Art Project at Stanford University, October 25, 2008-January 18, 2009. Curated by Daniell Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson. "Forty years ago there were no Asian Americans."1 This puzzling and provocative opening statement made by professors Gordon Chang and Mark Dean Johnson in the catalog of the exhibition Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970 (A/A/M) is explained in the next sentence by the historical acknowledgment that the term Asian American was not claimed until 1968: a panethnic collectivity, reappropriated as a sign of resistance within the context of the Asian American movement. The statement is key to understanding why many of the artists featured in this landmark exhibition did not identify as "Asian American," nor did they consequently categorize, describe, or mark their art with that label. The exhibition reifies, but also challenges, the expectations of an exhibition titled Asian/American/Modern Art with seven subheadings: Looking Both Ways, War and Peace, Urban Life and Community, Philosophy and Religion, Nature, Sexuality as Abstraction, and lastly Ink and Line. The exhibition consists of five large rooms in which the themes are introduced on wall texts. Next [End Page 193] to each work is a description of the work or an anecdote about the artist. For example, in the War and Peace section, works of art in an array of different styles from figurative to abstract expressionism are presented that document the various wars of the twentieth century-World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War-that depict the effects of war on everyday life, and/or that are commentaries on the fear of racial violence, modern warfare, and nuclear annihilation. The exhibition opens with Looking Both Ways, a selection of artworks that highlight the East-West alliance, showing the hybridity of Asian American art. Until recently, Asian American art has been assumed to include some visual marker of Asianness or to take identity or race as its subject matter. American Orientalism, together with neoliberal multiculturalism, continues to skew and homogenize understandings of Asia as fixed in time, reinforcing imaginary divisions between East and West, racializing Asian American artists as representative types and their art as the site of immutable cultural difference.2 We see this at work in Eugene Neuhauss's 1915 statement in the catalog for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, "Why the modern Japanese artists want to divorce themselves from the traditions of their forefathers seems incomprehensible . . . I think the sooner these wayward sons are brought back into the fold of their truly oriental colleagues, the better it will be for the national art of Japan, the most profound art the world has ever seen."3 Paradoxically, the exoticizing of the East, in the form of Japonisme, for example, has created professional liaisons and exhibiting opportunities for Asian American artists. Whereas some artists' work benefiting from this exoticization does have a typically "Asian" look, as in Toshio Aoki's Untitled (Thunder Kami) (ca. 1900) painted in a nihonga style,4 some neither look to nor engage in Asian aesthetics or traditions. And many artists' works do not fit neatly within either category, as in the case of Ball Game (V) (1952/1980) by Chen Chi-Kwan, an experimental ink painting that at first glance may seem like modern Chinese calligraphy or a visual play on artists Henri Michaux and Eadweard Muybridge. The work is neither. Rather, the lyrical Ball Game, divided subtly into "yards" of a football field, is a study of the forward movement of a football rendered through thick and...

Three-Step Boogie in 1970s Los Angeles: Sansei Women in the Asian American Movement

Women and men came into the Asian American Movement with gender role baggage from our 1950s' upbringings. The struggle to let go of this baggage for both and men embodied the struggle against male chauvinism. We refused to separate race, class, and gender—identifying as women of and consciously seeing our women's movement within the framework of the Asian American Movement. Sansei maintained strategic patience in their struggle with Movement men's male chauvinism because in the bigger picture, Movement men were comrades and allies against U.S. imperialism that used racism, sexism, and classism to maintain its rule. White feminists who saw men as the enemy and chose to form their own separate movement often reproduced racism, sexism, and classism—women of color found no good reason to be a part of this.

Richard Aoki (1938–2008): Toughest Oriental to Come Out of West Oakland

Longtime Asian American movement activist and Black Panther Party (BPP) founder, Richard Aoki, passed away Sunday morning on March 15, 2009. The day before his passing, Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strike veterans and students were celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the strike for Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.

Flying in the Face of Race, Gender, Class and Age: A Story About Kazu Iijima, One of the Mothers of the Asian American Movement on the First Year Anniversary of Her Death

Telling stories is how women pass on their wisdom and this article is but one story about Kazu Iijima, one of the members of the Asian American Movement. Many other people no doubt have many more stories of Kazu. Her life provides a new paradigm for combining the personal and the by offering examples of the many forms activism can take. More importantly for me, in her son Chris' words, Kazu showed how one could be a political person her whole life and yet was a mom. It was the wisdom of this possibility—that is so rarely offered—that she gave to me. And I have modeled my relationship with my own children after Kazu's example. Alice Walker wrote, Write for your dead. They are listening. Death gives one pause to appreciate life. On the first anniversary of Kazu's death, I tell this story to reflect on the meaning and lessons of her life.

Who Studies the Asian American Movement? : A Historiographical Analysis

Who Studies the Asian American Movement?A Historiographical Analysis Diane C. Fujino (bio) The Sixties are a Stretched-Out Decade synonymous with political protest. Yet Asian American activism barely registers on any political radar for a number of reasons, including being conspicuously understudied. Here, I seek to develop, for the first time, a historiography of the Asian American Movement (AAM).1 The study focuses on grassroots and non-institutionalized discourses and practices from the late 1960s, when longstanding resistance by Asian Americans became characterized as a "social movement,"2 to the decline of the AAM in the late 1970s. My analysis generates four periods of study. The first (late 1960s to mid-1970s) was dominated by activists and activist-scholars producing knowledge in the zenith of the AAM. The second (late 1970s to late 1980s) represented a vacuum in AAM research. The third (late 1980s to late 1990s) saw a slow upsurge in AAM scholarship and a greater inclusion of scholarly works and civil rights frameworks. The fourth (2000 to present) can be seen as the "coming of age"—the adolescence, but not full maturity—of AAM scholarship, with the greatest number of scholarly works, a re-emphasis on the radical roots of the AAM, and attention to Steven Lawson's "interactive model" that calls for connecting local and national, social and political issues.3 Unlike historiographies of established fields that focus on books, my analysis also includes journal articles, book chapters, Ph.D. dissertations, [End Page 127] and Masters' theses.4 Three types of works are excluded. First, based on conventional definitions of social movements, this article does not explore participation in establishment politics, including the electoral arena.5 Second, it is beyond the scope of this essay to include the rich and varied novels, poetry, films, music, and other cultural productions created within and, in turn, generative of the AAM. Third, as is common with historiographies, this article does not analyze primary-source materials, including the many vibrant AAM newspapers.6 Five areas of struggle were critical to the 1960s–1970s AAM. First, Asian Americans of diverse ages helped to transform the Antiwar Movement from its emphasis on saving American lives to exposing racism, sexism, and capitalism at home and abroad. Activists linked the U.S. war in Vietnam to critiques of U.S. imperialism and militarism in Cambodia, Hiroshima, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawaii, and elsewhere. Second, given the predominance of youth in the AAM, it is not surprising that educational transformation, particularly establishing ethnic studies, captured their imagination. More than simply including marginalized groups on campus and in the curriculum, activists contested the very structures and purpose of the educational system and redirected learning toward community service rather than self- or corporate interests. San Francisco State College's five-month strike that birthed ethnic studies remains the longest student strike in U.S. history. Third, "serve the people" programs and connections to the community, particularly working-class communities, became central guiding principles of the AAM. Activists developed programs to meet basic human rights, including the provision of housing, jobs, healthcare, and education. Fourth, labor struggles were integral to the AAM, not only because of the working-class location of many Asian Americans in that period and historically, but also because of the influence of Marxist theory, which identifies capitalism as the primary source of oppression and class struggle as key to liberation. Fifth, the AAM originated a new political and pan-Asian identity and a new vocabulary, creating the very term, "Asian American," to signify a common experience with racism and a shedding of the passivity associated with the "Oriental."7 [End Page 128] Mainstream Social Movement Literature Mainstream social movement scholarship, primarily in the fields of sociology, political science, and history, has produced a voluminous literature on the 1960s–1970s social movements.8 Yet there has been scant attention paid to the study of the AAM, with a few exceptions.9 Two frameworks—the logic governing U.S. race relations and the tendency towards liberalism—help to explain this erasure of memory in relation to Asian American resistance. First, two mainstream newsmagazines popularized the image of Asian Americans as the "model minority" in 1966, the same...

<i>Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture Min Zhou Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture. Edited by Sucheng CHANMadeline Y. HSU. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008. Pp. xx, 266. History and historiography have been central in the emerging field of Chinese American studies. This anthology, edited by Sucheng Chan and Madeline Hsu, uses a cultural history framework that weaves together personal narratives, family histories, case studies, and event analyses to show the lives of Chinese Americans “in more complex, intricate, and intriguing ways” (p. xvi). Sucheng Chan’s introductory chapter offers an excellent and comprehensive literature review to demonstrate the synergy in Chinese American history and historiography. Chan identifies five periods of Chinese American historiography: partisan writings between the 1850s and the early 1920s, social science studies in the mid-1920s to the 1960s, works by Asian American and European American scholars in the late 1960s to the early 1980s, works by university-based historians between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, and cultural histories since the late 1990s. Chan focuses on three genres in the works of the pre-Asian American Movement — partisan tracts, social science studies, and Chinatown “guides” or exposés (p. 2). She plows widely and digs deeply into the field of Chinese American studies, not merely showing readers what has been done but also paying attention to the legacy of the Asian American Movement and raising profound issues of great theoretical import and practical significance. As always, Chan takes issue with two prevailing perspectives — that of victims being exploited in the United States and that of agents and decision makers capable of making sensible choices that shape their lives. Her actor-oriented approach shows how individuals make history and initiate adaptive responses to the social, economic, and political milieu in which they find themselves. Her passionate and extraordinary commitment to building and defending Chinese American studies and Asian American studies is remarkable. I cannot think of another scholar of Chinese American studies who covers such a broad range of topics, and who always successfully connects the human dimension to the key philosophical and social science concerns. Chan’s introduction is without a doubt a useful guide to the vast literature on Chinese American history and historiography. The anthology consists of seven chapters arranged in chronological order. The chapter by Mae Ngai, “History as Law and Life,” tells the story of a Chinese immigrant family from the late 19th to early 20th century. Ngai questions the canonical assumption that all immigrants necessarily follow a general path of Americanization, socioeconomic mobility, and political inclusion. She points to [End Page 294] the limits of the democratic-political culture in the incorporation of immigrants and argues that the trajectories of exclusion and inclusion are closely entwined. Through her analysis of an 1885 civil rights case, Tape v. Hurley, in which the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese children could not be excluded from public schools, Ngai demonstrates how the two trajectories converged in a process of ethnic middle-class formation as the legal status of the Chinese in America was being adjudicated in court. The Tape family was an example of the emerging brokering class of the time. Members of this brokering class, serving as transportation agents, immigration-bonds brokers, labor contractors, and language interpreters, were both liminal and powerful figures. Because they were bilingual and bicultural, they were needed and distrusted by both the Chinese and the Europeans. Indispensable for the resettlement and protection of the immigrant laboring classes, they promoted incorporation while simultaneously invested in the exclusion of the immigrants as a means of achieving wealth and social status. Ultimately the brokers’ involvement in illegal immigration and their advocacy for civil rights were an integral part of their struggle for survival and advancement. The chapter illustrates how immigration and exclusion created a site for wealth accumulation and social status attainment and how the entwined processes of inclusion and exclusion produced constraints for some and opportunities for others within the Chinese American community. Josephine Fowler’s chapter, “The Activism of Left-Wing and Communist Chinese Immigrants, 1927–1933,” builds on Him Mark Lai’s study of activism among...

Replenishing the Ranks: Raising Critical Consciousness Among Asian Americans

Based on interviews with 30 Asian Americans, this article examines the process by which respondents developed a pan-Asian American critical consciousness and commitment to social action. Key factors that contribute to the development of a critical consciousness include: exposure to "meaningful" information which helps respondents situate their lives in larger social contexts; the presence of social support to help break isolation and encourage the exploration of new ideas; and involvement in organizations and political action. The article's goal is to assist activists and educators who seek to "replenish the ranks" by bringing new generations into the Asian American movement.