Neoliberal Multiculturalism Research Articles

Toxic Imperialism: Memory, Erasure, and Environmental Injustice in David Chariandy's Soucouyant

Critical literature on David Chariandy’s Soucouyant has explored the dementia suffered by the protagonist’s mother Adele as a metaphor for the erasure of Black experience from cultural memory and dominant historical narratives, and as a response to the traumatic effects of imperialism. “Toxic Imperialism” builds on these critical insights, while mapping new critical terrain to argue that in Chariandy’s novel, dementia is both an effect and symptom of the multiple sites of chemical exposure that disproportionately impact low income communities of color. From Adele’s and Roger’s birthplace in Trinidad, to their home and work environments in Canada, the family’s multiple encounters with unequally borne byproducts of industrial production are inseparably linked to legacies of colonialism and racism. The analysis traces the roots of Adele’s trauma in environmental and cultural disruptions wrought by the U.S. military occupation of Trinidad during World War II, while also examining the novel’s critique of Canada’s discourse of neoliberal multiculturalism, and its relevance to Indigenous-Black solidarity to address racism, white supremacy, and injustices in Canada. In its attention to epistemologies of memory and multigenerational effects of (neo)colonialism, Soucouyant is a literary intervention in support of local and global decolonization struggles for social, environmental, and ecological justice.

Trans Riot: Transmasculine of Colour Expressions and Embodiments in the Films of Christopher Lee

This article focuses on transmasculine mixed-race Asian American filmmaker Christopher Lee’s documentaries and pornography of the 1990s. At a moment before today’s reduction of transgender experiences to spectacles of transitional assimilation, bio-social disorder, and death by dominant—or even authoritarian—white cis-heteropatriarchal culture, Lee’s films gave expression to the gender subversions of trans people of colour and their co-conspirators. In solidarity with Lee’s work, I produce critical creative language about racial transgender social identities. At a current moment offering more abundant critical resources and intersectional transgender movement-building, I also seek to re-harness Lee’s transmasculine imagery towards the trans of colour feminist work of transforming the white Western cis-binary gender/sex system and its perceptual structures. I view the communities represented in Lee’s filmmaking as confronting the contradictions of a post-Civil Rights neoliberal multiculturalism that promises minimal access while institutionalizing white cis-binary formations of gender/sex fundamental to the US nation-state.

The land of seven moles: Mexican culinary nationalism in an age of multiculturalism

ABSTRACTMole, a complex sauce of chiles and spices often served with turkey, has long been considered Mexico’s national dish, but as a symbol of culinary nationalism, its meanings have changed significantly over time. This article uses mole to examine elite and popular expressions of culinary nationalism that accompanied the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism in the 1990s. In particular, it considers the shift away from the city of Puebla’s singular mole poblano, which was adopted in the 1920s as a symbol of indigenismo, a somewhat misleadingly named program of ethnic assimilation that sought to create a unified, mestizo (mixed-race) nation, and toward the contemporary celebration of multicultural diversity among indigenous cuisines and populations in the state of Oaxaca, which has become known as the “Land of Seven Moles.”

Amazonian struggles for recognition

Since the 1988 Constitution, forest peoples of Brazilian Amazonia have been struggling for territorial recognition. Yet studies of recognition in post colonial contexts, based on cases with clear settler/indigenous distinctions, are highly critical of recognition, seeing it as a form of “neoliberal multiculturalism,” a co‐option of subaltern identities with limited emancipatory potential. I question these critiques by examining struggles for legal and intersubjective recognition of subaltern identity categories “Índio” and “Agroextractivista” and corresponding territories of the “Terra Indigena” and “Reserva Extractivista” on the Madeira and Tapajós Rivers in Brazilian Amazonia, where heterogeneous origins of forest peoples belie simple settler/indigenous distinctions. I engage a key question, the relationships of subaltern peoples with state institutions, and highlight a finding, the relevance of the state's “proximity,” often underestimated in the literature. I build a theory of decolonial recognition combining Axel Honneth's idea of recognition as love, rights and solidarity with David Scott's late‐Foucauldian reworking of Frantz Fanon. Herein, the Fanonian colonised subjectivity is shaped by the negation of love, rights and solidarity, that is to say, misrecognition. The subject requires legal and intersubjective recognition in order to positively incorporate love, rights and solidarity into their “practices of techniques of the self.” On the Tapajós, territorial struggles are more successful owing to a stronger sphere of legal recognition – the presence of state institutions – and a history of Church and union grassroots organisation, both supporting greater intersubjective recognition among forest peoples. On the Madeira, a much weaker sphere of legal recognition has resulted in a situation of intractable conflict around territorial struggles which have correspondingly less intersubjective recognition. I conclude that a theory of decolonial recognition is of considerable utility in elucidating the dynamics of subaltern emancipatory struggles for territory.

The Psyche of Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Queering Memory and Reproduction in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea

This paper explores how Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Changrae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea (2014) use speculative tropes to unsettle the “post-racial” futures imagined through the tethering of neoliberalism and multiculturalism. By combining speculative elements with tropes of queer reproduction, both novelists forgo the racial identities that make individuals recognizable to neoliberal multiculturalism. Instead, these texts focus on how the bodies, talents, stories, and memories of racialized subjects become appropriated and reconstructed for the purpose of maintaining a multi-racial upper class. In this essay, we consider how these Asian diasporic speculative texts enact their critique of neoliberal multiculturalism and its instrumentalization of ethnic/diasporic memory through the deployment of speculative tropes of (queer) reproduction.

White Nationalist Rhetoric, Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Colour Blind Racism: Decolonial Critique of Richard Spencer’s Campus Visit

This essay examines white nationalist discourses within the U.S. context of the alt-right movement from a decolonial perspective. It challenges concepts grounded in the enlightenment era that connect whiteness and European identity with civilisation and progress, thereby positioning whiteness as a disciplinary discourse. Specifically, our essay will use the hateful rhetoric of Richard Spencer, who is credited with coining the term alt-right movement, and analyze the white nationalist rhetoric surrounding his visit to Texas A&M University as a case study. It examines the fallacy and violence of white supremacist rhetoric that constructs Europe and North America as a “white” space, thus symbolically and politically erasing complex indigenous histories and peoples. It investigates how diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism are utilised to normalise discourses of white supremacy within historically white institutions. This type of multiculturalism serves as a form of colourblind racism that reinforces rather than challenges white supremacy. Specifically, it examines the University’s response to Spencer’s visit by hosting the Aggies United entertainment performance emphasising unity as an expression of neoliberal multiculturalism, which is contrasted with critical anti-racist pedagogy and other more meaningful forms of resistance such as protests.

Introduction: lasting and resurgent racism after recognition in Latin America

ABSTRACTThis special issue examines and theorizes lasting and resurgent forms of racism after recognition and claims to decolonization in Latin America. It also analyses what the authors interpret as a retrenchment in indigenous and Afro-descendant rights. The authors argue that this shift is underpinned by factors including extractivism, aided by the ability of neoliberal multiculturalism to shape, weaken and co-opt popular movements, and launched by a backlash by elites in conjunction with actors from dominant groups rendered vulnerable by global capitalism, who have turned to populism and racial scapegoating as a reaction to increased precarity. The issue shows that the circumscription of indigenous and Afro-descendant rights manifests itself both in novel ways and as entrenched colonial practices and traditions. Moreover, the issue explores the cultures and geographies of extractivism, specifically as it relates to race and racism. The issue moves forward critiques of neoliberal multiculturalism by arguing for the need to challenge racist hierarchies instead of only focusing on difference, and by looking at discrimination and the rearticulation of racism in left leaning post-neoliberal regimes ostensibly committed to decolonizing reforms. The articles in this issue highlight the importance of interrogating cultures of power while also conducting sound ethnography at the margins. These strategies allow the authors to question the appropriation and ventriloquist use of ethnic markers and agendas by elites.

From Hacienda Domesticity to the Archaeological Sublime: Sentiment and the Origins of Heritage Management in Yucatan, Mexico

Frictions between state-sanctioned heritage policies and the quotidian practices of local stakeholder communities often have deep historical roots. In this essay, I trace the history of conflicts in the management of archaeological sites in the Yucatan peninsula to the emergence of a romantic sensibility toward the leisured enjoyment of ruins in the mid-nineteenth century. This posited a kind of subjectivity that was radically different from the subsistence practices that brought Maya-speaking peasants into contact with archaeological sites. There are important parallels between this discourse on ruins and a philological approach to the Yucatec Maya language which tended to denigrate the vernacular of rural speakers. Interestingly, the tendency of these entwined discourses to delegitimate the speech and customs of rural agriculturalists posited a “proper” relationship to heritage that could be assumed by people from diverse ethnic categories if they adopted an attitude that was consistent with liberal perspectives on labor and identity. The heritage of this simultaneously inclusive and elitist discourse is still evident in contemporary heritage practice and neoliberal multiculturalism.

The Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model: Stages For Developing Critical Consciousness in Indigenous Education

The Transformational Indigenous Praxis ModelStages for Developing Critical Consciousness in Indigenous Education Cornel D. Pewewardy (bio), Anna Lees (bio), and Hyuny Clark-Shim (bio) The historical and ongoing struggles for Indigenous communities in settler-designed school systems across what is now named the United States call for radical educational reform that includes a decolonized curriculum model for Indigenous children.1 These efforts must first acknowledge that Indigenous education existed prior to European contact and that settler-designed schools were and are detrimental to the well-being of Indigenous children and communities.2 Radical reform efforts must also recognize the continued systemic racism ingrained in school structures that privilege the dominant, whitestream communities and disadvantage communities of color, including Indigenous communities.3 As Indigenous scholars responding to such profound inequity, we engage in insurgent research to actualize decolonization through radical reform. In these efforts, the lead author of this article developed the Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (TIPM) to promote critical awareness and cultural consciousness among educators. This model was shared over the past decade at multiple settings, including national conferences and invited speaking events. With each presentation, followed by discussion, critique, and feedback from colleagues, the authors modified and further developed the TIPM. The purpose of this article is to put forth the TIPM as a structure to support educators in decolonizing and indigenizing their practices as they support the development of their students' critical thinking skills.4 This in turn supports collective engagement, critical thinking, healing, and cultural restoration in the [End Page 38] improvement of school-based educational offerings in order to better serve all children, especially Indigenous children. The article provides a step-by-step framework for educators to transform their practices, a framework that not only challenges Eurocentric knowledge bases but also was designed to scrutinize the foundations of the current dominant Western educational models. It also serves as a catalyst for critical thinking conversations about reclaiming Indigenous education. It is crucial to note that this model is not designed to "diagnose" an individual's "condition" but rather to provide terminologies that support educators to transform their practices as they articulate their experiences, the stages of the model that they aspire to embody, and the obstacles and promoters that actualize their collective hopes and visions. We begin this study with an introduction to our praxis and agency as scholars of Indigenous education. Next, we offer a brief history of Indigenous education and depict the impact of systemic racism on Indigenous children and educators in U.S. schools. We discuss the challenges presented by the adoption of neoliberal multiculturalism in whitestream educational systems and reframe our resistance to this context within our respective teaching settings. We explain the theoretical frameworks that grew from our praxis and how those frameworks helped us develop the TIPM and then describe the TIPM, which reflects multiple stages of critical thinking development. We also discuss resistance to each stage and antidotes to that resistance. SITUATING OUR PRAXIS, AGENCY, AND PROLOGUE The authors have nearly fifty years of combined experience working for Indigenous education. Our experience during these times helped us realize the importance of challenging the Eurocentric knowledge base and providing culturally responsive teaching strategies that counter the whitestream educational experiences of Indigenous learners. The culturally responsive strategies include incorporation of theoretical frameworks and language that reflect "our responsibility to bring to our communities useful ways of talking about our experiences and co-creating a culture of resistance."5 Our accountability to our communities as educators centers us in Indigenous educational sovereignty, which includes our rhetorical sovereignty, especially given that "the professional vocabulary can be imperialistic, falsely generous and self-serving for the colonizer and less than 'empowering' and fair to Indigenous Peoples."6 Therefore, here we introduce ourselves in our languages, along with English, to represent our indigeneity, since our languages shaped and reflect our cultures and worldviews.7 Our introductions below capture the inherent "sacred responsibilities" we bring into the academy. The art of speaking and using [End Page 39] Indigenous languages to reclaim our historical stories and reframe our existence is one of the most courageous acts that Indigenous scholars can perform. In many Indigenous cultures, it is our...

Anthologizing “Little Calibans”: Surplus in Junot Díaz’s Linked Stories

Author(s): York, Janet Zong | Abstract: Anthologizing stories from linked short story collections gives rise to a troubling tension. To select and curate a story in an anthology elevates it to paradigmatic status. Yet, linked collections are anti-paradigmatic: interweaving fragments, rejecting representative conventions and monolithic narratives, and producing a surplus of feeling and knowledge beyond individual stories. These qualities become obscure when reading a single story contextualized in an anthology. This tension is particularly evident with anthologization of authors like Junot Diaz, whose works are suspicious of neoliberal multiculturalism’s totalizing embrace, but whose inclusion as an ethnic, national, or world writer in different anthologies results in varied thematic framings specific to each. Juxtaposing the linked story in two settings, anthology and linked collection, expands scholarly conversations around emergent forms of transnational American literature. This article argues that linked collections preempt, primarily through formal means, the flattening and functionalizing of their stories into unified exemplars of multicultural diversity or universal experience. Examining stories from Diaz’s Drown and This is How You Lose Her alongside these same tales as framed in three Norton anthologies illustrates this possibility. Diaz develops a paradigm of surplus through stories connected by a sense of displacement. This surplus is a literary strategy that anticipates and addresses anthology curation’s effects and expectations. Rather than recuperating identity or loss to construct more unified notions of ethnicity, nation, or world, linked stories give shape to assembled fragments. They point toward a transnationalism invested in how narrative fragments of displacement and diaspora constitute an irreducible surplus.

Tradition and transition: neoliberal multiculturalism and the containment of indigenous insurgency in southern Mexico in the 1990s

ABSTRACTWhy did Mexico’s disruptive indigenous movement begin to fade during the ‘indigenous boom’ years of the 1990s? Containing the influence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Oaxaca, a state with a large indigenous population and a long history of radicalism, had much to do with it. This article suggests that neoliberal multicultural reforms created a new formula for distinguishing an ‘indio permitido’ from its unauthorized Other and helped sideline one of the state’s most powerful indigenous coalitions, the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca – Ricardo Flores Magón. By examining the cultural politics of Mexican divide-and-conquer strategies in a moment of insurgency, this article highlights how a tradition-and-transition mode of neoliberal governance emerged in Oaxaca in the 1990s. It divided and isolated a ‘participating’ indigenous subject from a protesting one, and played a key role in preventing the further consolidation of indigenous movements in southern Mexico.

Active Solidarity: Centering the Demands and Vision of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Teacher Education

In the era of Black Lives Matter (#BLM), urban teacher education does not exist in isolation. The White supremacist, neoliberal context that impacts all aspects of Black lives also serves to support antiblackness within the structures of teacher education. In this article, the authors, who are grounded in a race radical analytical and political framework, share a vision of what it means to be an urban teacher who actively understands and teaches in solidarity with #BLM. The authors unpack their theoretical framework and the vision of #BLM while examining the state of teacher education in this era of neoliberal multiculturalism. The authors contemplate what a race radical, #BLM-aligned, approach to urban teacher education might look like. The article concludes by addressing ways that teacher educators must be in active solidarity with the #BLM movement to better prepare teachers who understand that the lives of their students matter within and outside of their classrooms.

Hernández Castillo, R. Aída (2016), Multiple InJustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America

Multiple InJustices draws on research conducted with indigenous women in the past 25 years especially in Mexico, but also in Guatemala and Colombia. The struggles of indigenous women facing multiple forms of violence and injustice, particularly State violence, are analyzed from a decolonial feminist perspective on women’s rights within the contexts of legal pluralism, neoliberal multiculturalism, and criminalization of poverty and social movements. Both the methodology and the theoretical app...

“Do We Have to Call It That?” The Response of Neoliberal Multiculturalism to College Antiracism Efforts

The authors discuss the ways in which neoliberal multiculturalism influences the reception and implementation of antiracist initiatives on college campuses. They suggest the intersections of neoliberalism and racism produce a resistance to antiracist efforts and desire for softened multicultural approaches that maintain the status quo. Since the logics of White supremacy and capitalism dominate every space of our society, critical multiculturalism must address these oppressive systems in antiracism education.

Using Indigenous Feminist Land Ethics to Queer the Korean Missionary Position in Canada

This essay reflects on my practice of building solidarity with Indigenous peoples in a research project on diasporic Korean Christian missionary involvement with Indigenous communities in British Columbia. I incorporate an Indigenous feminist land ethic of relationality to queer my investigation of Korean missionary relationships with Indigenous peoples in Canada. I bring queer, woman of colour and Indigenous feminist perspectives into conversation with Asian Canadian studies to examine how the relationships between Korean diasporic and Indigenous subjects are structured by the normative logics of settler colonialism and late global capitalism. Korean Canadians occupy a conflicted position as marginalized citizens in a settler nation with global economic aspirations. Yet, in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism, they can also be complicit in white settler colonial and capitalist projects, which encourage Koreans to perform and be recognized as respectable, upwardly mobile citizens. By theorizing personal memoir and lived experience, my aim is to present a self-reflexive research methodology and explore how Indigenous feminist perspectives offer non-normative epistemologies that can transform institutions in radically queer ways.

Disciplining dissent: multicultural policy and the silencing of Arab-Canadians

This article examines two cases of state funding cuts to the most prominent and active Arab community organisations operating in Canada, the Canadian Arab Federation and Palestine House. It contextualises the cuts within broader ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ debates imbued with anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism and the silencing of Palestine advocacy efforts; arguing that the shift to a neoliberal multiculturalism, emptied of anti-racist politics, along with the construction of national identities around a set of western ‘core values’ has advanced a marginalising politics that demarcates a ‘civilisational’ border which excludes Arabs, Muslims, and by extension Palestine solidarity. Curtailing freedom of expression, partly through funding cuts, thus becomes a key mechanism for disciplining dissent in racialised communities.

Máseual excluido/indio permitido: neoliberal translation in Waldemar Noh Tzec

ABSTRACTThis article examines issues of translation in contemporary Yucatec Maya literature, using selected poems from Waldemar Noh Tzec’s 1998 Noj Bálam/Large Jaguar as a representative case of how the Mexican state and ideologies of neoliberal multiculturalism may inflect the translation of indigenous text. In arguing for the existence of neoliberal translation, I use DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness and Rivera Cusicanqui’s theory of the ‘indio permitido’ to demonstrate how some bilingual indigenous texts create a space that is simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary, a literary phenomenon I refer to as the ‘máseual excluido/indio permitido’. I suggest that when nationalizing projects reduce indigenous language texts to objects that vouchsafe the ethnic particulars of indigenous authors, they do not so much create an intercultural literature so much as reinforce the linguistic status quo of bilingual indigenous and monolingual non-indigenous subjects. Moreover, the apparent translations of indigenous texts into Spanish must in some sense correspond to the expectations of non-indigenous readers. In cases like that of Noh Tzec’s poetry, this means that indigenous- and Spanish-language texts may convey wildly divergent messages to distinct readerships.

The first black Miss Colombia and the limits of multiculturalism

ABSTRACTTen years after the 1991 Constitution recognized Colombia’s ethnic diversity, the National Beauty Pageant crowned Vanessa Mendoza, the first black beauty queen in the pageant’s 65-year history. Mendoza won the 2001 crown as the representative of the Chocó, one of Colombia’s poorest and predominantly black departments. In this paper, I draw from critiques of neoliberal multiculturalism to discuss the terms under which a black queen was understood to represent Colombia. Drawing from pageant documents and the national press, I analyze how pageant affiliates, Mendoza supporters, and Mendoza herself understood the pageant victory. Mendoza supporters debated the race of the queen and whether she represented a mestizo or multicultural nation. Journalists and pageant affiliates reconfigured racial hierarchies and upheld Mendoza’s victory as proof of the absence of racism. In contrast, a group of journalists and academics used ideals of multicultural diversity and regional solidarity to emphasize the persistence of racial and regional inequalities. As a beauty queen and later aspiring black politician, Mendoza often reinforced the neoliberal logic of multicultural spaces.

Shipibos displaced in Lima: insurgent Citizens as authorized Indians in Peru

ABSTRACTAfter years of settlement on a landfill in Lima’s shanty-town Cantagallo, more than 300 families of the Shipibo-Konibo Amazonian indigenous group faced displacement by a public–private project to transform the area into a riverside park. Instead of resisting, Shipibos utilized spaces that neoliberal multiculturalism opens up for them, adopting entrepreneurial ways that conform to the status of the ‘indio permitido,’ or authorized Indian, and taking advantage of rewards offered to such Indians by the Peruvian state. Yet, the tactics of Shipibos demonstrate that the authorized Indian is often mutually constituted by its insurrectionary Other. Shipibos exercise both ways of being as they become fluent in the dominant sphere and problematize the types of citizenship they can attain. This article investigates the ways in which the Peruvian government promotes indigenous exclusivity by rewarding the authorized Indian and placing limits on the attainment of full citizenship status by all Indians. It also explores the possibility that the use of state tactics that try to fit the neoliberal multiculturalist mold – like practices of ‘prior consultation’ – could open spaces for indigenous groups, authorized or not, to attain citizenship.

Comparison and Coalition in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Comparison and Coalition in the Age of Black Lives Matter Grace Kyungwon Hong (bio) Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I began writing this on November 9, the day after the troubling election night that proved to be a testament to the resilience of white racist fear and entitlement, as well as a shift (in the United States, one that happened much earlier in other places in the world) from the reigning governmentality of neoliberal multiculturalism to neoliberal authoritarianism. In this context, the question that animates this forum—that is, why Black Lives Matter is relevant to Asian American studies and vice versa—is all the more pressing because it seems clear to me that this election result is a backlash against the very real successes of the Black Lives Matter movement. By that movement, I mean not only the social-media-based activism that sprang up in support of and in the aftermath of the mass protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, but the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than fifty organizations. Indeed, "Black Lives Matter" can be used as shorthand to gesture to the resurgent energies of a number of coalitional movements led by and for black people. One example is the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, and the Historic Thousands on Jones Street coalition that preceded it, which mobilized a vibrant coalition around an interconnected set of issues, including voting rights, environmentalism, reproductive justice, labor rights, and public education, to name just a few.1 The concerted efforts at voter suppression in that state, enabled by the Supreme Court's 2013 repeal of the Voting Rights Act and by racial gerrymandering that was so severe that a federal panel of judges ruled it unconstitutional, is not simply evidence of the regressive forces that contributed to the outcome of the [End Page 273] presidential election, but a panicked response to the undeniable impact and power of such movements.2 As a matter of fact, Black Lives Matter must be contextualized within an even larger landscape of contemporary antiracist, anticolonial, and coalitional activism that has transformed our communities. I speak of not only the decades of prison abolitionist organizing against state violence that is the backdrop of Black Lives Matter,3 but also the vibrant movements built by undocumented immigrants and the resolute claims to Indigenous sovereignty and challenges to development and environmental degradation led by Idle No More and the water protectors who mobilized against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. At a moment when the casualization of whole industries and the general turn toward service economies is supposed to make labor impossible to organize, we've witnessed renewed energy in union activism in such disparate sectors as fast food, domestic work, and college athletics.4 My point is that we can read the backlash politics made manifest in the election results as a symptom of the success of antiracist, anticolonial movements, rather than evidence of their failure. These movements have succeeded in undermining the bedrock structures of white racism and settler colonialism of the United States and in so doing have created spaces for new possibilities and opportunities. I also want to emphasize the coalitional and intersectional nature of these movements that led to their successes and that is all the more important now. All of these movements bring together a variety of interests and constituencies. They cross racial and national boundaries as they also highlight the ways in which racial groups are internally heterogeneous. Led by women, queers, and transgender and genderqueer people, they insist that these issues, from police violence to environmental devastation, are inherently issues of gender and sexuality. Asian American activists and organizations have been important, if not necessarily the most visible, contributors to many of these struggles. In this context, how is Asian American studies relevant to this age of Black Lives Matter and vice versa? This raises a broader question of the role of scholarship and pedagogy for social movements. As this is a meditation on Black Lives Matter published in an academic journal with a largely academic audience, I am not dismissing the importance of Asian American activists and organizations outside of...