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Keywords for Asian American Studies

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Keywords for Asian American Studies

Edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Võ, and K. Scott Wong

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London{~?~ST: end chapter}

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org

© 2015 by New York University All rights reserved

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ISBN: 978-1-4798-7453-8 (hardback)

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http://www.nyupress.org
Contents Acknowledgments

Introduction

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Võ, and K. Scott Wong

1 Adoption

Catherine Ceniza Choy

2 Art

Margo Machida

3 Assimilation

Lisa Sun-Hee Park

4 Brown

Nitasha Tamar Sharma

5 Citizenship

Helen Heran Jun

6 Class

Min Hyoung Song

7 Commodification

Nhi T. Lieu

8 Community

Linda Trinh Võ

9 Coolie

Kornel Chang

10 Cosmopolitanism

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

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11 Culture

Robert G. Lee

12 Deportation

Bill Ong Hing

13 Diaspora

Evelyn Hu-DeHart

14 Disability

Cynthia Wu

15 Discrimination

John S. W. Park

16 Education

Shirley Hune

17 Empire

Moon-Ho Jung

18 Enclave

Yoonmee Chang

19 Entrepreneur

Pawan Dhingra

20 Environment

Robert T. Hayashi

21 Ethnicity

Rick Bonus

22 Exclusion

Greg Robinson

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23 Family

Evelyn Nakano Glenn

24 Film

Jigna Desai

25 Food

Anita Mannur

26 Foreign

Karen Leong

27 Fusion

Mari Matsuda

28 Gender

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

29 Generation

Andrea Louie

30 Genocide

Khatharya Um

31 Globalization

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

32 Health

Grace J. Yoo

33 Identity

Jennifer Ho

34 Immigration

Shelley Sang-Hee Lee

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35 Incarceration

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

36 Labor

Sucheng Chan

37 Law

Neil Gotanda

38 Media

Shilpa Davé

39 Memory

Viet Thanh Nguyen

40 Militarism

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

41 Minority

Crystal Parikh

42 Movement

Daryl Joji Maeda

43 Multiculturalism

James Kyung-Jin Lee

44 Multiracial

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain

45 Nationalism

Richard S. Kim

46 Orientalism

Sylvia Shin Huey Chong

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47 Performance

Josephine Lee

48 Politics

Janelle Wong

49 Postcolonialism

Allan Punzalan Isaac

50 Queer

Martin F. Manalansan IV

51 Race

Junaid Rana

52 Refugee

Yến Lê Espiritu

53 Religion

David Kyuman Kim

54 Resistance

Monisha Das Gupta

55 Riot

Edward J. W. Park

56 Sexuality

Martin Joseph Ponce

57 Terrorism

Rajini Srikanth

58 Transnationalism

Lan P. Duong

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59 Trauma

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

60 War

K. Scott Wong

61 Yellow

Robert Ji-Song Ku Bibliography

About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments First and foremost, we want to publicly thank all the contributors to this Keywords for Asian American Studies volume, whose work renders visible the capaciousness, strength, and growth of the field. They patiently worked with us through our requests for revisions to make this a cohesive project and it is through their immense scholarly contributions to the field that we are able to produce this collection.

We likewise owe much to Eric Zinner, who had the foresight to envision the need for such a volume; without hesitation and with considerable consistency, he provided indefatigable support and offered invaluable advice from the planning stage to the production phase. Alicia Nadkarni at NYU Press in comparative fashion ushered us through all facets of the process. This volume benefits greatly from anonymous readers, who productively pushed us to reconsider and reevaluate the overall scope of the project.

In a more local vein, Keywords for Asian American Studies would not be possible without the careful eyes of Laura A. Wright, who vetted citations and kept the project on track in its first phase; we are also appreciative of Patrick S. Lawrence, who made sure the manuscript was thoroughly prepared for final submission. Last, but certainly not least, we want to acknowledge those who make what we do possible via their hourly and daily support:

Cathy is thankful to her parents, Charles and Ginko Schlund, along with her twin brother, Charles; they have offered unfaltering support and guidance. She is forever indebted to Christopher Vials, who is a true partner in all respects.

Linda appreciates her parents, Thuy and Bob, and sister, Christine, and her family for their constant sustenance and encouragement. She is thankful for her children, Aisha and Kian, and partner, John, and his children, Bronson and Carly, who bring her immeasurable enjoyment and fulfillment.

Scott is grateful for the wonderful support he has received over the years from his parents, Henry and Mary Wong, his brothers, Kenny, Keith, and Christopher, and his wife, Carrie, and daughter, Sarah, as well as his friends and colleagues who sustain him with love, companionship, good food, and music.

Finally, it is to our students, mentors, and colleagues that we dedicate this collection for enriching our pedagogical capacities and reminding us of the vitality of Asian American studies.

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Introduction

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Võ, and K. Scott Wong

Born out of the civil rights and Third World liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American studies has grown considerably over the past four decades, both as a distinct field of inquiry and as a potent site of critique. In the late nineteenth century, most of what was written about the Asian presence in America was by those who sought to impede the immigration of Asians or to curtail the social mobility of Asians already in the country. This tendency in the literature of the time, and subsequent scholarship on Asians and Asian Americans that appeared into the late 1960s, led Roger Daniels to observe, “Other immigrant groups were celebrated for what they had accomplished, Orientals were important for what had been done to them” (1966, 375). As the field developed starting in the late 1960s, more emphasis was placed upon the lived experiences of Asian Americans, in terms of what they have endured, accomplished, and transformed. In the early stages of the development of Asian American studies as an academic field of inquiry, more attention was paid to the history and experiences of Chinese, Japanese, and to some extent, Filipinos in the United States.

Among the first foundational texts in Asian American studies were edited collections that included contributions by an eclectic group of Asian American activists, artists, and academics. Roots: An Asian American Reader (Tachiki et al. 1971) was intent on going to the “root” of the issues facing Asians in America and included three sections—“Identity,” “History,” and “Community”—focusing on the “imperative that their voices be heard in all their anger, anguish, resolve and inspiration” (vii). Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Gee 1976) questioned the “self-image of America as a harmonious, democratic, and open society,” calling for a reexamination of the mistreatment of Asian Americans to deepen “their understanding of their own past and present political, economic, and social position in American society” (xiii). While some of the authors in these two collections, published by the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, had established careers, many of them were emerging community activists, writers, and academics who would become the important first generation of noted Asian Americanists. Although they came from different backgrounds, they were committed to bringing the Asian American experience to the foreground, in order to stress how they had been marginalized in the dominant narrative of our nation’s history, society, and culture. The articles and essays in these two publications represent themes that

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would dominate the field for years: labor exploitation, immigration policies, racial stereotypes and oppression, community development, gender inequalities, social injustices, U.S. imperialism in Asia, struggles of resistance, and the formation of Asian American identities. The Immigration Act of 1965 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 drastically changed the demographics of the Asian American population, bringing ethnic Chinese from the diaspora as well as expanding the number of Filipinos, Koreans, and Asian Indians and adding refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and these ongoing shifts have created new scholarly directions for the field.

In private and public institutions across the country, Asian American studies courses, emanating from these tumultuous histories of struggles, are now an identifiable and often integral part of university and college curricula. Most notable was the creation of the only College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1969, which incorporated Asian American studies. Currently, some courses in Asian American studies are offered by traditional departments, while others are in American studies or ethnic studies, with some campuses creating Asian American programs or centers and others establishing Asian American studies departments. The expansion of the field led to the creation of the Association for Asian American Studies in 1979, whose first conference was held the following year. Faculty and scholarship that focus on Asian Americans are found in a range of fields including anthropology, art, communications, economics, education, history, literature, political science, psychology, law, public health, public policy, religion, sociology, theater, urban studies, and women’s and gender studies. This has created a robust discipline that has broadened its scope in ways that were unimaginable when the field first began to take form, but it has also generated varying pedagogical directions and competing theoretical frameworks. The nature and tenor of Asian American studies have shifted dramatically since student strikes and undergraduate demand instigated its formation.

As recent scholarship underscores, Asian American studies is presently characterized by transnational, transpacific, and trans-hemispheric considerations of race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, gender, sexuality, and class. On the one hand, the pervasiveness of “trans” as a legible methodological prefix highlights the ways in which scholars in the field divergently evaluate the intersections between politics, histories, and subjectivities. On the other hand, such interdisciplinary approaches, ever attentive to past/present histories of racialization, social formation, imperialism, capitalism, empire, and commodification, engage a now-familiar set of what cultural critic Raymond Williams famously defined as “keywords.” These terms, which constitute “the

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vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion” (1976, 24), serve as a foundation for Keywords for Asian American Studies.

Some of the essays included in Keywords for Asian American Studies demarcate the origins of the field as well as critique its scholarly development. Certainly essays on “education” and “incarceration” speak to what has happened to Asian Americans as well as address critical transformations in the field. Essays on “diaspora” and “community” examine how Asian Americans have navigated their way around the world and established themselves in the United States, indirectly reshaping the field in the process. As significant, essays about “memory,” “terrorism,” and “postcolonialism” signal the field’s intimate yet nevertheless expansive engagement with U.S. imperialism and American war making.

Like Keywords for American Cultural Studies (edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler) and the other volumes in the series, Keywords for Asian American Studies is not an encyclopedia. Instead, Keywords for Asian American Studies is repeatedly guided by Williams’s provocative assertion that such a vocabulary “has been inherited within precise historical and social conditions” that nevertheless must “be made at once conscious and critical” (1985, 24). Expressly, the keywords included in this collection—central to social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies—reflect the ways in which Asian American studies has, in multidisciplinary fashion, been “shap[ed] and reshap[ed], in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view” (1985, 25). Attentive to the multiple methodologies and approaches that characterize a dynamic field, Keywords for Asian American Studies contains established and emergent terms, categories, and themes that undergird Asian American studies and delineate the contours of Asian America as an imagined and experienced site. On one level, such “imagined” and “experienced” frames highlight what Sucheng Chan evocatively characterized in Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991) as distinctly racialized modes of hostility via “prejudice, economic discrimination, political disenfranchisement, physical violence immigration exclusion, social segregation, and incarceration” (45). On another level, Chan’s use of “interpretive” as a disciplinary modifier functions as a theoretical touchstone and methodological foundation for Keywords for Asian American Studies.

As field interpreters, the collection’s contributors contextualized and situated their keywords according to their disciplines, points of entry, and critical engagement, while being simultaneously attuned to the fluidity and trajectories of the field. Determining the selection of keywords has been an organic progression. In terms of structuring the collection, we initially envisioned and

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prioritized keywords that capture the contours of multiple scholarly disciplines and that resonate with our pedagogical methodologies. As editors, we established few parameters for the contributors; however, we had the difficult task of assigning varying lengths to each keyword, recognizing that spatial limitations would be the major challenge for all authors, most of whom have written books related to their respective keywords. Strategically, we did not inform the contributors of the other entries, with the intent of allowing them to develop their keywords unencumbered, although as editors we suggested revisions so that the collection would be comparative in scope and tangentially cohere.

Additionally, we were interested in exploring core terms that suggestively demarcated distinctive Asian American histories, curricula, and pedagogies. While some of these keywords, such as “assimilation,” “citizenship,” and “trauma,” may be universal terms applied to immigrants in general, our contributors were observant to their specific application in Asian American studies, and mindful of the need to shift dominant paradigms that have been exclusionary. As the project moved from proposal to completed manuscript, our original purview grew to encapsulate divergent approaches, nomenclatural shifts, and disciplinary variations. For example, while “internment” remains a recognizable term within the field, it nevertheless fails to contain (as Lane Ryo Hirabayashi productively notes) the racial, gendered, and classed dimensions analogously associated with present-day understandings of “incarceration.” Armed with the editorial desire to represent spheres of knowledge and diverse methodologies, we deliberated over terms such as “capitalism,” “democracy,” and “prostitution,” which are fundamentally subsumed or embedded within other terms (hence, their omission in this iteration). We were similarly attentive to parsing out keywords that are often considered synonymous (for example, “gender,” “sexuality,” and “queer”). At the same time, we recognized the need to include terms that are foundational to the field, such as “labor,” “exclusion,” “identity,” “ethnicity,” “immigration,” and “war.” Last, but certainly not least, we encouraged contributors to engage the heterogeneity of Asian Americans in their respective essays, so analyses were not limited to one ethnicity or a singular historical moment.

This capaciousness frames the overall collection, which features interconnected references between keywords, includes overlapping examples, and involves reiterated events (such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the ongoing War on Terror). The derived meaning or relevance and justifications or reasons for these events have transformed over time for both the

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populations they have impacted as well as for the critical scholarship they have generated. Although there may be repetitions of some concepts or events in these essays, they are illuminated by differing perspectives and contextualized through varying lenses. The transforming demographics of the involved populations continue to contribute to fundamental debates regarding the racial positioning of Asian Americans and this has impacted the crucial terms and concepts in the field. In some instances, the emergence of a particular keyword within the field (e.g., “genocide” and “refugee”) is due to history and policy more closely tied to a specific ethnic group (for example, Southeast Asian Americans). Yet we encouraged authors to move beyond the expected boundaries of ethnic containment and address how their keywords are historically, ideologically, or empirically interconnected to various groupings. Following suit, the collection’s contributors demonstrate the ways these diverse groups, in the face of colonial histories and imperial structures, have resisted cumulative pressures by creating their own dynamic identifications.

Although directed to consider the field’s expansiveness, contributors were purposely provided latitude in analyzing the formulation and tone of their keywords to more aptly represent the genealogies in which ideas and ideologies traverse theoretical and disciplinary insularities. Even with these intentional coherences, each essay illustrates variations in approach and relevancy in articulating the significance or utilization of a keyword. Correspondingly, while Asian American studies remains an interdisciplinary field, its practitioners nevertheless bear the mark of their respective disciplines with regard to terminology and emphasis. Rather than serve as a limitation, these disciplinary linkages make visible new ways not only of seeing established fields but also of rethinking seemingly familiar topics.

Set adjacent to this editorial context, two terms that admittedly do not appear as specific entries in this collection serve as an implicit point of entry for each contributor: “Asian” and “American.” Encompassing geographical sites, political affiliations, and ethnoracial categories, both “Asian” and “American” are incontrovertibly qualified terms that syntactically operate as modifiers (e.g., adjectives) and subjects (specifically, nouns). As John Kuo Wei Tchen previously argued in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, “Asian” (along with “Asia” and—more problematically—“Asiatic”) is necessarily “loaded with particular spatial orientations rooted in temporal relationships” that are anthropological, geopolitical, and cartographic in scope (2007, 22). These concepts have been constructed as antagonistic to or in competition with one another, evidenced by the political conflicts in the Pacific, or in the cultural juxtapositions of the oppositional identifiers “traditional” and “modern”

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associated with each. Concomitantly, “American,” as an analogously overburdened concept, encompasses cultural, social, and political understandings of citizenship. Within the dominant U.S. imagination, these senses of belonging—fixed to characterizations of the United States as a “nation of immigrants”—correspond to assimilative and euphemistic claims of e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”) selfhood. Notwithstanding the encumbered nature of each word, the term “Asian American” (which pairs continent and country) upholds Yuji Ichioka’s intent when he coined it to replace such derogatory labels as “Asiatic” and “Oriental” and envisioned its politicized possibilities. On one level, the adjectival use of “Asian” as a descriptor for “American” accentuates the degree to which the field reflects multiple coordinates (in East, South, and Southeast Asia, and the United States). On another level, “Asian American” as an identifiable ethnoracial category underscores the migration histories of variegated peoples whose experiences divergently involve overt exclusion, aversive discrimination, and paradoxical incorporation.

In sum, this collection is a gathering of scholarship by those who have dedicated their careers to creating what is now an established field of knowledge, which has been remarkably dialogic in nature and fostered meaningful collaborations. The field emerged under conditions of contestation and resistance and it has generated controversies regarding its epistemological legitimacy, direction, and purpose. The essays are not intended to be definitive, but to encourage readers to creatively engage with the multilayered historical and contemporary debates and the vexing contradictions that reflect the shifting and evolving terrain of Asian American studies. Our expectation is that this collection will provide intellectual stimulation for the seasoned scholar and activist as well as a critical tool for those initially encountering the field to further their inquiry and research.

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1 Adoption

Catherine Ceniza Choy

In Asian American studies, the word “adoption” is increasingly significant for elucidating the breadth and depth of Asian American demographics, cultural expression, contemporary issues, and history. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the sight of an Asian child with white American parents has become a new social norm. Between 1971 and 2001, U.S. citizens adopted 265,677 children from other countries, and over half of those were from Asian countries. In 2000 and 2001, China was the leading sending country of adoptive children to the United States. South Korea, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, and the Philippines were among the top twenty sending countries (Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute 2013). Thus, the terms “international adoption,” “intercountry adoption,” and “transnational adoption” are used to describe the global dimensions of Asian adoption in the United States (Volkman 2005; Eleana Kim 2010).

A related keyword is “diaspora,” which acknowledges the broader histories of Asian international adoption across time and space. Since the end of the Korean War, approximately two hundred thousand Korean children have been sent to the United States for adoption and an additional fifty thousand have been sent to Europe (Yuh 2005). Because white Americans predominantly adopt these children, the words “transracial” and “cross-cultural” are additional key modifying terms for describing this phenomenon (A. Louie 2009; Davis 2012). However, Asian Americans have also adopted children from Asia. The phenomenon of “transethnic” and “multiethnic” adoption (wherein one or both of the parents is Asian American) thus deserves further study.

American adoptive parents and adult Asian American adoptees have made a mark on American national culture by spearheading organizations, such as Families with Children from China and Also-Known-As, that expand the traditional boundaries of kinship and community. They have created specialized virtual networks, print media, and heritage camps, which provide resources and support to other adoptive families and potential adoptive parents. In doing so, they participate in “global family making,” the process through which people create and sustain a family by consciously crossing national and often racial borders (Choy 2013). These “global families” are well known to the general

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public through mainstream news stories about celebrities as well as ordinary Americans adopting children from Asia. These narratives typically portray the phenomenon as a virtuous example of contemporary U.S. multiculturalism and a desirable way to create a family.

The international and transracial adoption of Asian children is also highly controversial. Since the late 1990s, anthologies, documentary films, and memoirs by Korean American adoptees about their upbringing emphasize the themes of American racism and alienation (Bishoff and Rankin 1997; Borshay Liem 2000; Borshay Liem 2010; Trenka 2003; Trenka 2009). The popularity of the seemingly positive stereotype of Asian Americans as “model minorities” in relation to negative “less than model” stereotypes of African Americans adds further complexity to issues of race in Asian international adoption. Some scholars have argued that these stereotypes undergird a racial preference for Asian children over African American children (Dorow 2006).

Furthermore, the decreasing supply of white babies in the United States that began in the second half of the twentieth century—a result of factors including the creation of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, and the increasing social legitimacy of single parenting—contributes to the commodification of Asian children for an international adoption market. Charges of “baby selling” and child abduction have resulted in suspensions of international adoptions from Vietnam and Cambodia. Some scholars have strongly criticized international adoption, characterizing it as a global market that transports babies from poorer to richer nations and likening it to a form of forced migration and human trafficking (Hubinette 2006).

These controversies have a longer history rooted in the post–World War II and Cold War presence of the U.S. military in Asia. Americans adopted Japanese and Korean war orphans, but their adoption of mixed-race Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese children (popularly known as Amerasians), a population fathered by U.S. servicemen with Asian women, captured the hearts and minds of the general public. The distinctive racial features of these mixed Asian-and-American children made them visible targets for abuse. And the lack of U.S. and Asian governmental support, and desertion by their American fathers, influenced their mothers’ decisions to abandon them, creating a group of children available for adoption.

International adoption from China is popularly conceived as a recent history, beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the emergence of China’s “one- child policy” and its increasing standardization of international adoption. While the policy may have eased the pressure of rapid population growth on Chinese communities, it has been widely criticized for motivating Chinese families,

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living in a patriarchal society with a marked cultural preference for boys, to relinquish baby girls for adoption. However, an earlier period of Chinese international adoption took place in the 1950s and 1960s under the auspices of the “Hong Kong Project,” through which Chinese American and white American families adopted hundreds of Chinese boys and girls who had been relinquished by refugee families fleeing communist mainland China.

Individual advocates who had themselves adopted children internationally— most notably Oregon farmer Harry Holt, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Pearl S. Buck, and Hollywood actress Jane Russell—and international social service agencies, such as the International Social Service–United States of America (ISS-USA) branch, popularized and facilitated Asian international adoption in the United States. While Russell’s WAIF (World Adoption International Fund) worked with the ISS-USA, Harry Holt organized the Holt Adoption Program (now known as Holt International) and Pearl S. Buck founded Welcome House, which continues to facilitate international adoptions. In the 1950s and 1960s, competition between social service agencies and individuals over who should oversee international adoption processes, and the controversy over proxy adoptions—through which adoptive parents adopted a child “sight unseen” through a third party abroad—dominated their interactions. In later years, more cooperative relations would prevail.

Until recently, the history of Asian international adoption was a topic markedly absent from Asian American studies. In the past decade, however, a critical mass of scholarship has emerged. The leadership of Korean adoptee artists and scholars has been pivotal in making Asian adoptee concerns integral to the field. Under the executive directorship of filmmaker and producer Deann Borshay Liem, NAATA (National Asian American Telecommunications Association, now the Center for Asian American Media) showcased films about Asian international adoption. The Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) features an Asian Adoptee section, which Kim Park Nelson founded in 2007. At the groups’s annual meetings, scholarly panels regularly feature recent research on Asian international adoption.

Finally, the keyword “adoption” has enabled political as well as scholarly projects that are critical of the dominant narrative about Asian international adoption, which casts the phenomenon as the humanitarian rescue of Asian children by white American families. Scholars and activists have called attention to the global inequities that persist in Asian international adoption, the significance of birth families, the social reality of adult adoptees, and the historical and political ties that bind international adoptees to immigrants. They emphasize that Asian international adoption is a unique phenomenon deserving of

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scholarly attention on its own terms as well as a generative lens through which we can view our increasingly global society.

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2 Art

Margo Machida

Whereas all human societies have developed visual idioms, the idea of Art (with a capital “A”) is elusive, much debated, and often closely entwined with social and class hierarchies, and subjective matters of value, taste, and sensibility. Its historic application as a cultural category and definitions of what constitutes visual art have varied significantly from culture to culture, across different historic periods, and according to the background, position, and perception of the viewer. Especially in the modern West, distinctions have typically been drawn between “high” or “fine” art, and crafts or applied arts. “Fine” art has been conceived as a specialized, elevated focus of aesthetic activity with its own intellectual history, professional principles, standards of judgment, and notions of individual “genius.” By contrast, crafts, design, and vernacular practices deemed as “tribal,” “primitive,” “folk,” or “outsider” art were often treated as lesser. While the Western tradition of visual art once referred mainly to painting, sculpture, drawing, and graphics, the invention of groundbreaking technologies— photography, film, television, the computer—and the appearance of new practices including video, digital, mixed media, web-based, conceptual, installation, performance, body, land, and earth art have repeatedly enlarged and complicated the ways in which visual artistic activity is understood and utilized. Moreover, as distinctions continue to erode between the realms of the “fine” arts, visual and material culture, and everyday life, it is more commonplace for artists to draw upon and integrate methods and materials from a range of sources, including craft, commercial, and industrial processes.

The term “Asian American art,” like “Asian American,” first came into general usage as a discrete subject of interest in the late 1960s and 1970s with the contemporaneous rise of the Asian American movement and establishment of ethnic studies as an academic field, beginning on the West Coast. Fueled by broad-based protest, identity, and counterculture movements, this turbulent moment witnessed the potent convergence of heightened ethnic awareness, cultural activism, and politically inspired cultural production. Activist scholars and writers published the first critical writings that sought to frame constituent elements of a distinct Asian American identity and culture. This emergent panethnic formulation was premised on the belief that despite their many

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differences and longstanding antagonisms, Asian groups shared common struggles and aspirations to establish themselves in the face of a difficult domestic history marked by racism, discrimination, exclusion, and economic exploitation.

Exposure to ethnic studies programs also galvanized members of this generation to use art to promote social change. Consequently, the 1970s witnessed the nationwide formation of grassroots organizations by loose groupings of artists, writers, scholars, college students, and cultural activists that played a foundational role in the Asian American community arts movement (Wei 1993; Louie and Omatsu 2001). Pioneering organizations were established with a strong visual arts component like Basement Workshop in New York, and Kearny Street Workshop and Japantown Art and Media Workshop in San Francisco. Activist artists produced large-scale public murals, silk-screened posters, prints, and illustrations intended to impart clear messages that could be apprehended by the broadest possible audience (Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft 1977). Cuban graphics, Cultural Revolution–era Chinese political posters, the Chicano art movement, and Mexican murals influenced these efforts as expressions of solidarity with liberatory struggles against racism and imperialism in the U.S. and the Third World (Machida 2008). Similarly, in the early 1970s, visual art regularly appeared in the Asian American alternative press—including periodicals such as Aion and Gidra in California, and Bridge magazine in New York—as illustrations, comics, photography, and portraits of people and community life.

During the early years of the Asian American movement, a highly politicized approach to cultural development influenced by writings such as Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” prevailed. Its advocates conceived of art as a force for revolutionary transformation and emphasized the artist’s social and political responsibility to produce work of relevance to a community identified chiefly with the Asian American working class and immigrants. In conjunction with highlighting social problems, and crafting empowering images to counter distortive representations imposed by the dominant culture, activist artists sought to envision a distinctive Asian American culture. However, their efforts to articulate a definitive aesthetic and, by extension, something that could legitimately be called “Asian American art” proved problematic. The issue would lead to perennial debates over whether the term “Asian American art” refers to the background of the maker or to a particular subject matter—that is, work that directly addresses some historic, social, or political aspect of Asian American experience. With conceptions of Asian American art shifting substantially after the 1970s, a wide spectrum of

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opinion subsequently arose about how, or if, an Asian American visual aesthetic should be defined (A. Tam 2000). Reflective of a variety of ideological and intellectual orientations, these views have ranged from prescriptive formulations inflected by political doctrines to deconstructive critiques of the term itself.

The intensifying interest in Asian American artists likewise led to the emergence of Asian American arts writing, critical discourse, curatorial projects, and archival efforts in the 1970s. Such developments converged with wider efforts by activist scholars and critics, under the umbrella term “multiculturalism,” to challenge the strictures of Eurocentric art historical and aesthetic canons and bring forward art by nonwhite groups in U.S. society (Lippard 1990). These allied practices would contribute to the gradual formation of Asian American art history over the ensuing decades. Such ventures, in which seminal community-based Asian American arts organizations played a generative role, understandably associated Asian American art with the groups that comprised the largest domestic Asian populations of the period: peoples of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent. The imprint of that era, as manifested in many exhibitions throughout the 1980s, would exert a significant influence on extant discourses about what constitutes Asian American art. The 1990s witnessed an unprecedented number of museum and gallery exhibitions organized under either an Asian American frame or ethnic-specific rubrics such as Japanese American, Chinese American, Korean American, Filipino American, and Vietnamese American art. Many of these shows centered on identity, sociopolitical, and historic issues related to the transpacific trajectory of U.S. involvement in Asia, including the pervasive, multigenerational effects on U.S. Asian communities of war in Korea and Southeast Asia, the colonization of the Philippines, and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans (Machida 2009).

Yet by the late 1970s, conceptions of Asian American art were ripe for a radical realignment due to the demographic transformation of the U.S. Asian population, resulting from changes in inequitable federal immigration laws, and an expanding backlash against multiculturalism and identity politics. Due to the 1965 abolition of restrictions that severely limited Asian immigration to the U.S., along with refugee statutes enacted after the Vietnam War, new entrants had begun to outstrip the U.S.-born generations whose forebears had mostly settled by the early twentieth century. Beyond the profound impact of this new wave of immigration and transnational circulation on the internal landscape of Asian America, the so-called “culture wars” were also rapidly gaining momentum. Not only was ethnoracial difference as a defining concept under widespread attack in America by the 1980s, but also due to parallel intellectual challenges to

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discourses of identification and strategies of representation, categories such as nation, race, ethnicity, and gender, and even unitary conceptions of the self were being reconceived as multidimensional, shifting, contingent, and discontinuous (Trinh 1992).

Ever more resistant to being labeled as Asian Americans, by the 1990s younger artists, curators, critics, and scholars perceived that identity, especially when filtered through the lens of race and autobiography, had virtually become a new delimiting canon for minoritized artists. In this move away from rhetorics of race and identity politics, formulations like “post-racial” and “post-identity” art gained increasing currency. As any interest in cultural specificity and affiliation risked being associated with a confining essentialism, those who continued to characterize their subject as “Asian American” art inevitably found themselves treading through a dense political and intellectual minefield. Moreover Asian American art, unlike other disciplines in ethnic studies that were firmly established before the 1980s, was still a subject-in-formation when it ran afoul of this polarizing climate (Elaine Kim 2003).

Visual art, moreover, was largely overlooked as a research priority in Asian American studies, unlike other aspects of visual culture such as film, television, and print media. The paucity of serious and sustained Asian Americanist scholarly writing on the subject is attributed to conditions specific to the genesis and ideological roots of a field concerned with ongoing struggles with racism and marginalization (G. Chang 2008). The role of visual art in the everyday lives of Asian communities was seldom mentioned until the 1990s, given Asian American scholarship’s emphasis on bottom-up approaches to social history and labor studies. Indeed the subject was often viewed with ambivalence, due to its presumptive links to elite and elitist interests with no relevance to the lives and circumstances of the Asian American masses. Visual representation was also scrutinized for its function in providing dominant culture with a means to negatively stereotype and suppress Asian efforts to claim a place for themselves in this nation.

Another powerful influence in repositioning Asian American art and cultural criticism—as framed through an array of scholarly and curatorial projects—has come via the accelerating influx of Asian artists and intellectuals to the U.S. during the post-1965 era, which has increasingly placed Asian American art and artists in dynamic conversation with art and ideas emerging from Asian nations and global overseas Asian communities (A. Yang 1998). As identity- and nation- based rhetorics are relativized by discourses of diaspora, transnationality, and globalization, the idea of diaspora, while sometimes criticized for its links to nationalism, provides a basis for the comparative study of distinct yet

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multivalent identifications that transcend dichotomous notions of domestic identity (DeSouza 1997). By utilizing a diasporic lens, and by positing an “aesthetics of diaspora,” visual art by Asians in the U.S. was reconceived as part of a broad continuum of Asian and Asian diasporic artistic production. These included interstitial frames like “transexperience” and “intersecting communities of affinities” that were respectively applied to jointly position work by overseas Chinese artists residing in three Western nations (the United States, Australia, and France) (M. Chiu 2006), and to trace the formation and artistic production of mixed Asian American and Asian artist collectives in New York and Tokyo (A. Chang 2008). More recent pandiasporic exhibitions organized both domestically and abroad would similarly emphasize international connections by juxtaposing artists in Asia with their ethnic counterparts in Asian diasporas, among them a Korean biennial that brought together works by Korean and Korean diasporic artists from the U.S., Kazakhstan, China, Brazil, and Japan (Y. S. Min 2002).

Overall, the past two decades have proved to be an especially fertile period, distinguished by an upsurge of publications, research initiatives, and thematic and survey exhibitions on and of Asian American art, including projects by scholars in Asia and the Pacific. Much as the foundational work in this field has simultaneously proceeded inside and outside the academy, it is due to the combined efforts of curators, critics, artists, academics, art museums, alternative spaces, community arts and artist-run groups, and historical societies that the scope of the contemporary discourse on Asian American art continues to expand. Tracing individual artists’ creative and personal trajectories, these projects variously reveal intricately configured circuits of cultural production and differing contexts in which artistic work is produced, displayed, interpreted, and marketed. Amid these expansive conceptions of contemporary Asian American participation in ongoing flows of artists, ideas, and cultural influences between Asia, Oceania, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, there is rising interest in artists of mixed ancestry (Kina and Dariotis 2013), and in artistic efforts that occurred prior to the 1960s (Chang, Johnson, and Karlstrom 2008; Johnson 2013). Recent publications shed fresh light on works by Yun Gee, Miné Okubo, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi (A. Lee 2003; Robinson and Tajima Creef 2008; S. Wang 2011). These explorations allow for a clearer understanding of the continuum of concerns and standpoints that have engaged visual artists of Asian heritages working in the U.S., including their historic contributions to the development of an internationalized modernism.

As this area of inquiry continues to evolve, some cultural critics are also revisiting the value of framing and promoting art as “Asian American.” While

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they may harbor reservations about “bounded” notions of identity associated with such a term, they also acknowledge the potential elasticity of the rubric in broadly delineating positions that arise from a common presence in this nation. Moreover, they continue to grapple with how to account for the significance of conceptions of race and the particular effects of domestic racialized exclusion on Asians and other nonwhite groups. To the extent, they argue, that the experiences, histories, and cultural contributions by Asian groups in the U.S. society remain obscured, neglected, or even actively denied, platforms for collective representation remain strategically necessary (S. Min 2006).

With contemporary Asian American visual artists embracing virtually every medium, stylistic exploration, and intellectual current, and drawing upon the full range of representational and critical strategies, no single discourse, critical perspective, ideological stance, or theme can be taken as definitive. Approached this way, the use of the umbrella term “Asian American art”—like the heterogeneous construct of Asian America itself—maintains its utility as an angle of view that allows for the work of artists of diverse Asian heritages to be situated and compared, irrespective of visual idiom, formal approach, or subject matter.

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3 Assimilation

Lisa Sun-Hee Park

The definition of “assimilation” and its subsequent usage has long been a contentious issue in American scholarship. Fundamentally, assimilation raises difficult questions about the social composition of a society or culture. More specifically, the debates around the term address the adaptation of those populations or individuals understood as outside or different from mainstream society. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “assimilate” as a verb meaning to “take in (information, ideas, or culture) and understand fully” and “absorb and integrate.”

The dispute over the meaning of assimilation follows the intertwined history of racial formation, immigration politics, and national identity in the United States. In 1897, W.E.B. Du Bois published “The Conservation of Races,” in which he argued against assimilation. Du Bois pushed for the substantive retention of racial difference, beyond that of physical difference, in acknowledgment of distinct, racial experiences and their particular contributions to society. In this way, to assimilate was understood as meaning to absorb into white America, which requires the negation of black experience and knowledge. He asked, “Have we in America a distinct mission as a race—a distinct sphere of action and an opportunity for race development, or is self-obliteration the highest end to which Negro blood dare aspire?” (1897, 12). Du Bois’s argument rests on the assertion that African Americans were already Americans; thereby raising the question of “assimilation into what?” If one is already an American, then assimilation efforts are normative measures to center whiteness as the national identity during a historic era of transnational migration that brought significant racial and national challenges. With substantial agreement in political ideals and social engagement, Du Bois saw no need for assimilation: “there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two or three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation” (1897, 13). In other words, racial difference was not the problem; it was the racism, or the assumption of racial inferiority, that marginalizes African Americans which was the problem.

Later, Robert E. Park further solidified the connection between racial anxiety

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and assimilation. However, unlike Du Bois, Park viewed assimilation as a solution to racial difference, which he understood as a social problem. Park’s views were more in line with those of another important African American figure of the time, Booker T. Washington, for whom Park worked as press secretary for seven years at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (see H. Yu 2001, 38). Park would later become the most prominent member of the Chicago School of sociology and the influence of his time with Washington and their framing of assimilation as a solution is evident within sociology generally. Park and Ernest Burgess’s canonical 1921 work, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, established Park’s theory of interaction, according to which two different social groups follow a cycle of progressive stages of interaction. This was understood as a universal, natural process that begins with competition and ends with assimilation. Assimilation, then, was understood as inevitable, though there were significant barriers to achieving this outcome. Park and his protégés went on to produce studies of these barriers—prejudice and isolation in particular—that would define the foundations of U.S. sociology in general and research on immigrants specifically.

Since then, sociology has fluctuated in its usage and acceptance of the term. More recently, Richard Alba and Victor Nee have argued for the continued legitimacy of assimilation as a social scientific concept by “reformulating” the term apart from some of the most disagreeable elements of the past. They write, “As a state-imposed normative program aimed at eradicating minority cultures, assimilation has been justifiably repudiated” (1997, 827). In addition, they acknowledge the limitation of this concept as a universal outcome measure but contend that assimilation remains the single best theoretical framework from which “to understand and describe the integration into the mainstream experienced across generations by many individuals and ethnic groups” (1997, 827).

Parallel to this social scientific progression, the concept of assimilation has been interrogated in other ways. Building upon new knowledge of power and the role of the state, scholars have criticized the continued assumption of assimilation as a taken-for-granted process of immigrant incorporation in which the state holds a universal and implicitly benign presence. As DeWind and Kasinitz note in their review of immigrant adaptation, whether this concept of assimilation is “segmented” (see Portes and Zhou 1993) or encounters other “bumps in the road,” “[t]he world may well be more complicated than the straight line model of assimilation implies” (1997, 1099). Alba and Nee and others continue to treat assimilation as a natural (meaning spontaneous and unintentional) occurrence derived from interpersonal interaction, largely devoid

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of state interference. Implicit in this assumption is an understanding of the state as a top-down, readily observable social force. But, as scholarship on power has shown, the state has multiple faces, many of them hidden. A “state-imposed normative program aimed at eradicating minority cultures” can come in multiple forms in the age of hegemonic governmentality, in which the domination and subordination of particular classes take place on a “multiplicity of fronts” (Gramsci 1971, 247) and bureaucratic forms of recognition and identification enforce “the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed” (Foucault 1982, 21).

This is particularly so within neoliberal conditions in which the state maintains both a fluid and pervasive presence. And while Alba and Nee are careful to note that their definition “does not assume that one group must be the ethnic majority; assimilation can involve minority groups only, in which case the ethnic boundary between the majority and the merged minority groups presumably remains intact” (1997, 863), their analysis lacks an understanding of multiple forms of power. Assimilation is not a haphazard event. Governmental programs, with the enforcement of controlling images, are structured in specific ways to promote assimilation into a particular citizen subject (see L. Park 2011).

It is an aspirational process and, as such, the point or value of assimilation is not necessarily to achieve it. Its usefulness resides in its nebulous state as a distant goal rather than as a reality. In this regard, the main issue of contention with respect to assimilation is not its definition but its intention. A critical perspective, derived from an interdisciplinary analysis that combines the theoretical and methodological tools of feminist/queer, ethnic, transnational, and postcolonial studies, approaches assimilation or, more to the point, the wish to assimilate as a powerful normative, disciplinary tool. This perspective is based in an analysis of power that moves away from a state-centric approach. It is an effort to decenter normative or dominant understandings of migration, which often unquestioningly mimic the goals of national economic and political rationalities.

A case in point is the model minority myth, which is assimilation exemplified. The idea of Asian Americans as the “model minority” is a myth—meaning, untrue. However, the myth remains strongly entrenched in the U.S. narrative of its national origins as a liberal democracy with equal opportunity. It holds up Asian Americans as models for other minorities based on measures of income, education, and public benefit utilization rates (see Cheng and Yang 2000; L. Park 2008). Just recently, the myth was promoted in a Pew Research Center publication (P. Taylor et al. 2012). Disregarding data that shows vast variations in income and employment experiences across Asian immigrant groups in the

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U.S., the Pew report in question states that Asian Americans have made tremendous progress from a century ago, when most were “low-skilled, low- wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination” (P. Taylor et al. 2012, 1). And, now, these same immigrants are “the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.” As an example, the report states, “When newly minted medical school graduate Priscilla Chan married Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last month, she joined the 37% of all recent Asian-American brides who wed a non-Asian groom” (P. Taylor et al. 2012, 1).

According to this report, Asian Americans are models of assimilation, enjoying high educational achievement, good (white) neighborhoods, and interracial marriages to whites. On its face, the model minority myth is a seemingly positive image of personal success and social integration that promotes a moral narrative of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Absent from this progress narrative are the many Asian Americans who live in poverty and experience intense and direct racism. The murder of six Sikhs in Milwaukee by a white supremacist two months after the Pew report’s publication is just one graphic reminder. In addition, this assimilationist narrative focuses on just six of the largest and wealthiest subgroups (Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese Americans), which obscures not only the composition of the poverty that exists within Asian American communities but the history of Asian migration to the United States. The privileged Asian Americans of today are not the same Asian Americans of a century ago. They are not the generations descended from the low-wage laborers, in keeping with a simplistic individual progress narrative of assimilation. Instead, today’s Asian Americans represent a dramatically bifurcated immigration system that separates the “high skilled” from the “low,” and success or lack thereof in the U.S. is, in no small part, indicative of one’s access to Western education and other forms of human capital prior to migration (see Park and Park 2005 and Hing 1993 for detailed discussions of immigration policy). However, the significant role of the state in structurally determining who gets ahead remains hidden within a linear, ahistorical progression toward cultural assimilation.

A critical assessment, then, brings the state to the fore by asking, “assimilation into what?” Similar to “capitalist discipline” as defined by Aihwa Ong, assimilationist narratives promote the “enforced and induced compliance” of Asian Americans with specific political, social, and economic objectives (1987, 5). According to Yến Espiritu, the objective is a well-rehearsed patriotic drama of American rescue, cleansed from the messy realities of conquest and colonization (2003, 208). These narratives represent a double-edged sword for

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Asian Americans. Lisa Lowe explains that Asians in the U.S. hold an impossible position in which they are simultaneously projects of inclusion and exclusion (1996, 4). She argues that this contradiction is rooted in the paradoxical nature of American citizenship, in which the state presents itself as a democratic, unified body where all subjects are granted equal access, while it also demands that differences—of race, class, gender, and locality—be subordinated in order for those subjects to qualify for membership (1996, 162). Assimilation, then, is required for inclusion. But assimilation into what? For Asian Americans, it is the position of the perpetual foreigner/victim who must be rescued, welcomed, and domesticated (i.e., assimilated) again and again (see Tuan 1999). The logic is paradoxical by design. Asian Americans, as a marginalized racial minority, are compelled to adapt their history to fit into an Orientalist drama that requires they play the outsiders repeatedly, all in an effort to establish their legitimate role as insiders. In essence, Asian Americans must be foreign in order to fit into the United States (see L. Park 2005).

Some of the most influential work on Asian America illustrates how the notion of a model minority does not imply full citizenship rights but, rather, a secondary set of rights reserved for particular minorities who “behave” appropriately and stay in their designated subsidiary space without complaint (see Y. Espiritu 2003; L. Lowe 1996; Glenn 2004; Ong 1999; Palumbo-Liu 1999). This subsidiary space is a socially marginal one in which Asian Americans despite their legal citizenship continue to hold foreigner status (see C. Kim 2000). In this way, assimilation actually reinforces established racial inequalities and imposes on even subsequent generations of Asian Americans born in the U.S. a precarious defensive dilemma in which they must constantly prove their worth as “real” Americans.

The foundational disputes regarding racial formation, immigration politics, and national identity associated with assimilation continue. For example, Nadia Kim’s (2007) contemporary critique of assimilation as a form of racialization into whiteness is strongly reminiscent of Du Bois’s more than a century ago. Over the years, scholarly contestations regarding assimilation as a measurement of Americanization conveyed the fluctuating composition of social citizenship and its deeply intertwined connection to historical formations of racial difference. It remains to be seen whether assimilation as a concept can be convincingly recuperated from its imperial tendencies. As Iris Marion Young has argued, this would require the transformation of institutions and norms to no longer express dominant interests but function according to neutral rules that do not disadvantage those deemed “different” (1990, 266). What is clear, however, from these many years of contemplation is that assimilation is neither simple nor

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“natural.”

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4 Brown

Nitasha Tamar Sharma

“Brown” is a term from 11th-century Old English (brun) and Middle English (broun) referring to a color, meaning “duskiness, gloom.” With regard to people, the Oxford English Dictionary describes a brown person as “having the skin of a brown or dusky colour: as a racial characteristic.” “Brown”’s work as an adjective (“brown bird”), verb (“to brown”), and noun parallels its references to multiple groups of people, including those from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Pacific, and Latin America. Given that many people have “brown” skin, “Brown” of course refers to much more than skin color and phenotype: like the terms “Black” (used to refer to people of African descent), “Yellow” (often referring to East Asians), and “Red” (indigenous peoples of the Americas), it refers not to a thing or person as much as to the processes through which these are given meaning.

The unsettled and untethered uses of “Brown” illustrate the ambiguity and contestation that define its history. “Yellow” is often the expected terminology with which to discuss Asian Americans, as it has long been the American referent for the “Yellow peril” formerly known as “Orientals.” The U.S. conflation of Asia with East Asia arises from immigration histories and geopolitical relations. The Chinese and Japanese were the first to arrive in substantial numbers, followed by Filipinos and South Asians, who were also considered “Asiatics,” albeit Brown ones. Under the umbrella of “Brown,” members of various ethnicities (e.g., Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis) arrived with distinct colonial and military histories and cultures that shaped their ethnic politics and experiences in the United States. For instance, Vijay Prashad highlights how Orientalists developed a dominant conception of South Asians, or desis—the “Brown” in his title The Karma of Brown Folk—as neither White nor Black others who are viewed by Americans through the lenses of spirituality and culture vis-à-vis British colonization. The direct colonial and military history of U.S.-Philippine relations, on the other hand, shaped Filipinos’ distinct earlier legal status as U.S. nationals (rather than as aliens ineligible for citizenship) who were viewed as a sexual-economic threat. Brown and Yellow Asians, therefore, have been racialized as perpetual foreigners, outsiders to the nation. Their social locations are to be understood in relation to the foundational Black-White binary

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rooted in U.S. slavery and to indigeneity. As a racial category forged through racialist ideologies and colonization, Brown often reflects the intermediary hierarchal position of those who are neither Black nor (fully) White.

The institutions of science and law have defined who and what is Brown through categorizing and fixing populations to justify colonialism abroad and exclusion at home. At the turn of the 19th century, race scientists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach referred to people from Southeast Asia and the Pacific, including Filipinos, as belonging to the “Malay” or “Brown” race. During the 1900s, White colonialists distinguished themselves from their Filipino and Indian subjects. Filipinos in the Philippines and the U.S. were bestialized as “Brown monkeys” and South Asians were patronized, as they were by the British, as “little Brown brothers” and “Brown cousins.” U.S. courts used Blumenbach’s taxonomy of five races when they added “Malay” to the list of races prohibited from marrying Whites, further distinguishing Brown Malays from Yellow Mongolians. Yet law and science have often disregarded one another. The Supreme Court case United States v. Thind (1923) shifted the categorization of South Asians from “Caucasian” (and therefore legally “White”) to non-White (and thus Brown), upon which they became “aliens ineligible for citizenship.”

The ambiguous and shifting nature of this term continues to reveal tensions and alliances across groups. Some populations that fall within the umbrella of “Asian American” identify with “Brown” to distinguish themselves from Whites as well as East Asians and yet they may be misrecognized as Latino or assumed to be Muslims. In late-20th-century U.S. popular representations, “Brown” referred to Latinos and more specifically to Mexicans in the Southwest. Hernandez (2010) proposes “Mexican Brown” as a conceptual and rhetorical tool that reflects the racial lumping of a denigrated caste of Mexican migrants who have been constructed as “illegal” noncitizens. Since 9/11, both the Wars on Terror and the Arab Spring have shifted yet again the always-under-construction lines of “Brown,” so that it now refers to people from the Middle East and North Africa and more broadly to the religion of Islam. That these multiple populations representing transnational geographies identify with the same word does not mean they identify with each other as belonging to a single “race.” Thus, “Brown” as a reference to a people’s phenotype, like “Black,” is not merely descriptive or U.S. based—it is political and global.

The rise of subfields in Asian American studies has led to an interrogation of the heterogeneity and hierarchies of knowledge production within the field. Since the 1990s, Filipino American (Tiongson et al. 2006), Southeast Asian (Schlund- Vials 2012a), South Asian American (Prashad 2000; Prashad 2002), and Pacific

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Island studies (Camacho 2011) scholars have expanded Asian American studies. These subfields highlight the deeply local yet diasporic formations of Brownness and the relational dynamics among communities of color across territorial boundaries. Events since the millennium have encouraged these scholars to consider the locations and intersections of Asian Americans with Arab and Muslim Americans as fellow subjects of U.S. empire and militarization (Maira and Shihade 2006). Other scholars have drawn intellectual and ethnographic links between Brown and Black populations that illustrate models of interminority solidarity. Scholars in Asian American studies have expanded upon Paul Gilroy’s (1993) diasporic notion of the Black Atlantic in their attention to queer and female subjectivity formation (Gopinath 2005) and racio-religious terror (Rana 2002) within South Asian diaporas. Critical histories (Fujino 2005; Fujino 2012) have articulated the impacts of Black struggles (e.g., Brown v. BOE, 1954) and racial models of Blackness upon Asian American identity and political formation (Wang 2006).

“Brown” at the turn of the 21st century is not simply an imposed identity; it also reflects the racial consciousness of those who self-identify with the term. Various groups in the U.S. have taken to claiming “Brown pride” as a politicized expression of non-Whiteness, akin to Black pride. Post-9/11, “Brown” (Sharma forthcoming) operates as a political and diasporic identity among people across the globe in response to the Wars on Terror and changing U.S.–Middle East relations. This expression of Brownness as a political concept and identity in the 21st century is evidenced in communities that have arisen through global social networks and in hip hop music that discusses surveillance and oppression that links Arabs, South Asians, North Africans, and Muslims—and those mistaken for them—in their homelands and across diasporas.

“Brown” is both part of and expands beyond Asian America. Referring to Latinos, Filipinos, South and Southeast Asians, Arabs, “Muslim-looking” people, and others, its flux reminds us to question the seemingly fixed boundaries of all racial categories. Racial formation is an always incomplete process of contestation and negotiation, of hegemony and resistance, and of imposition and adoption. This category, crafted by racial scientists to impose (their) order upon the world has also been a self-selected identity. The identifications of people around the world as Brown—whether racially, politically, or religiously— demonstrate that Brown will “stick around” as an expansive and global category infused with power relations.

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5 Citizenship

Helen Heran Jun

“Citizenship” has been a key foundational term within modern liberal definitions of rights since the 18th century. In the most basic sense, citizenship is a legal status accorded to subjects of a nation that confers to its members a host of rights, protections, and obligations. Citizenship is the institution through which states may grant or deny such rights and duties to the inhabitants of a national territory, and thereby positions the state as the ultimate arbiter and guarantor of equality and justice. With the rise of the nation-state form, citizenship became a necessity for realizing what had been imagined as inalienable human rights, insofar as these rights could be practically claimed and administered only if recognized by a nation-state entity (Arendt 1968).

At the very heart of the modern idea of citizenship is a universality that is both its emancipatory promise and limit. For example, all subjects who have secured U.S. citizenship status, regardless of the specific particulars of their economic standing, gender, race, religion, national origin, etc., have equal standing before the law and are formally equivalent to one another. Hence, all U.S. citizens can participate in electoral politics, operating as if they were equivalent to one another. Critiques of citizenship maintain that this universalism is a false abstraction since citizens participate in an imaginary political sphere of equality and formal equivalence, while their material lives are in fact constituted by substantive inequalities that define the economic and social spheres. In other words, political emancipation via citizenship replaces and displaces possibilities for actual emancipation. Marx noted how the elimination of religion and property ownership as preconditions for citizenship did not eliminate the power of these institutions over people’s everyday conditions, but rather, intensified the reach of religion and class position, which were now falsely bracketed as private matters so that the citizen-subject can emerge as an imaginary “universal.” While the liberal position maintains that this abstract equality is the grand substance of citizenship, critics maintain that this imaginary universalism is designed to offer merely abstract equality—the law will treat you as if you were all equal to one another—to ensure the reproduction of vast existing inequality.

Ethnic studies scholars have observed that the Marxist critique of citizenship

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as abstract and illusory does not adequately account for the contradictions that inhere to racialized citizenship. For nonwhites in the United States, historical processes of racialization are not easily confined to the privatized domain of an individual “particular” and racial difference institutionally emerges in contradiction to the universality promised by political emancipation through citizenship. Lisa Lowe notes that while Marx regarded abstract labor in the economic sphere as underwriting abstract citizenship, “capital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract,’ but precisely through the social production of ‘difference,’ marked by race, nation, geographical origins, and gender” (1996, 27–28). In other words, the classical Marxist critique has not accounted for modalities of differentiation as being crucial to the development of capitalism. Like other racialized minorities within the United States, Asians have neither been abstract labor nor abstract citizens, “but have been historically formed in contradiction to both the economic and the political spheres” (L. Lowe 1996, 28). This point might seem a familiar one for students of Asian American studies, but it is crucial to contextualize the stakes of this intervention, which is not a simple negation of the Marxist critique of citizenship but rather a deepening of that critique through an understanding of how racialization can produce a productively antagonistic contradiction to the institution of citizenship.

Citizenship has been a primary analytic of Asian American discourse (and within ethnic studies, generally), with an emphasis on both its denial and negation. The early history of Asian American racial formation has been a history of the incorporation of Asian labor in the West while those workers were rendered more exploitable through the systematic denial of citizenship status through legislation that deemed Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship. From the 1790 Naturalization Act, which deemed only “free white persons” eligible for naturalized citizenship, to the systematic exclusion of new Asian emigrants (Chinese in 1882, Asian Indians in 1917, Japanese and Koreans in 1924, and Filipinos in 1934), and finally to Alien Land laws that prohibited Asians already in the United States from owning property, these acts of legislation are concrete manifestations of how Asians were constituted as not only nonwhite but as antithetical to the U.S. citizen. The history of Asian Americans is indeed, generally narrated as the denied access to U.S. citizenship. For those born to Asian immigrants in the United States and therefore U.S. citizens by birth (what Mai Ngai [2000] refers to as “alien citizenship”), we can observe the practical irrelevance and disregard of that legal status, such as in the mass internment of Japanese American citizens.

We understand this history of exclusion from citizenship as the product of competing interests and institutions, including capital (which has historically

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embraced Asian immigrant labor), white labor interests (which has historically organized to prohibit Asian immigrant labor), Asian nation-states with varying degrees of geopolitical influence, and the U.S. state, which both passes and reverses exclusionary legislation in the effort to manage the political crises that have arisen due to the threat (or alternately, the “promise”) of Asian labor in the United States. In many ways, the 19th-century exclusion of Asian immigrant workers from citizenship was also a reaction to the formal inclusion of African Americans into citizenship in 1868 following the abolition of slavery, a political concession that capital, labor, and the U.S. state were not eager to repeat (Saxton 1975; Du Bois 2008).

After World War II, however, the needs of the U.S. labor market, geopolitical ideological demands, and mass civil rights mobilization led by African Americans and others brought an eventual end to exclusionary legislation directed against Asian immigrants (Melamed 2011; L. Lowe 1996; S. Chan 1991). One feature of the post–civil rights era has been Asian American incorporation into U.S. citizenship via liberalized immigration policies resulting from the Immigration and Naturalization Act, or Hart-Celler Act, of 1965 (Ngai 2000). Indeed, with the passage of civil rights legislation that same year, African Americans (who were formally granted U.S. citizenship via the 14th Amendment almost a century earlier) and all other racialized groups also finally experienced full formal equality and equal rights, that is, full equality in the realm of the law. However, as the Marxist critique of citizenship underscores, legal equality and political emancipation (as if we were equal) will necessarily fail to resolve the brutal racialized inequality that constitutes our social formation. The ethnic studies critique of Marx’s inability to account for the imbrication of race and class retains this crucial understanding that under liberal capitalism, citizenship is constituted in relation to the sanctity of property rights that the political state is founded to protect. While an ethnic studies critique of citizenship recognizes the historical racialization of citizenship in the United States, it also simultaneously recognizes that citizenship and the achievement of rights can never abolish the exploitative systems that they were in fact designed to protect and reify. Rather, the charge for a critical ethnic studies analytic has been to better understand how the imbrication of race and class yields an entire range of contradictions for racialized subjects who can be situated in contradictory antagonism to the mandates of both the state and capital.

For Asian Americans who have been racialized as alien to the national body, but who have been otherwise incorporable as exploited workers, as bourgeois professionals, and as capitalists, it is crucial to clarify the multiple implications of how Asian American racial difference emerges in contradiction to citizenship.

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Bearing out the materialist critique, we can see, since 1965, that securing civil rights instantiated racial equality in the United States, but only in the legal realm of abstract formal equivalence. While such legal equality enabled partial socioeconomic mobility on the part of U.S. racial minorities, institutionalized racial exploitation continues to materialize in racialized ghettoization, uneven mortality rates and unequal access to functioning public education, a racialized, gendered labor market, and subjection to state violence and detention.

One aspect of contradiction that has been familiar terrain within Asian American discourse underscores how, despite access to citizenship, Asian Americans continue to signify within the national imaginary as racially particular and as foreign to the national culture. We can see how Asian American racial difference is a particularity that does not simply dissolve into the universality promised by political representation through the institution of citizenship. Hence, even economically privileged Asian Americans are read not as “universal” U.S. citizens, but regarded through the laudatory terms of their racial difference as model minorities. While members of the educated Asian American professional class may continue to signify as culturally foreign despite their citizenship and economic status, such examples of exclusion do not negate or displace the vast differences in life opportunities that radically distinguish the lives of the Asian American poor from those of their economically mobile professional counterparts.

Therefore, what is often referred to as the construction of the Asian as the “forever foreigner”—the deferred promise of full inclusion into the national body that Asian Americans are yet to enjoy—cannot be interpreted as the ultimate crisis and horizon of what Asian Americans must both claim and aspire to. Such a positioning situates the Asian American critique as a perpetual lament of never being recognized as a “true” American, a grievance that one is continually (mis)recognized as a foreigner rather than citizen. For the Asian American poor, the consequences of such Othering can mean the naturalization of violence and exploitation of, say, immigrant garment workers or the lack of resources for displaced Southeast Asian refugees after Katrina, while for the Asian American elite, it can manifest as a bittersweet night of winning the Miss America pageant or the difficulty of securing political office in a non-Asian district. While all of these instances can be taken up as yet another sign of the enduring “disenfranchisement” of Asian Americans, there is much at stake for Asian American studies in recognizing that full inclusion for the latter group— that is, when professional Asian Americans can unquestionably be regarded as representative of America—will not resolve the violent material deprivation of the Asian American poor.

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Given the history of Asian American studies and its commitment to critiquing the exploitation of 19th- or 21st-century Asian/American workers, opposing imperialist wars waged in Asia (and beyond), or waging antieviction campaigns on the behalf of the Asian American elderly, there is strong reason to believe that despite the institutionalization of Asian American studies, it is possible that in the distance or disruption produced by Asian American racialization, something other than the lamenting desire for inclusion into existing institutions might emerge to interrupt the endless loop of denial and desire constituted by citizenship. In other words, even middle-class or elite Asian American disaffection/alienation can potentially be the basis for a critique of citizenship with different political horizons that would be transformative of the brutal conditions endured by the racialized poor in this country and beyond. Race is the locus in which multiple contradictions—economic, gender, sexual—variously cohere and assemble in specific contexts, and hence it is a locus of myriad tensions that must be kept in productive relation with a critical understanding of global capitalism (Hall 1980; L. Lowe 1996).

As with other racialized immigrants, citizenship is one of the most crucial mediating institutions in the formation of Asian Americans, irrespective of specific legal statuses. Whether as U.S.-born citizens, green-card holders, H-1B workers, or those granted refugee status, the institution of citizenship dictates the terms of access to the labor market and to a host of state-regulated resources, including housing, healthcare, and education. In this context, we can recognize the clear importance of pressuring the state to make good on its promises of abstract rights, whether in the instance of challenging state surveillance of U.S. Muslim communities, seeking benefits for Filipino World War II veterans, or securing safer housing for Southeast Asian refugees. At the same time, it is critical to simultaneously recognize how a rights-based discourse narrows the parameters and terms of what can be claimed and imagined as politically possible.

Predictably for the most privileged under globalized capitalism, Asian American displacement from national culture may cease to even resonate as crisis, particularly for the members of a bourgeois Asian cosmopolitan class less invested in signifying as “American” so long as they have the access secured by multiple passports and dual citizenship (Ong 1999; Appadurai 2000; Miyoshi 1993). The globalization of capital has significantly altered the meaning of citizenship as neoliberal rhetoric and economic policies have dismantled the welfare state and the very notion that citizenship entails “entitlements”; there is, instead, an obsessive trumpeting of a discourse of “individual responsibility” that works to displace any traditional notion of the social. Stuart Hall and David

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Held contend that, while traditional critics might have regarded citizenship rights as a kind of “bourgeois fraud” in the post-Thatcher/Reagan era, there are renewed stakes to working out “the individual vs. the social dimensions of citizenship rights,” the latter of which is negated by a neoliberal rhetoric that asserts that the common good can be realized only by private individuals engaging in a capitalist free market, unencumbered by state intervention (Hall and Held 1989). As Thatcher famously declared, “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families,” an extraordinary call that seeks to obliterate the very notion of a larger social good or collective beyond the heteronormative nuclear family.

This neoliberal emphasis and recognition of the normative “family” as the only legible social unit also suggests that the dominant construction of Asian Americans since 1965 as hardworking, self-reliant, and family-oriented subjects is part of a neoliberal rhetoric that has refashioned the modern discourse of citizenship of entitlements and state obligations—to provide access to housing, public education, health care, and employment—into an individuated narrative of private competition in the free market and diminished state capacity (with the exception of policing and the military). In other words, in the post–civil rights era, discourses of Asian American racial difference are consistently in the service of constituting a new conception of citizenship defined through both normativity and individual competition, while explicitly undermining and eroding principles of reciprocity, obligation, and social contract that have constituted the most compelling social dimensions of citizenship.

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6 Class

Min Hyoung Song

The meaning of “class” in Asian American studies formed in conversation with Marxism, with the former building on the latter’s insights while seeking to find ways to exceed its perceived limitations. For instance, Lisa Lowe starts her groundbreaking book Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics by insisting, “Understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized foundations of both the emergence of the United States as a nation and the development of American capitalism” (1996, ix). In the equally groundbreaking Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Racial Purity, Vijay Prashad observes, “White supremacy emerged in the throes of capitalism’s planetary birth to justify the expropriation of people off their lands and the exploitation of people for their labor” (2001, x–xi). In both these examples, race plays a larger role in the development of capitalism than Marx himself ever considered. This is so because, for Marx, capitalism could best be explained as a process of valorization produced by the inequality between those who own the means of production and those who own only their ability to work. To keep this discussion as simple as possible, we can refer to these two fundamental socioeconomic classes as capitalists and workers. While other classes did exist for Marx, he understood them as having become less relevant as capitalism replaced preexisting economic arrangements. For scholars like Lowe and Prashad, such a claim has been significantly supplemented by an acknowledgement of the importance of race, as well as gender, sexuality, and other markers of difference, in sustaining unequal access to wealth, and indeed to the very means of sustaining life itself.

As Marx was quite aware, history does not unfold with the dialectical neatness that his insistence on the primacy of capital and labor suggests. Moments of revolutionary possibility do not always, or often, lead to changes that directly benefit workers. The outcome of any struggle is intrinsically unpredictable. There are at least two major ways in which the capitalist class can keep the working class in check regardless of the historic circumstances, frustrating or even foiling what might have turned into a revolution. First, it can deploy what Louis Althusser calls—in an essay that has been widely quoted and

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critiqued in Asian American studies circles (J. Ling 1998, 159–60; V. Nguyen 2002, 144; M. Chiang 2009, 27)—a “repressive state apparatus,” which is a combination of laws, courts, police, and military that work more or less in concert against the interests of the working class. Unfortunately for the capitalist class, relying on repression alone is expensive and inefficient. Being nakedly repressive also leaves capitalists unable to keep workers, such as individual police officers, serving in roles that require them to inflict physical harm on others of the same class. Before long, such workers can begin to think of themselves openly as part of the working class and join the very people they are supposed to keep in line. Under such circumstances, capitalists have no choice but to employ the lumpenproletariat, a subclass of loafers who neither have any access to the means of production nor care to use their labor to perform any useful work. They are as a result more inclined to crime and other unproductive behavior than anyone else. Employing the lumpenproletariat as hired thugs is a dangerous move, however, because by definition they are untrustworthy and might easily decide to turn their weapons of repression on their employers with the hope that they can usurp their position.

Hence, finding an alternative way to prevent workers from engaging in revolutionary activity is of paramount importance if the capitalist class wants to maintain its dominance. The most significant method involves confusion, via what Althusser called the “ideological state apparatus.” For instance, workers may be convinced by various means that what truly ails them are undocumented workers whose illegal presence in their country steals jobs away from those like themselves, who are law abiding. In this way, such workers may be convinced that their real enemies are not the owners of the means of production but a subgrouping within their own class who reap unmerited rewards, who unfairly hog resources, and who are somehow a threat to their way of life. As this example suggests, the task of confusion is easier to accomplish if workers are divided along racial, ethnic, gendered, and national lines, and taught to feel superior because they are not the Other. Hence, for those who study Asian Americans, a keen awareness of how race coincides with the interests of capital might stress, as Mae Ngai does, how this concept “is always historically specific. At times, a confluence of economic, social, cultural, and political factors has impelled major shifts in society’s understanding (and construction) of race and its constitutive role in national identity formation” (2004a, 7).

Given how essential this second method of social control is, we might say that there are two levels of relationships that organize capitalist societies. There is the “base” or “infrastructure,” which refers specifically to the relationship between capital and labor that forms “the economic conditions of production”

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(Marx 1978, 5). It is necessarily structured by inequality, without which wealth would not be possible and capitalist societies would fall apart. Overlaid on top of this all-important structure of inequality are the efforts capitalists employ to confuse workers and make them unable to band together into a revolutionary force. We can call this layer of misinformation, deception, and trickery the “superstructure,” an epiphenomenon of ideological manipulation that actively frustrates workers’ attempt to make sense of their real interests even as it may also act as a crucial domain for these same workers to grasp intellectually changes occurring to the base that can lead them to revolt. The fact that the superstructure can simultaneously obfuscate and provide insight suggests that while the base is ultimately what drives history forward, there remains a fluid and heuristic relationship between the two. Despite Marx’s tacit recognition that the base is not always and only determinant, many leftists have conceived of the cultural work they should engage in as tantamount to showing how what we believe to be important is an illusion, a part of the superstructure, that inhibits us from firmly making sense of what is actually important, the base.

As Asian American studies scholars have pointed out, many of the activists who first considered themselves Asian Americans in the early 1970s modeled their struggles on black power (Maeda 1999; Omatsu 2000; Fujino 2005). This means that while they often employed the language of Marxism, they were also engaged in a sharp departure from its preoccupation with class, especially when it privileges this category of analysis over all others. There were of course several prominent activists who maintained the centrality of class in their thinking, such as Grace Lee Boggs (although she did so specifically with an attention to the experiences of an African American working class), but others who turned explicitly to race as a basis of organizing tended to be skeptical of such privileging. Some, for instance, turned to the Black Panther Party for inspiration, and in doing so adopted the very un-Marxist view that the lumpenproletariat was revolution’s “vanguard” (Pulido 2006, 142).

In general, most early self-conscious Asian Americans understood revolution less as the overturning of a class relation and more as a struggle against inequalities of many kinds. It was only by coordinating such struggles, they reasoned, that a broad coalition could be built to help upset the status quo into social forms more respectful of the complexities of peoples’ actual lives. This kind of thinking had little room to grant class the kind of primacy it once enjoyed, and has instead led to understandings of class and race, alongside gender, sexuality, and increasingly disability, as dynamically intersectional concepts (Hong 2006, xxvi). In their foundational book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant state

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this view with unequivocal clarity: “Racial dynamics must be understood as determinants of class relationships and indeed class identities, not as mere consequences of these relationships” (1994, 34). Other thinkers such as Chandan Reddy (2011, 33–34), Junaid Rana (2011, 157), and Lisa Marie Cacho (2012, 99–100) have since turned to Foucault, who in “Society Must Be Defended” suggests that class may be an epiphenomenon of race: “After all, it should not be forgotten that toward the end of his life, Marx told Engels in a letter written in 1882 that ‘[y]ou know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle’” (2003, 79).

For the most part, debate about the importance of class has largely been settled in Asian American studies in favor of intersectional thinking. Class is now widely understood to be one of several important forms of inequality around which we understand how modern American society, as well as societies in general, are structured. Indeed, anyone who advocates for giving primacy to class at the expense of attention to these other forms is likely to stir suspicion, as such an approach is a sure sign that one is not taking the struggles of racial minorities, women, queers, and the disabled seriously enough. This view also conjures past working-class movements that have defined the worker explicitly as white, male, heteronormative, and able-bodied.

One consequence of this consensus is the discomfort it has generated for those who insist that class must remain at the center of all socially responsible thought. The prominent American literature scholar Walter Benn Michaels exemplifies this discomfort when he writes, “we like the difference between black people and white people or between whites and Asians much more than we like the difference between the rich kids and the poor ones” (2011, 1023). As this quotation suggests, when class is understood as the primary social relationship around which all others are of secondary importance, attention to racial difference, gender, sexual orientation, the disabled, or the nation can be easily understood as a sideshow. Worse, becoming fixated on anything other than class can mean that one has become a counterrevolutionary, someone so blinded by the buzz of the superstructure that one ends up preventing others from engaging in meaningful political struggle. Indeed, so blind has Asian American studies been in its commitment to everything but class, it has, according to Michaels, become focused on fostering “a world in which the fundamental conflicts have less to do with wealth than with race, space, gender, and sexuality. . . . This is the world of neoliberalism, the world in which identity and inequality have both flourished” (2011, 1029).

For many in the field of Asian American studies, the demand that scholars

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must choose between paying attention to race or class can feel impossible to satisfy. As Sunaina Maira reports, for instance: “an African American woman who lived in the North Wellford [pseudonym] apartments once told me that all the South Asian families were middle class, if not well off, and she observed that they were quick to move out of the high-rise apartments and buy their own houses. What she did not see was that many of these family members worked, possibly even without wages, in family businesses and so did not earn much individually and that several family units were crowded into small apartments where they shared one or two bedrooms” (2009, 141). Being Asian American in the mind of this African American woman, as in Michaels’s article, has become synonymous with upward mobility, mysterious access to wealth, and social distance. At the same time, Maira’s explanation of the invisible struggles South Asian American family members endure reveals how tirelessly working class they are and how within the family unit class cleavages emerge. Some members are workers whose exploitation is nearly total, so that they work only for the cost of their basic physical maintenance, while other members reap the benefits of their labor to concentrate wealth and invest in schemes for more accumulation. In this example, Asian immigrants become both capital and labor, and as a result capable of economic mobility while simultaneously remaining workers with only their ability to work to sell. Because of this apparent class paradox, they also seem racially different from their African American neighbors, who somehow can’t—and wouldn’t want to?—achieve the same feat. Clearly, more attention to the way class entangles ideas of race, and the way race does the same to class, is needed.

One approach that many scholars have already taken (Parreñas 2001; Park and Park 2005; Zhou and Gatewood 2007) is to consider how successive immigration laws have given birth to an hourglass, and often transnational, class structure within Asian America itself that is also often ethnically marked. At the top, there are relatively large numbers of materially well-off college-educated professionals and skilled international workers on specialized visas who are gaining a lot of attention, and setting the pace for what is popularly understood as Asian American. While few in this group can be said to own the means of production, and many may lead modestly precarious lives (in the sense that should they ever lose their jobs, they could quickly fall into economic and other kinds of trouble), they do enjoy an impressive access to wealth and the kind of pleasures such access can afford. At the bottom, there are an equally large, if not larger, number of working poor, the undocumented, refugees, and so forth who struggle everyday with little wealth to sustain themselves at a high level of precarity. Now, more than ever, “Asian America” names a paradox of “class” that makes the latter term resonate with urgent meaning.

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7 Commodification

Nhi T. Lieu

In Capital, Volume One, Marx was highly critical of commodification, a process that occurs under capitalism whereby things are assigned an exchange value in the marketplace. He observed that when the use-value of commodities are given economic or exchange values, these commodities subsequently modify social relationships. Building upon these ideas, Marxist scholars such as Arjun Appadurai (1986), Stuart Hall (1992), and Donald Lowe (1995) have complicated the studies of commodification to argue that the social values of commodities are highly contested and firmly immersed in their cultural, social, and political contexts. In her thought-provoking article “Eating the Other,” bell hooks (1992) contends that racial and ethnic expressions of difference by minoritized groups can be co-opted, sold, and consumed in the dominant marketplace. In this essay, I explore the various ways in which capitalism makes commodification practices manifest through culture, ethnicity, and the racialized body. I suggest that histories of colonialism and Orientalism shape various forms of commodification as it pertains to Asians and Asian Americans. Following complex human migratory paths, the social lives of objects, bodies, cultural forms, and practices are animated by transnational market exchanges. Commodification thus occurs as a dynamic process in the service of capitalist expansion. It functions to transform racial and ethnic difference by repackaging, exoticizing, and making cultural forms and practices more palatable for mainstream consumption.

In addressing the historical commodification of race, Mae Ngai considers the enterprising ways in which Chinese merchants acted as social agents who capitalized on the exoticism of racial difference in world’s fairs and insists that we examine such interactions as “products of translation and negotiation” (2004a, 61). Likewise, Sabina Haenni notes in her close readings of commercial leisure in Chinatowns that Chinese immigrants played an active role in “self- Orientalization” as a way to seek “cultural legitimation” (2008, 146).

As did the early immigrants who vied for cultural legitimacy, Asian immigrants who arrived later invested in cultural commodification for different purposes, transforming meanings of cultural nationalism and cultural practice as well as ethnic identity. One of the most public displays of culture is embodied

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through dress, but clothing and fashion are contested terrains of commodification. For example, adorning women in traditional ethnic dress such as the ao dai, cheongsam, hambok, kimono, and sari visually renders them as cultural bearers of different Asian nations. Vietnamese refugees commodified the national dress, the ao dai, to consolidate an identity of exile by claiming it as an authentic piece of Vietnamese culture (Lieu 2001). The maintenance of exclusive claim to a commodified object is however elusive, particularly as traditional material objects become highly desirable fashion pieces that reinterpret meanings of class, ethnicity, and gender. Thuy Linh Tu’s evocative study of Asian American fashion designers “threads” together “design as an Asian American practice and Asianness as a fashionable commodity” (2010, 6). Tu troubles the complex web of intimacies between Asian immigrant labor and Asian American fashion designers who are defined by their positioning as a racialized creative class. Tu’s work illuminates the trend in late capitalist globalization in which commodification frequently erupts in popular culture and Orientalist tropes still resonate in fashion and design.

Advances in technology from the 1990s onward in media such as satellite television and digital video have facilitated this circulation of Orientalist images in contemporary popular culture. In her work on the emergence of “Indo-chic” and “Asian cool,” Sunaina Maira argues that the popularization of Asian cultural practices such as the application of henna by American models, actress, and celebrities including Madonna and Gwen Stefani commercializes and evacuates them of their specific cultural meanings. More specifically, her studies of the mainstream embrace and cooptation of mehndi, bindis, yoga, and belly dancing (2007; 2008) demonstrate the fluidity of these cultural forms as they become palatable to and commodified by middle-class women. She writes, “Indo-chic does the political and symbolic work of domesticating difference, extracting not just profit but the very signs of difference from South Asian immigrant workers and South Asian Americans at large. This commodification of the threat of difference is even more apparent as the ‘war on immigrants’ of the 1980s and 1990s has extended into the ‘war on terror,’ affecting Muslim, Arab, and South Asian immigrants, as well as undocumented immigrants more generally” (2007, 237). Confronted with cultural and racial difference, dominant groups thus commodify “others” to manage what is deemed as unfamiliar.

While the commodification of cultural practices renders ethnic and immigrant communities subject to other forms of commodification, Marilyn Halter (2000) has demonstrated that immigrant groups have the power to gain economic security when they reinforce their ethnic identities. This was most pertinent between the 1990s and early 2000s, when multiculturalism flourished as a

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profitable marketplace phenomenon. Today, in an era perceived as “post-racial,” there remains a profitable “ethnicity” enterprise that seeks to tweak and refashion old products and invent new ones to contribute to the discourse of American exceptionalism. As such, embodied racial hybridity has become valuable in the marketplace, particularly in a society that claims to value diversity but is slow to respond to social policies that promote it.

With the expansion of global capitalism, the dominance of new media, and the advancement in digital technology, we are witnessing not only the commodification of ethnicity, but of bodies, food, music, and anything that can be marketed, made available for economic exchange, and consumed by those with access to capital. Ethnic immigrant communities have participated in self- commodification as a strategy to assuage the social fears of alien others. While this introduced the mainstream to “foreign cultures,” the drawback to commodification remains that it renders humans as objects to be desired. Moreover, the racial structure does not allow for Asians and Asian Americans to have control over consumption. It is important to note what bell hooks reminds us, that the consumption of the other is legitimated by a racial structure that positions others to be consumed. The danger lies not in commodification itself but, as Marx would caution, in the fetishism of commodities.

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8 Community

Linda Trinh Võ

“Community,” or “communities,” is an amorphous keyword in Asian American studies that has evolved along with societal transformations, and its meaning is highly contested. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “community” as a “body of people organized into a political, municipal, or social unity”; it can be characterized as those “who have certain circumstances of nativity, religion, or pursuit, common to them, but not shared by those among whom they live.” In Asian American studies, the term is most often associated with bounded, geographic localities that incorporate people, places, and institutions that have an affinity to one another or intricate connections. Additionally, communities are interpreted as non-territorial spaces, formed by individuals residing in various locations who share similar interests or objectives. They can be created as a result of people being excluded or treated interchangeably, thereby compelling them to come together, or they can be forged by internal notions of sameness, as a result of which aggregates cohere and differentiate themselves from those outside certain territorial or ideological boundaries. For Asian Americans, these collectivities are often projected as welcoming and unified; however, they also can be exclusionary and divided, so in certain contexts the term has a beneficial and affirming connotation, while in other cases it is perceived as oppressive and constrictive.

Studies of Asian Americans have focused on them as victims of racial discrimination and involuntary segregation. They were unwelcomed in an American republic that espoused a fervent nationalism and nation-state based on white supremacy. The 1790 Naturalization Act bestowed citizenship on “free white persons,” thereby excluding Asians, who were classified as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” from the body politic, which relegated them to the status of perpetual foreigners. U.S. colonial projects in Asia and domestic policies based on ideologies of Manifest Destiny reified their subordinate position in the racial hierarchy. Cultural stereotypes and pseudo-scientific constructions of them as inferior, uncivilized, and inassimilable affirmed that they were a peril to national unity. Xenophobia and fears of Asian laborers as economic competitors created exclusionary immigration policies, particularly concerning women, and repatriation programs, which were implemented to

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prevent the formation of permanent geographic settlements. The ethnic spaces they managed to form were alleged to be sites of contagious diseases and aberrant sexuality, “vice-filled opium dens,” and as such, threats to public health and Protestant morality (N. Shah 2001). They endured mob violence and massacres as well as the arson of their residences and neighborhoods.

Scholars have also recouped a celebratory history of Asian American pioneers who contributed to the nation, capturing the materialization of their communities and their engagement in acts of resistance. Ostracized from mainstream America, early immigrants forged their own economic and cultural spaces in both rural and urban areas (Takaki 1989; S. Chan 1991; Matsumoto 1993). Attracted by economic opportunities, they labored in agricultural production, railroad construction, fishing industries, service sector economies, and light manufacturing, with some owning small farms or businesses. In their pocket areas, they managed to create economic niches for survival, devoid of interracial competition and governmental interference. They relied on kin and non-kin networks with those who shared the same dialect, home village, region, and religion to find housing and employment. As a result of legislation, such as the Alien Land Laws, and later racially restrictive covenants, Asian immigrants were prohibited from purchasing land or property, but they managed to establish roots by registering property in their U.S.-born children’s names, signing long- term leases, or finding neighborhoods willing to accommodate their presence (Brooks 2012). The Asian women who were permitted entry, such as merchant’s wives and picture brides, contributed to the family labor and the formation of permanent settlements.

In these positive references to community, cluster spaces are narrativized as safe havens where Asians found a refuge from mistreatment. Scholars analyzed how members created their own associations and institutions, some of which paralleled mainstream ones. As a form of resistance to their exclusion, they demarcated their communities by establishing markets, stores, restaurants, pool halls, schools, and religious sites that served co-ethnics. For residents and migratory laborers, these ethnic hubs allowed those who were homesick to absorb the sights, sounds, and smells of their homeland. In the earlier historical period, the predominantly male population created a bachelor subculture and engaged in leisure activities in these shared homosocial spaces. With the arrival of a diverse range of immigrants following the 1965 Immigration Act and refugees at the end of the Viet Nam War in the post-1975 era, ethnic sites provide opportunities for newcomers to participate in communal activities and construct a collective ethnic identity (Bonus 2000; Rudruppa 2004). This perspective conceives of community as a favorable place for ethnic solidarity, since it

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promotes ethnic retention and the transmission of traditional cultural practices (Wong and Chan 1998; L. Kurashige 2002).

In addition to “community,” ethnic districts have been identified with terms such as “barrio,” “colonia,” “enclave,” “ghetto,” “inner city,” and “slums,” which can have negative or positive connotations depending on the context (Y. Chang 2010). Ethnic succession or ecological models developed by Chicago School sociologists theorized that ethnic concentrations are gateway spaces for first-generation immigrants to transition and eventually assimilate into American society (H. Yu 2002). Although other terms have been employed, “ethnic enclave” is typically associated with Asian American community formation and many scholars depict such ethnic concentrations as places that provide opportunities for immigrants to find employment, build networks, become incorporated, and ultimately, be socioeconomically mobile (Zhou 1995). In contrast, other scholars argue that enclaves are isolating and counterproductive to assimilating immigrants or enhancing their civic engagement (Peter Kwong 1996). Additionally, critics of neoliberalism argue that ethnic enclaves reproduce conditions of inequality and poverty, and that their insularity allows the state to relinquish its social and fiscal obligations. Immigrant enclaves are reliant on an informal economy characterized by fierce competition, slim profit margins, and a flexible labor pool (Hum 2014). As such, they produce labor market segmentation in the light manufacturing industries, retail and service sectors, and small businesses, which can lead to unemployment and underemployment as well as co-ethnic labor exploitation that is often unmonitored or unregulated.

The concept of community is not only used synonymously to reference an ethnic group, such as Filipino American or Korean American, it is also substituted for the broader label “Asian American.” In the late 1960s, the term “Asian American,” coined by Yuji Ichioka, was adopted by activists who articulated their shared interests, in parallel with the formation of Asian American studies (Y. Espiritu 1992). Benedict Anderson observes that nations are imagined communities in which members “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion,” so this usage of “community” is symbolic and instrumental (2006, 6). Given that they were externally lumped together, activists during the Yellow Power movement embraced this racialized identity and intentionally constructed a collective history that focused on their commonalties in terms of the discrimination they encountered domestically and the oppression they faced as colonized subjects from “Third World” nations (Maeda 2011). By masking their cultural, ethnic, historical, linguistic, and ideological variances to

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outsiders and forming a coalition or community of interest, Asian American activists continue to enlarge their numerical representation in their struggle for scarce resources. Using a strategic essentialism model, advocates often use broad generalizations or summative statements about the state or condition of this population to impact public policies (Spivak 1996). For example, using the latest U.S. Census reports that Asian Americans have surpassed Latinos as the fastest- growing minority group, increasing by over 43 percent in the last decade to more than 17 million, analysts attempt to tactically parlay this demographic growth into political power.

Critics note that the deployment of an imagined homogeneity to garner resources or political clout can reinforce a precarious interchangeability. The model minority label, which stereotypes Asian Americans as hardworking, highly educated, successful, and lacking social problems, has been utilized to deny them public services as well as to exclude them from remedial programs. Activists attempting to counter this myth have continually pushed for the collection of disaggregated data, broken down particularly by ethnic groups, in order to understand the distinct educational, healthcare, and socioeconomic needs of each population. For example, Southeast Asian refugee groups tend to have more English-language learners and lower socioeconomic status and educational achievement than other Asian Americans. Internal debates continue about the practicality or political efficacy of mobilizing under a collective rubric when the community is so divergent, with emergent ethnicities—such as Bhutanese, Burmese, Indonesian, Nepalese, and Thai—adding new complexity to the grouping, and there are also divergencies within each subgroup. Some aver that regardless of how individuals or groups identify themselves, if outsiders continually perceive them as interchangeable, then it is beneficial for them to forge multiethnic and multiracial alliances to effectively protect the interest of their collectivity (F. Wu 2003). These contentious debates mirror ongoing discursive and programmatic negotiations within the academy regarding the structure of Asian Americans as a field of study, since it requires articulating the interconnections between and convergences of multiple groupings, disciplines, theories, and methods.

The meaning of the word “community” often minimizes dissimilarities and accentuates cohesiveness, when de facto, communities are fragile and fractured collectivities (Võ and Bonus 2002). Its usage is modified from Raymond Williams’s definition in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, in which he states, “What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it [community] seems never to be used unfavourably” (1983, 76). Ideological differences were evident during

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World War II when Japanese Americans were divided on how to respond to their forced relocation from the West Coast and incarceration as well as whether they should agree to serve in the U.S. military after their imprisonment. Those who served were praised for displaying Japanese American patriotism, while those who refused to enlist in U.S. military service were denounced as disloyal and shunned by co-ethnics. In retrospect, those who challenged the incarceration orders and rejected enlistment are applauded for standing up for their civil rights and upholding the tenets of American democratic ideals. Allegiances to a racialized grouping were enforced during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s when Asian American activists were asked to choose their political allegiances along binaries, such as women being encouraged to join their Asian American brothers to fight racial discrimination over aligning with their feminist sisters in the struggle against gender oppression (Maeda 2009). Some ethnics prefer to hide their social problems, such as domestic violence, arguing that publicizing them disrupts community harmony and reinforces negative perceptions of the community among outsiders (Abraham 2000). Additionally, scholars have examined urban struggles that have strained interethnic relations and impacted solidarities or antagonisms with other racialized communities (Abelman and Lie 1997; S. Kurashige 2008).

As the population became more diverse, disagreements over inclusion in this assemblage or “community” became more pronounced, and scholars increasingly focused on affective ties or feelings of belonging and the elasticity of boundaries. For example, studies have examined how Asian Americans who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender have subverted and countered their marginalization and created alternative, politicized spaces (Manalansan 2003). Other studies have critiqued the monoracial constructions of Asian America, delineating the saliency of interracial sexual contact and relations in Asia as well as in America and the existence of multiracial or mixed-race children, which necessitates shifting the definitions of community (Williams-León and Nakashima 2001). As generations move away from ethnic neighborhoods, do not maintain traditional cultural practices, and cannot speak the heritage language, vexing questions arise about their authenticity as ethnics as well as their membership in the collectivity (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). The assumption is that ethnic identity will disappear if individuals intermarry or are socioeconomically incorporated. However, this ethnic-option or dissipation model is more applicable to white immigrants who can blend more easily into the mainstream; it is not so facile for individuals who are racialized.

During the late 1960 and early 1970s, urban renewal projects were initiated to redevelop areas that were designated as blighted, which often included ethnic

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concentrations in inner cities. These targeted areas of gentrification became contested terrain between residents, public and private investors, urban planners, and civic and political leaders. Since the 1970s, there have been concerted efforts to preserve and reinvent areas identified as historic Chinatown, Japantown/Little Tokyo, and Filipinotown/Manilatown (Laguerre 2000; Mabalon 2013). In other cases, contemporary immigrants and refugees have rejuvenated established neighborhoods, but they also have created new distinctive areas, such as Cambodia Town, Koreatown, Thai Town, Little Bangladesh, Little India, Little Saigon, and Little Taipei (Khandelwal 2002; A. Chung 2007; Aguilar-San Juan 2009; Vergara 2009). These efforts at place making attempt to designate an ethnic space by preserving landmark buildings, establishing festivals or other cultural events, and reviving the space with ethnic residents and businesses (Habal 2007; J. Lin 2011). However, there are controversies over appropriation and representation in demarcating and claiming geographic spaces.

Efforts to revitalize ethnic concentrations reflect the debates over what constitutes a community and whom it should benefit (Võ 2004). While some ethnic concentrations cater almost exclusively to co-ethnics, others focus on finding a balance between serving residents and nonresidents, as well as marketing themselves to tourists. A designation as a tourist site brings voyeuristic elements and involves catering to customers seeking exotic eateries and curio shops, making ethnic residents uncomfortable. Ethnic entrepreneurs maintain that tourism supports small business owners and creates employment opportunities for new immigrants or refugees, which infuses more revenue into the local economy. With empty storefronts, some ethnic areas adapt by attracting Asians from various ethnicities and non-Asians who open up music venues, art galleries, and specialty shops, catering to a bohemian crowd seeking entertainment in alternative spaces. Other ethnic areas have been abandoned by the younger generation and it is the ethnic elders that remain, so the fundamental question arises as to the necessity of preserving these areas and the value of refabricating them into commercially driven, “Orientalized” attractions merely for the tourism trade.

The suburbanization process has led to the abandonment of ethnic concentrations in the urban core and to the establishment of ethnic neighborhoods and commercial centers in the suburbs, redefining perceptions of ethnic communities. In recent decades, socioeconomically mobile Asian Americans and affluent immigrants began relocating to once predominantly wealthier, white suburbs, which were established in the post–World War II years. Earlier theories of cultural assimilation applied to European immigrants are not applicable, since these Asian suburbanites began recreating ethnic communities with clusters of

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ethnic businesses and institutions. Some engaged in dramatic reconfigurations of the suburban landscape by remodeling mini-malls or building shopping centers, erecting religious centers, and revamping once bland spaces into destinations for co-ethnics. This commodification has lead to more expansive notions of ethnic communities and the creation of new terms such as “satellite communities” and “ethnoburbs” to describe these ethnic spaces (W. Li 2009). As immigrant populations expand their commercial or residential presence, even in areas that they regenerate, these newcomers often face accusations that they are displacing or encroaching on established neighborhoods and attracting excessive numbers of “foreigners,” which has fueled antigrowth movements and English-only campaigns (Saito 1998). In the post-9/11 era, with the War on Terror campaign, religious and racial intolerance in the U.S. has led to protests against the building of Muslim mosques and Sikh gurdwaras or temples, which are intended to prevent the establishment of South Asian communities.

The circulation of transnational capital and people is transforming once racially segregated spaces and reimagining them as alluring, international spaces (J. Lin 1998). Local ethnic leaders as well as city planners and politicians are turning to foreign financiers, real estate developers, and corporations to invest in urban residential, commercial, and entertainment projects. Historically, as a result of restrictive immigration policies, immigrants from Asia maintained homeland connections and split-family households. The majority of Asians in America are first-generation immigrants and refugees, some of whom continue to maintain close contacts and networks with co-ethnics in their homeland and throughout the diaspora, and local leaders want to capitalize on their potentially lucrative overseas connections. Asian American community networks are envisioned as key assets for economic recovery and urban modernization, but this is tempered by U.S. fears of increasing economic dominance by China and other Asian nations.

The tensions between capitalism and community are manifested in ethnic localities. In the postindustrial city, international financial investments can be disruptive, bankrupting small ethnic businesses that cannot compete with transnational corporate enterprises and displacing low-income ethnic residents who are unable to afford rising housing costs. In addition, these spaces are conceived of as having fluid and flexible borders that allow for “postcolonial transnational subjects” with dual citizenship to freely navigate between the domestic and international spheres (Ong 1999). However, in contrast to the cosmopolitan jetsetters, who are binational or multinational entrepreneurial and professional elites opting to venture abroad to enrich their opportunities, are transmigrant laborers forced to leave their homelands under conditions of

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poverty to find employment in the service sector or industrial production and send their modest remittances to support relatives who remain behind. These socioeconomic contrasts speak to the heterogeneity of the community and are evident when Asian owners of garment factories, supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses in ethnic districts clash with the local workforce, which is often comprised of Asian and Latino immigrants, over unfair wages or exploitative labor practices. Although it fosters global interconnections, capitalism with its inherent competition-and-profit model produces fragmentation and polarization within communities. This process has led community scholars to reconsider what compelling factors continue to bond seemingly disparate groups.

In the contemporary period, innovations in communication and travel affect time-space compression and facilitate transformative kinds of social networks and affinity groups (D. Harvey 1989), stretching the boundaries of nonspatial or deterritorialized communities (Y. Espiritu 2003; Valverde 2012). Technological advances provide opportunities for immigrants to maintain familial and social ties to their homeland as well as facilitate their transnational business ventures and cultural exchanges. Scholars are examining the ways communication devices such as cell phones and various forms of social media, such as Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogs, create new virtual communities (Davé, Nishime, and Oren 2005; Nakamura 2008). For example, YouTube has allowed Asian American artists who have been bypassed by traditional and even alternative marketing venues to create virtual fan bases, domestically and internationally (Schlund-Vials 2012b). These interactive platforms facilitate the sharing of gossip, information, and news, enabling Asians and Asians Americans to forge instantaneous relations and connections that were once unimaginable. The Internet has been instrumental in mobilizing geographically dispersed Asians around political interests and social justice causes. Future modernizations will alter the economic, cultural, and political linkages between individuals, groups, and institutions, which will have profound effects on conceptualizations of community.

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9 Coolie

Kornel Chang

The etymology of the word “coolie” was for a long time thought to have Tamil —kuli (wages)—Urdu—quli (hireling)—or Chinese—kuli (bitter strength)— origins (Tinker 1974; Tsai 1976; Irick 1982; M. Jung 2006). More recently, Mae Ngai (2015) has traced the word’s origins to a European neologism that was first employed by sixteenth-century Portuguese to describe common native workers on the Indian subcontinent. By the mid-nineteenth century, “coolie” came to be applied specifically to indentured laborers from China and India who were being contracted out to colonial plantations in Southeast Asia and the Americas (Hu- DeHart 1992; W. Lai 1993; Yun 2008). This shift in meaning was inextricably bound up with the abolition of slavery and deepening Euro-American imperial incursions into the Asia-Pacific world. Intensifying Euro-American encroachments in the region generated widening imperial networks through which people from China and South Asia were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to constitute a new colonial labor force in the Americas. As Lisa Lowe has noted, the introduction of the coolie trade in the nineteenth century “marked a significant . . . shift in the management of race and labor in the colonies” (2005, 193).

In the United States, charges of coolieism mainly fixated on Chinese laborers who were being imported to the Americas to take the place of formerly enslaved Africans. The coolie entered the American mainstream vernacular by way of political debates over free and slave labor in the mid-nineteenth century (M. Jung 2006). Prior to emancipation, pro- and antislavery ideologues both considered the Chinese coolie a coerced and degraded figure, but they mobilized this knowledge to advocate diametrically opposed positions on the slavery question, with southern slaveholders citing the evils of the Chinese coolie system to uphold the moral superiority of slavery while abolitionists conflated the Chinese “coolie” with slavery. This consensus around what and who constituted a “coolie” produced a national agreement—the 1862 act to prohibit the coolie trade—that suppressed the importation of Chinese coolie labor. Carrying the law’s premise to its logical conclusion, white labor restrictionists on the West Coast pushed for Chinese exclusion a decade and a half later, insisting that all Chinese, as living embodiments of the coolie, should be excluded (Saxton 1971;