The latehomecomer guiding questions and answers

Keywords for Asian American Studies

2

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}

3

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

© 2015 by New York University All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

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

ISBN: 978-1-4798-0328-6 (paperback)

For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress.

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Also available as an ebook

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

59 Trauma

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

60 War

K. Scott Wong

61 Yellow

Robert Ji-Song Ku Bibliography

About the Contributors

10

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.

11

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

12

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

13

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

14

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

15

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”

16

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.

17

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

18

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,

19

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

20

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

21

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

22

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

23

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

24

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

25

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

26

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.

27

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.”