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Disciplinarity and the Political Identity of Asian American Studies

Mark Chiang

in The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

This chapter discusses the debates over the impact of postmodern and poststructuralist theory in Asian American studies in a special issue of the journal Amerasia, entitled Thinking Theory in Asian ... More

This chapter discusses the debates over the impact of postmodern and poststructuralist theory in Asian American studies in a special issue of the journal Amerasia, entitled Thinking Theory in Asian American Studies. Even though this debate concerned theoretical paradigms and methods, essays in the issue—whether pro or con—justified positions based on political criteria rather than on intellectual or academic criteria. Thus, the debate over theory was overdetermined by two somewhat different sets of dynamics: political struggles in the Asian American field and academic struggles in the university. This convergence constituted Asian American studies. As such, it allowed the field to contain multiple, overlapping political and intellectual antagonisms.Less

Reorienting Asian American Studies in Asia and the Pacific

Rika Nakamura

in Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations

This chapter explores the possibilities of an Asian American studies which is more transpacific and inter-Asia oriented, with a specific focus on Japan and East Asia. Inviting U.S.- and Canada-based ... More

This chapter explores the possibilities of an Asian American studies which is more transpacific and inter-Asia oriented, with a specific focus on Japan and East Asia. Inviting U.S.- and Canada-based Asian Americanists to interrogate the discipline’s embedded North America-centrism in their perceptions towards Asia, this reoriented Asian American studies asks Asia-based Asian practitioners to reflect upon ethnoracial violences in our own lands, including those related to intra-Asian imperialisms and militarized violence. In this way, Asian American studies can become a place for mutual learning. The chapter underscores the usefulness of our disparate positions (however arbitrary) to look at ourselves from the perspectives of others and examine our complicities with the dominant groups rather than simply viewing ourselves in alignment with the oppressed. It is my hope that the reoriented transpacific, and inter-Asia, Asian American studies will help us expand our horizon and engage in conversations across Asia and across the Pacific.Less

Introduction The Post-Identity Condition

in The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

This book explores Asian American culture and politics by focusing on the notion of identity. It considers how the critique of identity politics has reconfigured the parameters of Asian American ... More

This book explores Asian American culture and politics by focusing on the notion of identity. It considers how the critique of identity politics has reconfigured the parameters of Asian American Studies and traces the persistence of what it calls the “idealized critical subject,” a theoretical figure that operates throughout Asian American literary culture and cultural criticism. To understand the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation, the book analyzes texts from different moments in the history of Asian American literature, including those by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa. It looks at the referential limits of Asian America while remaining cognizant of its so-called “real-life referents.” The book also examines Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, which illustrates how the relationship between knowledge and subjectivity can be theorized through an idealized critical subject.Less

Internationalism at Work: Bridge and Asian American Studies in Asia

Chih-Ming Wang

in Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America

This chapter looks at the case of Bridge magazine (1971–1985) and the emergence of Asian American literary studies in Asia since the late 1980s. While a review of Bridge can reveal the process of ... More

This chapter looks at the case of Bridge magazine (1971–1985) and the emergence of Asian American literary studies in Asia since the late 1980s. While a review of Bridge can reveal the process of foreign students' Asian American becoming, an examination of Asian American studies in Asia can shed light on the role of foreign students and scholars as transnational agents in imagining and inhabiting Asian America as both a critical project within American culture and an academic discourse that transcends American borders. Both endeavors provide insight into the cultural politics of Asian American transnationality as evolving from and working through the tension between nativism and diasporism, as well as between America's imperial outreach and Asia's desire for America.Less

The Racial Studies Project: Asian American Studies and the Black Lives Matter Campus

Nitasha Sharma

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Situated adjacent to present-day student protests calling for more diversity with regard to program, department, and faculty hiring, Sharma recounts the contested formation of Asian American studies ... More

Situated adjacent to present-day student protests calling for more diversity with regard to program, department, and faculty hiring, Sharma recounts the contested formation of Asian American studies at her home institution, Northwestern Univversity.Less

Introduction: Transpacific Studies: Critical Perspectives on an Emerging Field

Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins

in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field

We think of Transpacific Studies as a new research paradigm, a dynamic model that goes beyond conventional American, Asian and Asian American studies models. In examining the phenomenon of ... More

We think of Transpacific Studies as a new research paradigm, a dynamic model that goes beyond conventional American, Asian and Asian American studies models. In examining the phenomenon of Transpacific movement, Transpacific Studies enlarges the scope of American Studies to address Pacific Rim countries and cultures and their impact upon the United States, and vice versa. We also shift the focus from the anchored, traditional view of Asian studies as being attached to particular countries or areas to one more attuned to the great traffic of people, resources and materials in the present century, often described as the “Pacific Century.” Such a century requires the development of a more innovative approach to Asian interactions than the legacy of Asian studies, which is a legacy that we respect but do not wish to reproduce. Asian American studies has been key to challenging this legacy, drawing attention to the creation of diasporic and blended populations. The people who cross the Pacific include not only immigrants but dual citizens, “flexible” citizens, refugees, and exiles. But Asian American studies is also entrenched in U.S. assumptions, especially evident when seen from Asian locations.Less

Introduction: Black Inclusion / Chinese Exclusion: Toward a Cultural History of Comparative Racialization

Edlie L. Wong

in Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion remains one of the most lasting racial formations from Reconstruction America. Black citizenship and suffrage neither mitigated ... More

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion remains one of the most lasting racial formations from Reconstruction America. Black citizenship and suffrage neither mitigated racial inequality nor racially subordinated American identities, especially after Plessy v. Ferguson legalized racial segregation. The extension of nominal citizenship to black freedmen did not break the constitutive link between whiteness and citizenship, as the racial exclusion of Chinese (and later all so-called Asiatic races) from immigration and naturalization helped establish the whiteness or Americanization of new European immigrants. By the end of the century, the dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion had become an oft-referenced rhetorical figure in popular and legal discourses, structuring persuasive arguments both for and against Chinese political rights and black racial inequality. The introduction explores the cultural genealogies of this dialectical configuration linking together immigration and citizenship struggles in the long shadow of slavery and abolition.Less

Asian American Studies and Palestine: The Accidental and Reluctant Pioneer

Rajini Srikanth

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

The AAAS was the first academic association to declare its support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement protesting the wide-ranging violation of Palestinian rights by the Israeli ... More

The AAAS was the first academic association to declare its support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement protesting the wide-ranging violation of Palestinian rights by the Israeli government. While the association was in many ways a “pioneer,” it has struggled to articulate this position in the years following the historic action. Srikanth critically considers the history and aftermath of the AAAS boycott.Less

Contradictions in the Emergence of Ethnic Studies

Mark Chiang

in The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

This chapter discusses the development of Asian American studies at San Francisco State College in relation to community control and academic autonomy. Emerging from the Third world Strike, the most ... More

This chapter discusses the development of Asian American studies at San Francisco State College in relation to community control and academic autonomy. Emerging from the Third world Strike, the most radical aspect of the SF State program was an institutional structure predicated on the slogan of “community autonomy.” This phrase meant that Asian American communities should control the programs that were intended to serve the community's needs. However, community control is necessarily antithetical to the principle of the modern research university, which is faculty control. In order to establish itself in the university, therefore, the program had to eliminate community control in favor of academic autonomy. This question of autonomy was fundamental to the formation of black studies since that was the paradigmatic model on which the other ethnic studies programs were based.Less

Introduction: Institutionalization and the Crisis of Representation

Mark Chiang

in The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the development of Asian American studies, highlighting particularly the conflict that erupted within the Association for Asian American Studies ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the development of Asian American studies, highlighting particularly the conflict that erupted within the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) members over a fiction award given to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel, Blu's Hanging. Although the protests over the fiction award nearly led to the dissolution of the association itself, this event has already begun to be forgotten. The award was featured in several books and articles published shortly afterward, but scholarly commentary on both the event and Yamanaka's novel have been notably sparse to date, now almost a decade later. This book seeks to rectify that neglect on both counts, by arguing that the episode was significant not only as an instance of popular struggles over cultural politics, but that it also reveals certain basic lacunae in the theory and methods of Asian American studies.Less

Crisis, Conundrum, and Critique

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

The introduction provides a historical context for the project (which spans mid-century student activist movements and more recent debates involving Asian American activism and racial formation). The ... More

The introduction provides a historical context for the project (which spans mid-century student activist movements and more recent debates involving Asian American activism and racial formation). The introduction also provides overviews for each of the three sections and the chapters contained therein.Less

Has Asian American Studies Failed?

Timothy Yu

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Focused on the ways in which Asian American studies has and has not been accessed in mainstream and contemporary debates concerning race, ethnicity, and nation, Yu contemplates the possibilities and ... More

Focused on the ways in which Asian American studies has and has not been accessed in mainstream and contemporary debates concerning race, ethnicity, and nation, Yu contemplates the possibilities and limitations of a field that is institutionalized yet largely absent in public discourse.Less

From Cultural Politics to Cultural Capital

Mark Chiang

in The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

This chapter contrasts articulations of difference in Asian American cultural studies with Pierre Bourdieu's model of relational analysis between field and capital. Although both of these concepts ... More

This chapter contrasts articulations of difference in Asian American cultural studies with Pierre Bourdieu's model of relational analysis between field and capital. Although both of these concepts consider social relations as a dynamic system of negative differences, they vary extremely regarding their purpose—the former is committed to an antirealist and antirepresentational epistemology whereas the latter seeks to decipher the inequalities of a social order constituted by the structure of distribution of capital Asian American literature. As such, one detrimental consequence of Asian American cultural studies' rejection of the abjected troika of identity-essentialism-representation is that it obscures the relations of capital linking the university to the polity by attempting to (re)construct that relation as one of nonrepresentation.Less

Teaching Asian American Studies in Japan: Challenges and Possibilities

Masumi Izumi

in Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations

This chapter juxtaposes Asian American scholarship in Japan and the United States, and explores ways in which the field can be pedagogically useful for deconstructing hegemonic social discourses on ... More

This chapter juxtaposes Asian American scholarship in Japan and the United States, and explores ways in which the field can be pedagogically useful for deconstructing hegemonic social discourses on race, culture, ethnicity and justice both for Japanese and American university students and scholars. Teaching the history of Japanese emigration to the Pan-Pacific region not only helps Japanese students to overcome the historical amnesia about their country’s imperial past, but also helps American students to contextualize the migration from Japan to the US within the overall Japanese emigration history. Structural analyses of race lead to students’ better understanding of different ways in which race has historically created, naturalized and perpetuated social and economic hierarchy within the United States and Japan. Furthermore, learning about the social protest and cultural movements that led to the birth of Asian American studies can promote positive views among university students toward political engagement and social activism.Less

Asians Are the New … ​What?

Kandice Chuh

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Chapter 13 opens with recent debates involving Asian Americans, university admissions, and affirmative action. Noting the “constitutive ambivalence that has characterized the production of Asian as a ... More

Chapter 13 opens with recent debates involving Asian Americans, university admissions, and affirmative action. Noting the “constitutive ambivalence that has characterized the production of Asian as a racial category in the U.S. political and cultural imagination,” and connecting this process of “Asian racialization” to economically-determined “middleman” model minority discourses within the social ontology of the U.S. populace, Chuh calls for a critical reckoning of the model minority-identified Asian American subject. Such reckonings, in turn, enable a critical diagnosis of the continuing dominance of global capitalism as a defining feature of the U.S. nationLess

Un-homing Asian American Studies: Refusals and the Politics of Commitment

Anita Mannur

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and ... More

Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and programmatic levels. This chapter also considers how other interdisciplines—namely Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies—face similar crises with regard to funding, appointments, and co-optations.Less

Transformative Disjunctures in the Academy: Asian American Studies as Praxis

Linda Trinh Võ

in Transforming the Ivory Tower: Challenging Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in the Academy

This chapter analyzes the development of the field of Asian American Studies, focusing on efforts to institutionalize and professionalize the discipline, along with the multiple requirements and ... More

This chapter analyzes the development of the field of Asian American Studies, focusing on efforts to institutionalize and professionalize the discipline, along with the multiple requirements and challenges scholars encounter in the academy, especially balancing their teaching and on-campus and off-campus service demands. It contextualizes these developments by intertwining these macro–micro dynamics with the author's personal observations and experiences to demarcate some of the ways in which she negotiated her own path in the academy. As she weaves together her personal experiences and the path of Asian American Studies, the author examines specific forms of racial and gender inequalities in higher education and suggests strategies for making the academy more supportive of people of color and women. These inequalities include racist and elitist views of scholarship, deficient mentoring for women and people of color, tokenism, and a work environment unaccommodating to women faculty with children. She describes how these assaults thwart productivity and damage mental health, and stresses the importance of building community as a key form of resistance, including survival strategies shared among women of color to balance career and family.Less

Planned Obsolescence, Strategic Resistance: Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Neoliberal University

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

This chapter takes as a starting point the ways in which Ethnic Studies, as university/institutional initiative, was rendered precarious from the outset via joint appointments, soft funding lines, ... More

This chapter takes as a starting point the ways in which Ethnic Studies, as university/institutional initiative, was rendered precarious from the outset via joint appointments, soft funding lines, and non-binding budget commitments. The chapter then shifts to a reading of neoliberal university logics and provides strategies to subvert disciplinary “obsolescence” via a turn to critical/comparative Asian/Asian American studies.Less

The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

in The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

Asian American Studies as a discipline continues to be informed by the political objectives of cultural nationalism, yet critics have repeatedly exposed the nativism, misogyny, and homophobia ... More

Asian American Studies as a discipline continues to be informed by the political objectives of cultural nationalism, yet critics have repeatedly exposed the nativism, misogyny, and homophobia embedded in its constructions of identity. Despite their emphasis on the mimetic capabilities of literature and the possibility of realism, cultural nationalist critics and writers repeatedly sought to align textual content with the historical terrain in which praxis is actualized. In this sense, realism demands a close connection between the temporality of the text and the time of history. Moreover, cultural nationalism assumed an idealized critical subject for whom the history and realities of racism are accessible as knowledge. This chapter examines cultural nationalism and its ironic temporalities by focusing on literary criticism by Bruce Iwasaki and writings by Frank Chin, along with their claims about the agency of the author. It considers how such claims coexist uneasily with the temporal protocols of political discourse and literary representation.Less