“Chinese Migration to the Hemisphere: Multiraciality, Transgenerational Trauma, and Comparative American Studies," Transnational Crossroads: Reimagining Asian America, Latin@ America, and the American Pacific. Eds. Camilla Fojas and Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. Lincoln: U. Nebraska Press, 2012: 337-402 (original) (raw)

The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture

Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, 2020

The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, and Oceanic studies. In particular, following Lisa Yoneyama’s model for examining “decolonial genealogies of transpacific studies,” such a reevaluation emphasizes interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and, above all, a reckoning with settler taxonomies of intellectual production as vital to the continued use of the term. Beginning with a review of key scholarly interventions into the “settler colonial grammar of AA/PI,” this article relates the US histories and logics that first produced the categories “Asian American” and “Pacific Islander” and brought them into categorical relation with one another. These historical entanglements between diasporic and Indigenous movements across and through the Pacific, can be understood through cultural analysis of literary works that reconfigure transpacific studies around Oceanic passages and Pacific currents highlighting an Indigenous-centered regional formation. Rather than allowing transpacific discourses to dismiss the Pacific Islands as distant or remote “islands in a far sea,” such an approach recasts the region along the lines of what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa formulates as an interconnected “sea of islands.” It concludes by considering the ongoing harm produced by settler epistemologies of possessive liberal

RE-SIGNIFYING " ASIA " IN THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN OF ASIAN/AMERICAN STUDIES

Bringing inter-Asia cultural studies into conversation with Asian American critique, this paper aims to reframe the critical analysis of the scattered hegemonies of US imperialism in articulating the transpacific historical interconnections. Rather than privileging the US as a primary site of investigation and critique, I draw careful attention to the Cold War conditions of inter-Asia migration as an entry point for discussing how the geopolitics of Taiwanese modernity, from the Cold War up to neoliberal globalization, are inextricably linked to Japanese colonialism, US militarism and modernization, and Chinese globalization. To develop my theoretical and historical (re)conceptualization of “Asia” in Asian/American studies, I look at how the migrant narrative of migrant workers in the nonfiction novel Our Stories speaks to the power dynamics of the US Cold War involvement in Asia, neoliberal globalization, and Taiwan subimperialist relations with its neighboring countries. Whereas Asian American cultural critique offers a new analytics to enable a reconceptualization of Asian America without confining it to an identitarian category, inter-Asia cultural studies redirect critical attention to the historical undercurrents of inter-Asia geopolitics that are largely obscured by the dominant knowledge paradigm of the US Cold War politics in the regions of Asia Pacific.

Keywords for Asian American Studies ed. by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Võ, K. Scott Wong

Journal of Asian American Studies, 2016

The book's last chapter demonstrates how Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican performance-poet activists use education as a tool to produce "decolonizing activist projects." As Caronan notes, these poet activists are "organic intellectuals who teach their local communities how to disidentify with hegemonic narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and provide them with a repertoire of cultural tools to construct a genealogy of global power" (106). These genealogies or genealogy projects empower the local communities to collect and tell their own stories, adding to the wealth of resistance narratives that challenge hegemonic narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. Caronan concludes that in the twenty-first century, colonialism still functions but under the guise of globalization. Contemporary U.S. global power means not an end to U.S. imperialism, but rather a recycling of the same tropes and institutions that left the Philippines, for example, in political and economic shambles. Caronan warns us that to insist on the same process of planting democratic institutions with military intervention will only do the same in the Middle East. Legitimizing Empire thus illuminates how narratives of empire and U.S. exceptionalism continue to disrupt and overshadow the legitimate critiques made by Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural productions. Faye Caronan's Legitimizing Empire is an indispensable study that makes a significant contribution to the fields of comparative ethnic studies, Asian American and Latina/o studies, Filipino American and Puerto Rican studies, American studies, and U.S. history. It is an outstanding book that will inform future studies on how narratives of U.S. empire continue to evolve in response to the critiques that hold this country accountable for the conditions of both former and newly minted colonial territories in the twenty-first century.

The transnational politics of Asian Americans

2009

As America's most ethnically diverse foreign-born population, Asian Americans can puzzle political observers. This volume's multidisciplinary team of contributors employ a variety of methodologies—including quantitative, ethnographic, and historical—to illustrate how transnational ties between the US and Asia have shaped, and are increasingly defining, Asian American politics in our multicultural society. Original essays by US-and Asian-based scholars discuss Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and ...