Complicity and Resistance: Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter

Complicity and Resistance: Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter Wen Liu Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, October 2018, pp. 421-451 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2018.0026 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707261 No institutional affiliation (20 Feb 2019 14:13 GMT) COMPLICITY AND RESISTANCE Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter Wen Liu ABSTRACT. The portrayal of Asian Americans as the exemplar of American multiculturalism and the ideal “postracial” futurity has created a body politic easily recruited by neoliberal governmentality to disguise racial inequality. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Black Lives Matter movements based in New York City, this article focuses on the split within Asian American body politics between those for and against the centering of Black lives. Whereas an Asian American body politic risks being co-opted as a form of anti-Black white assimilation, the author also highlights the resistance of Asians for Black Lives activists and their attempt to recuperate Asian American identity for cross-racial solidarity. sian Americanness, like other hyphenated identities in the United AStates, is the exemplar of the American exceptionalist discourse of multiculturalism as well as of racial and ethnic national inclusion. It exists as both a theoretical and political contradiction, because on the one hand, the racial and ethnic part of the compound term signifies the inclusionalist ideal, and on the other hand, the American represents the universal principals of democracy, human rights, and equality.1 Because of this hegemonic universalism that obscures structural inequality and pushes for ideological integration, Asian Americanness is always “future- oriented,” as Rey Chow articulates, moving toward a day when the universal ideals are fully realized and the ethnic particulars are diluted to seemingly neutral cultural aesthetics.2 This disembodiment and reduction of the mattering of race to cultural mimicry of the past is the core of neoliberal multiculturalism.3 It obscures the mattering of race at the center of global capitalism, which functions to produce different classes of labor and secure white domination and capitalist interests internationally. JAAS OCTOBER 2018 • 421–451 © JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS 422 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.3 Unlike the blatant form of racism enacted through violent exclusion, neoliberal multiculturalism aims to incorporate populations, especially the racial Other, and capitalize on their differences as potential sources of profits. The shifting paradigm of race from violent exclusion to com- partmentalized inclusion places Asian Americanness at a historical junc- ture—to either move forward toward postracial neoliberalism and turn into a profitable cultural commodity or recuperate the nostalgic formation of Asian American nationalism and profess allegiance to U.S. racial liberalism. Neither approach is driven by a simplistic recruitment of white assimilation or hegemonic patriotism. The push and pull on the temporal and ideological scales demonstrates a competition between multiple forms of nationalism and political affiliations that have constituted the flexible subjectivity of Asian Americanness as well as the conflicting racial paradigms in the United States today. In this article, I attend to the growing ideological heterogeneity and focus on the variant corporeal visibility of Asian American body politics in the field of Asian American studies.4 Specifically, I critically examine how Asian Americanness is appropriated by neoconservative interests and color-blind racial agendas but also how it points to a yearning for cross-racial solidarity in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.5 The competing definitions of Asian Ameri- canness are certainly not new. The intensified racial conflicts in the United States as highlighted by the BLM movement rearrange and rearticulate the existing contradictions in Asian American subjectivity, as either the hyper- assimilated racial minority or the perpetual foreigner, the successful model minority or the silent second-class citizen. The framework of temporality aims to highlight precisely how the flexibility of Asian Americanness allows these racial subjects to claim citizenship and affiliation by imagining and desiring nation(s) across time, where they identify and disidentify with the contested racial paradigms that have emerged in the United States at different historical moments. Under the waves of rapid neoliberalization that fracture traditional forms of racial solidarity politics, the theorization of Asian Americanness has been moving toward acknowledging the ideological heterogeneity within Asian American communities. This growing body of scholarship particularly attends to the intraracial (divisions between East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian), interracial (Asian-Black), class-oriented, and transnation- ally shaped dynamics.6 For instance, Claire Jean Kim’s formative work on Black-Korean conflicts in 1990 in Brooklyn, New York, has shown how racial power operates to reconstitute racialized immigrant groups and exerts white dominance through bodies of color.7 More recently, Rowena Robles has illustrated how the Chinese Americans appropriated the stereotype COMPLICITY AND RESISTANCE • LIU • 423 of model minority for color-blind policies against affirmative action in the educational context, which ultimately benefit neoconservative interests.8 The “neither white nor Black” and “near white and Black” racial ambiguity has allowed Asian Americanness to transcend the meanings of race, as a simultaneous victim and success story.9 The recent waves of BLM movements have become a critical force that confronts the postracial regime of the United States by making the militarized state violence upon Black and Brown bodies visible and urgent. While BLM has become widespread and endemic to the social and political life of Americans, Asian Americanness has turned into a more contested and fragmented category as the different factions of communities claim their own positionality for or against the radical racial struggle. This article ethnographically examines the divergent claims of the Asian American body politic within the context of a Chinese American policeman, Peter Liang, who shot and killed an unarmed Black man, Akai Gurley, in a stairway alley in Brooklyn, New York, and became the first officer to be indicted since BLM’s call for police accountability began. The pro-police Chinese American communities that call for Asian American liberal racial recogni- tion and the Asian American BLM allies who demand an antinationalist Afro-Asian solidarity ran into direct conflict as the case evolved. These two factions represent not only the different ideologies of assimilation and opposition in the Asian American body politic, but the two kinds of temporality that have simultaneously taken shape in the racial formation of Asian Americanness as fitting into a “raceless” future or reclaiming a historical cross-racial alliance. The case also captures a distinct moment of Asian American subjectivity where neoliberal class interests, the American Dream, and Chinese ethnonationalism coincide to establish a new racial order and reorganize the privileges and stigmas previously assigned by racial liberalism, assembling new political subjectivities apart from the preexisting racial line. A Contested Field of Splitting Asian Americanness As a part of the diasporic Asian activist milieu in the United States, I was involved in a pan-Asian coalition of progressive NGO leaders in New York City, API People’s Solidarity (APIPS), from 2013 to 2016, primarily working on facilitating anti-imperialist dialogues and actions across the Pacific.10 The coalition became an entry point for me to begin my ethnographic fieldwork when the controversial Liang-Gurley case shocked Asian Ameri- can communities in the greater New York area, where there are historically accumulated conflicts between Asian and African Americans,11 as well 424 • JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES • 21.3 as between the fractured political ideologies within Chinese American communities that have become increasingly visible due to issues such as gentrification, educational access, and nationalistic interests.12 As a result of the geographical and historical particularities of the Asian American communities in NYC, APIPS member activists had worked on political projects attentive to the class and ethnic specificities as well as to the broader anti- imperialist goal in Asian American movements through campaigns around antigentrification, labor solidarity, anti–neoliberal trade, and antimilitarism in the Asia Pacific region. The ideological heterogeneity and transnational ontology of Asian American politics informed by the APIPS activist milieu in NYC became a crucial intervention and framework for my analysis as the Liang-Gurley case evolved.13 Due to controversial nature of the event, during my fieldwork, I had seen my close comrades and friends divided on the issue around the political position of Asian Americans—one side holding on to the radical racial justice goal of Asian and Black solidarity, and the other demanding an apol- ogy from the state for decades of Asian victimization and marginalization. To engage in fieldwork on the issue for me was politically charged as well as deeply personal

Load more