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Critical Contexts for Mixed Race Asian American Art and Identity

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Critical Contexts for Mixed Race Asian American Art and Identity Chapter 1 Miscegenating Discourses: Critical Contexts for Mixed Race Asian American Art and Identity LAura KInA and WeI MIng DariotIs foCused on contemporary visual culture, War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art investigates multivalent constructions of mixed heritage Asian American identity in the United States. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation comes of age, this book examines—by way of varying degrees and differing registers—how mixed heritage Asian Americans artistically contemplate, engage, and address what Lisa Lowe famously termed “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” in their respective artwork.1 As important, War Baby / Love Child draws its various sites of inquiry from critical mixed race studies, illumi- nating a complex intersection of racialization, war and imperialism, gender and sexu- ality, and citizenship and nationality. This multiauthor volume features more than thirty works across diverse media by nineteen emerging, midcareer, and established artists who reflect a breadth of mixed heritage ethnoracial and geographic diversity, as well as a variety of artistic styles. Through interviews with the artists grouped with essays by ten leading interdisciplinary Critical Mixed Race and Asian American studies scholars, War Baby / Love Child explores the ways in which these artists are navigating and imagining their individual and communal identities against broader art historical, legal, and domestic and transnational social contexts. “Bridge between Two Worlds”?: Re-seeing Mixed Heritage Asian American Racial Formation Set against an imaginary of U.S. imperialism (inclusive of war and colonization in Asia and the Pacific Islands), mixed race Asian Americans likewise reflect dramatic shifts in immigration policy and Civil Rights–era legislation. As many scholars argue, the 1965 passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which enabled the en masse entrance of Asian immigrants, has had a profound demographic impact. Equally sig- nificant is the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which overturned the nation’s last antimiscegenation laws. Both immigration law and civil rights cases fore- 3 War Baby finalNov.29.indd 3 11/29/12 2:59 PM ground what psychologist Maria P. P. Root dubbed the “biracial baby boom” in her seminal 1992 anthology Racially Mixed People in America.2 Such a boom is evident in the 2010 U.S. Census, wherein more than 9 million Americans (or 2.9 percent of the population) self-identified as more than one race, just behind the largest Asian Amer- ican group: Chinese. Moreover, Asians remain the fastest growing racialized group (up by 43 percent) in the United States. In the overlap, 2.6 million of 17.3 million Asians identified as Asian plus one or more other races, and a significant population of Asian Americans identified as interethnically mixed.3 Since the early 1990s, the increasing numbers of mixed heritage Asian Americans, especially on the West Coast, has led to the construction of communities and movements based around a mixed Asian American identity. The concretization of this identity developed through the deployment of the term “Hapa” as an ethnic identifier signifying “mixed Asian.”4 This word has been appropriated from Hawai‘i, which has the largest population of mixed Asians proportionally. Cynthia Nakashima, who coedited The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans with Teresa Williams-León, argues “that the field of Mixed Race studies is a direct outgrowth of Asian American and ethnic studies, borrowing heavily from its texts, its paradigms, and its language.”5 Nakashima further suggests that integrating mixed race perspectives into Asian American Studies is a “necessity . simply to remain relevant in the twenty-first century.”6 Such a project would “alter the entire Asian American studies discourse by disrupting the very concept of ‘Asian American’ itself. Who and what is Asian American, and who gets to decide?”7 Although inte- grating more mixed heritage content may subtly begin to shift the paradigms of Asian American Studies, this may also lead to a variation on the model minority myth: mixed Asians representing Asian assimilation into U.S. dominant culture. Coun- tering this requires a rejection of the move to count (either through the census or in other venues) people of mixed heritage as a “multiracial” block with no further dif- ferentiation, which promotes a melting-pot multiculturalism that glosses over power relationships in order to celebrate “diversity.” Born in 1976, African American and South Asian Indian American artist Mequitta Ahuja creates art that exemplifies the dynamics and vision of this generation. In her 2009 drawing Spark (plate 1), Ahuja focuses on the constructed nature of her self- representation. The camera shutter release cable is clearly visible in her hand as she presents a mirrored self-portrait, bowing deeply, arms thrust out, the sleeves of her Indian kameez open like bird wings. As her head swings down, she unleashes a mass of loose, curly “good hair.”8 At the point in the drawing in which her doubled Afro unites, a psychic explosion ignites. With uncontained hair and wearing a salwar kameez, Ahuja simultaneously signals Black Power pride and Indian ethnicity. None- 4 Chapter 1 War Baby finalNov.29.indd 4 11/29/12 2:59 PM theless, the artist’s refusal to face the viewer—evident in closed eyes and downturned head—forces Spark’s audience to move from an easy reading of ascribed identity to a focus on less tangible modes of mind and energy. As Ahuja summarizes, “The flow from the head became a flow from the mind: a vehicle of infinite possibility.”9 Accordingly, Ahuja’s self-portrait complicates notions of hybridity and destabilizes an artificial bifurcation of the psychic whole. In so doing, Ahuja’s Spark undermines facile readings of mixed race people as equally divided between two poles. Such polarity corresponds to a problematical reading of multiracial people as a “bridge between two worlds” within the dominant imagination. This connective evaluation carries the essentialized assumption that racialized groups are so deeply divided that interracial unions offer a solution to racial conflict. However, as the artists in this volume underscore, many of their mono- racially divergent parents met through shared economic or social spheres (i.e., attending the same college, mutual friends, allied professions or circumstances).10 Some, having parents and grandparents of mixed heritage, are multigenerationally mixed; others are transracial adoptees; and some have parents who found homes in communities of color other than their own. While the experiences and biographies of our interviewees are varied and often diverge significantly from the dominant discourses of mixed Asian identities, the mixed Asian body writ large continues to signify specific histories of Asian Pacific– U.S. collisions: narratives of war, economic and political migration, and colonization. Illustratively, when U.S. photographer Serene Ford returned to her mother’s native Vietnam in 2003 to shoot I’m the Girl Who Survived the War: Photographs from Viet Nam (plates 2–4), “Amerasian” people would come up to her and say, “Same same, but different.”11 She knew what they were saying. They could tell. She saw people who looked like her; as she says, “a lot of them were still on the streets,” and she thought, “Oh god.”12 In these brief encounters, the intersections and differences of race, eth- nicity, nationality, and class became visible. Ford’s mutual recognition of a shared ethnoracial lineage with Vietnamese Amerasians implies a homecoming—“same same”—but also highlights a larger comparative reading of mixed race people. Her concomitant response of “Oh god” and the Vietnamese qualifier “but different” point to the recognition of the vast chasm of citizenship-based privilege. At the same time, as Asian countries have increasingly entered the economic sphere as superpowers, faces implying “Asian fusion” are increasingly used as a sign of upward mobility and cosmopolitanism with which to “sell the new Asia.”13 Simultaneously fixed to an insider/outsider racial status, mixed race Asian Americans strategically use art as a way of illuminating, according to Homi K. Bhabha’s oft-quoted phrase, a “Third Space” in the historic East-West binary (and additional spaces outside of and inter- MisCegenating disCourses 5 War Baby finalNov.29.indd 5 11/29/12 2:59 PM secting this binary). Bhabha described this interstitial alterity as “unrepresentable” and constituting “the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistorized and read anew.”14 This volume expands the framing of hybridity as a liminal discursive, which has come to dominate alterna- tives to polarities such as theory/practice and First/Third World and Self/Other, to something more akin to mixed heritage Chinese American poet Mei-mei Berssen- brugge’s tangible metaphor of “fenestrated capillaries”—blood flowing through many tiny veins, like diverging and converging streams, but veins in which there are windows, providing opportunities to take advantage of the multiple and shifting per- spectives.15 This image is more fluid and multidirectional than the current imagery in mixed race circles of “mixed roots,” and it connotes the focus on blood and embodi- ment in historical discourses of mixed race identity while also acknowledging the water and wave metaphors of early Asian American Studies. Fenestrated capillaries invoke the idea of blood, blood quantum, bloodlines, mixed blood, watering down the blood and the idea of capillary action—a drawing together from multiple dispa- rate sources. This is a multicentered approach that asks how Critical Mixed Race and Asian American Studies might “fenestrate” these boundaries in such a way as to maintain Asian America while simultaneously reframing it. The window, unlike the lens, is multidirectional, looking both out and in simultaneously; the window provides reflection, implies the home as well as the casement that frames the view.
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