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Shifting Boundaries of Asian American Panethnic Identities and Solidarities

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Shifting Boundaries of Asian American Panethnic Identities and Solidarities Sugijanto 1 Beyond, Within, and Outside the U.S. Nation- State: Shifting Boundaries of Asian American Panethnic Identities and Solidarities Jennifer Sugijanto Honors History Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Georgetown University Advisor: Professor Ananya Chakravarti Honors Program Chair: Professor Alison Games 4 May 2020 Sugijanto 2 Acknowledgments First, thank you to my professors, particularly my advisor, Professor Chakravarti, and Professor Games, who spearheaded the thesis seminar course. Your comments and guidance have undoubtedly made me a better reader, writer, and thinker. If nothing else, I was motivated to continue to better this thesis with the understanding that at least you two would read it. Thank you also to all other members of the seminar course for parsing through many incoherent paragraphs. Second, many thanks to Jamie from UC Berkeley for hours spent scanning and photographing primary source materials that were critical for the development of my argument. Third, thank you to countless individuals and communities who have cared for me as I cultivated my self-consciousness as an Asian American. Many of these people I have had the privilege of organizing with as a part of the Asian Pacific Islander Leadership Forum. Within this cohort, thanks to my roommate, Heej, for putting up with my late-night ramblings, and my housemate, Nat, for making the Asian American HOME a community space which has intimately influenced my approach to this thesis. A final thanks to my parents for countless sacrifices and bowls of cut fruit that have led me to this country and this thesis. This thesis is motivated by the dismal but improving (!) status of Asian American and Ethnic Studies at Georgetown University. I wrote this work on land that was and still is the homeland of the Nacotchtank and their descendants, the Piscataway Conoy people. I acknowledge that these peoples and many others were forcefully removed, and that Georgetown University’s occupation is fundamentally tied to colonial development. I offer gratitude for the land and her people as we learn, teach, work, and commune (adapted from the Native American Student Council’s land acknowledgment statement). Sugijanto 3 Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..……4 Chapter 1 - The Vietnam War and the New Left (1960-1970s)………………………...…...…..17 Chapter 2 - Changing Population Demographics and the New Right (1980s – 1990s)…...…….40 Chapter 3 - National Security Threats and the Boundaries of Panethnicity (1990s-2000s) ….…62 Conclusion…………………………….…………………………………………………………83 Bibliography…………………………….……………………………………………………….88 Sugijanto 4 Introduction “The boundary marking of [Asian American Studies] is caught up in a perception of competing needs: the tension between the need for political identity and the need to represent the conflicted and heterogeneous formation we call “Asian American.” These needs are antagonistic to each other only if we work from the assumption that there is a “real” Asian American identity to which our vocabulary and procedures can be adequated.”1 --- Susan Koshy On November 20, 2016, Asian students at Georgetown University convened to discuss the formation of an Asian-specific leadership forum, which today exists as the Asian Pacific Islander Leadership Forum (APILF). They began with a discussion of who counted as Asian in the first place. One student asked if the meeting’s organizers had reached out to students a part of the Georgetown Arab Society to be included in the conversation, to which one of the conveners remarked, “I didn’t know they identified as Asian.” The group then debated at length whether they should refer to the new organization as an “Asian Leadership Forum,” or an “Asian and Pacific Islander Leadership Forum.” Pacific Islander (PI) students, one student argued, at times identified more closely with Indigenous rather than Asian communities. The student then commented on the place of Filipino students, as “Filipinos generally identify as Asian Americans, but there are a few who identify more as PIs.”2 Asian Americans and Asian immigrants, as well as state apparatuses like the government, the administration, and the courts, utilize abstractions like “Asian,” “Asian American,” and “Asian and Pacific Islander” to categorize individuals with origins in “Asia.”3 Evidenced by Georgetown students’ discussions, 1 Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 342. 2 APILF, Google Drive shared with author, December 01, 2017. Google Drive contains meeting minutes dating back to 2016. 3 State apparatuses as articulated in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (Delhi, India: Aakar Books, 2006). Sugijanto 5 these terms can also serve as tools for organizing different communities. Understanding who counts as Asian American and according to whom is then critical for comprehending how Asian American and immigrant communities relate to one another, as well as how they relate to the U.S. nation-state. Where, if anywhere, is “Asia”? In his study of trade around the Indian Ocean region from the rise of Islam until 1750, historian Kitri Chaudhuri argues that both the term and idea of “Asia” originated in Europe. Prior to widespread contact and subsequent colonization of Asia by various European powers, no equivalent word or concept in any Asian language that was analogous to the term “Asia” existed.4 Geographer Martin Lewis and historian Karen Wigen similarly contend that “there is no logically constituted geographical category called Asia,” a reminder that humans construct and impose geographical categories onto the natural world.5 Cultural critic Edward Said offers further insight into who benefits from the construction and continued use of vague terms like “Asia,” or more broadly, the “Orient.” In his discussion of Orientalism, Said maintains that conceptions of the Orient, a product of European (and later American) imaginations, are upheld by the prevailing strength of Western cultural discourse and cultural hegemony.6 More importantly, Said argues that imperial states and actors’ demarcation of particular bodies as either the Western-self or Oriental Other maintains and is maintained by the “positional superiority” of Europe and Europeans. This imbalance allows for domination, control, and extraction from the Orient and its subjects.7 4 The “West” is similarly constructed. Kirti N. Chaudhuri. Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 22. 5 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 16. 6 Cultural hegemony meaning the domination of society by a ruling class able to manipulate the culture of that society. 7 Edward Said, “Introduction to Orientalism,” in Media Studies: A Reader, eds. Paul Marris, Sue Thronham, and Caroline Bassett (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 1-4, 7. Sugijanto 6 Where, then, is “Asian America?” In the late 1960s, U.C. Berkeley graduate student Yuji Ichioka coined the term “Asian America” to refer to a new, pan-Asian, or panethnic, organizing identity for Asians living in America.8 In studying panethnic identity, scholars David Lopez and Yến Lê Espiritu define panethnicity as “the development of bridging organizations and solidarities among subgroups of ethnic collectives that are often seen as homogenous by outsiders.”9 The label arose out of the Asian American movements of the 1960s-70s, a period wherein Asian university students and community organizers engaged in widespread political, economic, and cultural grassroots mobilization efforts. “Asian American” conferred a commitment to a particular anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics. Asian activists also adopted the panethnic label to reject popular usage of the pejorative term “Oriental” to refer to their communities, though some time passed before those outside of activist and academic spheres similarly embraced the term “Asian American.” By the 1980s, the U.S. state had also adopted the term “Asian American” to refer to Asian populations within the United States.10 This adoption likely occurred for bureaucratic purposes, given the increasing heterogeneity in Asian immigrant communities by the late 1900s. A great number of Asians living in America today, for various reasons, do not identify with the term “Asian American,” at times opting for ethnic-specific identifications like “Filipino American” or “Indian American.”11 Whether at the hands of U.S. state apparatuses or Asian American activists, lumping together diverse individuals under the 8 Densho Encyclopedia, Brian Niiya,“Yuji Ichioka,” accessed December 12, 2019, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Yuji%20Ichioka/. 9 David LoPez and Yến Lê EsPritiu, “Panethnicity in the United States: A Theoretical Framework,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13, no. 2 (1990): 200. 10 The “Asian American” category aPPeared in the 1980 U.S. Census. It did not aPPear in the 1970 Census, where officials counted the poPulation of sPecific Asian ethnic grouPs in America, namely Chinese, JaPanese, and Filipino communities. 11 Janelle Wong, “National Origin, Pan-Ethnicity, and Racial Identity,” in Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and Their Political Identities, ed. Janelle Wong, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Taeku Lee, and Jane Junn (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 157. Sugijanto 7 sign of “Asian America” may simultaneously
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