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 mask the vast heterogeneity found within Asian
American communities.12
Said and historian and philosopher Michel Foucault suggest that power is vested in the ability of the state and individuals themselves to categorize, name, and rename political subjects.13 Within the U.S. context, a discussion of race exemplifies how the material and discursive power categorization yields impact how political actors interact with one another. For example, state apparatuses utilize racial and ethnic categories to divvy up economic and political resources. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant refer to the sociohistorical processes which create, modify, and destroy race-based categories as “racialization.” The way race operates in contemporary times has its origins in the rise of European colonization in the fifteenth century.14 European seizure of goods, land, and people contributed to colonial demarcation of political subjects as either part of the Western-self or Other. These dichotomies spurred attempts to locate the fundamental qualities of racial identity, be they physical, genetic, or in more recent times, cultural, that separated in from out-groups.15 “Race has played a unique role in the formation and historical development of the United States,” Omi and Winant contend, as an unstable master status that is structural in origins and yet also based in real patterns of behavior or being.16 These processes originate from external or internal sources. While external,
12 Deepika Bahri, “With Kaleidoscope Eyes,” in A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America, eds. By Lavina D. Shankar and Rajini Srikanth (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 29-30. 13 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208-26. 14 Enseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (April 2004): 217-19. More specifically, the Portuguese, followed by other European powers, engaged in the geopolitical project of empire building and effectively transformed preexisting Indian Ocean transregional trade networks. 15 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2014), 114. 16 Master status meaning that race is often the paramount social identifier for individuals in the U.S. Sugijanto 8 dominant groups or entities, like the U.S. state, impose social identities onto subordinate groups, subordinate groups adopt and modify existing social identities as a means to resist dominant forms of categorization.17 The women’s, student’s, anti-war, and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, each heavily inspired by concurrent Black Power movements, serve as an example of when subordinate groups engaged in widespread reinvention of identification categories.
During the 1960s and 1970s, students and organizers who evoked the term “Asian
American” referred mostly to Japanese, Chinese, and to lesser degrees, Filipino and Korean
Americans. Long before the 1960s, Asian immigrants, specifically Filipino traders, arrived in what is now known as the U.S. in the sixteenth century, though large-scale Asian migration to
America began in the mid-1800s. Asian immigrants faced barriers to entry, codified in legislation like the infamous 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and barriers to naturalization, in addition to being subject to other discriminatory practices demarcating the nonwhite from the white populace of the U.S.18 Beginning in World War II and continuing into the Cold War era,
U.S. geopolitical imperatives created new opportunities for utilizing Asian political subjects to advance American interests abroad. In particular, as blatant discrimination along racial lines became a diplomatic liability in the ideological struggle against Communism, the U.S. government, among other actors, sought to change public perception of Asians in America from enemy aliens to assimilable, nonwhite subjects of the U.S. nation-state.19 These efforts
17 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 106 and 111. Omi and Winant further explore race-making processes, which they describe as the ways in which differences between bodies are given meaning and become significant. 18 Maeda, Chains of Babylon, 77. 19 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 240. Asian Americans themselves contributed to shoring up perceptions of the U.S. as a harmonious, multiracial nation-state. Sugijanto 9 manifested in the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1942, the 1946 Luce-Celler Bill that allowed Indian and Filipino immigrants to naturalize, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act that invalidated exclusion of immigrants on the basis of race, and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that abolished usage of national origins quotas in immigration.20 These legislative changes did not result in dramatic social change, as systemic racism against Asians in America simply took on less overt forms. The promise of assimilation remained untenable for immigrants of color.
As Asian American demographics changed significantly from the mid-to-late twentieth century, my thesis attempts to interrogate the shifting boundaries of Asian American panethnicity from the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. I do not attempt to explicitly define Asian America, nor do I think that any uniform understanding of Asian
America exists. Rather than approach Asian America as a knowable category, this thesis seeks to explore who Asian American students and community organizers saw as part of Asian America, what the term meant to them, and to what effects. I use the term “Asian American” to refer to my study population but am aware that some of the students and organizers discussed may or may not have themselves identified with the term.21 From here on out, I also use the plural “identities” to suggest the existence of heterogeneous, and at times contradictory, conceptions of Asian
America. When analyzing the viewpoints of those I believe came to a singular understanding of the term, I use the singular “identity.” I argue that students and organizers “(re)produced,”
“expanded,” or “constrained” panethnic identities to mean that panethnicity is a dynamic, constructed phenomenon that requires the belief and actions of historical actors to maintain it.
20 Klein, Cold War, 225. 21 Whether individuals who invoke the term “Asian American” are always cognizant of the complexities of the East, Southeast, South, Central, Southwest Asian, multiracial, and adoptee identities, among others, that fall within the Asian American umbrella is difficult to ascertain. Sugijanto 10
Sociologists, political scientists, literary critics, as well as professional historians have all contributed to producing interdisciplinary scholarship exploring Asian American panethnicity.
Scholars like Yên Lê Espiritu, Janelle Wong, and Ariela Schachter have produced more sociologically informed analyses of Asian American identities. A foundational text for studies of
Asian American panethnicity is Espiritu’s Asian American Panethnicity, originally published in
1992. Espiritu began a conversation on factors motivating Asian Americans to mobilize around a panethnic group identity. She utilizes interviews as well as statistical data to explore formative events in Asian American history, like the Third World Liberation Front Strikes of 1968, anti-
Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s, and the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982. Through these examples, Espiritu theorizes that violence launched against one particular Asian ethnic community may have triggered the formation of coalitions compromised of many other Asian ethnic groups.22 Since 1992, other sociologists studying Asian America have contributed to this conversation by exploring the limitations of various Asian Americans’ conceptions of panethnicity. For example, in two separate studies, Janelle Wong and Ariela Schachter both utilize data from the 2008 National Asian American Survey (NAAS), the first nationally representative survey of Asians and Asian Americans living in the U.S. Both Schachter and
Wong argue that some Asian ethnic groups have lower rates of panethnic identification compared to other groups. 23 While analyses of the NAAS provide valuable insight into community-wide perspectives in contemporary times, no equivalent studies gauging group identification existed in the mid to late twentieth century. Thus, attempts to undertake a change over time exploration of Asian American group identifications are limited. In addition, large
22 Yến Lê Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 23 Ariela Schachter, “Finding Common Ground? Indian Immigrants and Asian American Panethnicity,” Social Forces 92, no. 4 (2014); Wong, “National Origin, Pan-Ethnicity, and Racial Identity.” Sugijanto 11 surveys often offer rigid categories for survey-takers to choose from, limiting an individual’s ability to express more complex thought-processes behind panethnic identification. These sociological arguments are most valuable when put in conversation with equally rich scholarship on Asian American panethnicity produced by literary theorists.
Studies of Asian American panethnicity by literary scholars undertaken in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are heavily influenced by the traditions of postmodernism and postcolonialism, which seek to destabilize simple conceptions of identity.
Academics like Lisa Lowe and David Eng study literary and cultural productions informing
Asian American panethnicity in efforts to complicate conceptions of Asian America as a stable category of identification. They simultaneously situate discussions of Asian American panethnicity within broader trends in U.S. politics and political economy. Lowe in particular analyzes plays, novels, historical narratives, media, and immigration law produced by both individuals within and outside of Asian American communities. She argues that the racialization of Asian Americans and immigrants throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is linked to the growth and continued dominance of U.S. imperialism and capitalism.24 While these scholars contribute significantly to studies of Asian American panethnicity as intimately related to broader U.S. politics and political economy, few theorists directly connect theoretical paradigms to the perspectives and experiences of lay Asian American community members.
Historical studies exploring the development of Asian American panethnicity somewhat succeed at bridging gaps between individual experiences, as often studied by sociologists, and theoretical paradigms, as developed and refined by literary theorists. A key limitation in existing historical scholarship on Asian American panethnicity is that the bulk of research is often
24 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); David L. Eng, “Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies,” Social Text 52, no. 53 (1997). Sugijanto 12 focused on the mid-to-late twentieth century. Works that offer comprehensive takes on panethnic identity formations during this time period include William Wei’s The Asian American
Movement, published in 1993, and Daryl Maeda’s Chains of Babylon, published in 2009. Wei and Maeda both utilize archival material spanning from the West to the East Coast. They examine popular publications of the Asian American movements, like Gidra, and base their research also on interviews conducted with student and community activists who organized throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Wei and Maeda argue that global political changes triggered shifts in Asian American panethnic identity.25 The value of exploring panethnicity well into the
1980s and early twenty-first century is showcased by scholars like Glenn Omatsu in his article,
“ ‘The Four Prisons.’ ” Here Omatsu argues, also through analyzing student and community publications based both on the East and West coasts, that the rise of neoconservatism in the
1980s has drastically changed Asian American panethnicity.26
Utilizing historical methodologies informed by literary and sociological theories, my thesis attempts to understand the shifting boundaries of Asian American panethnic identities from the Vietnam War period to the early twenty-first century. I examine documents produced by two general categories of individuals: leftist, progressive, and or generally liberal university students and community organizers. These categories are not mutually exclusive, as some students were also active community organizers and vice versa, and these populations are by no means reflective of Asian American and immigrant populations as a whole. Based on Janelle
Wong’s 2006 study, only a small proportion of Asians in America self-identify as “Asian
25 Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Critical American Studies) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). 26 Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s,” in Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader, ed. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). Sugijanto 13
American.” I chose to study university students and community organizers as she also found that individuals at the highest education levels were more likely to self-identify as “Asian American,” given the unique socializing environment that university campuses provide.27 In addition, university students and organizers made up the bulk of the activist force in the Asian American movements of the 1960s. Students were the first group to utilize Asian American panethnicity as an organizing tool during this era, and the term soon spread to community organizers outside of academia, as well.28 Intimate ties between students and community organizers, evidenced by their correspondences and close working relationship, also suggest that both populations influenced one another and so must be examined together.
Periodicals produced by students and community organizers provide insight into how
Asian Americans activists at various time points comprehended panethnicity, in addition to how they conceived of their place in broader U.S. and global politics. A small group of individuals created, edited, and published most of the articles in the periodicals I study, and they wrote for particular ethnic, like Filipino American, and or racial, like Asian American, communities. As the Asian American writers and artists behind these publications were deeply involved in the production processes, I use periodicals to examine how writing served as a vehicle for the articulation and development of their political ideologies and views on panethnicity. These sources, in aggregate, reflected how students and organizers constructed particular types of Asian
American subjects at various historical junctures. The progressive political leanings of the students and organizers I discuss undoubtedly influenced how they conceived of panethnicity.
Simultaneously, I argue that students and organizers’ conceptualizations of Asian American
27 Wong, “National Origin, Pan-Ethnicity, and Racial Identity,” 157 and 174. 28 Dina G. Okamoto, "Institutional Panethnicity: Boundary Formation in Asian-American Organizing,” Social Forces 85, no. 1 (2006): 4.
Sugijanto 14 identities also influenced their politics. To address how panethnic identities changed over time, this thesis focuses on periodicals published from the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first centuries. Most of the sources I analyze originated from either Los Angeles and Berkeley,
California, or Boston, Massachusetts. This thesis attempts to explore panethnicity as it developed around these two localities.
This thesis begins during the 1960s and 1970s, when the term “Asian American” came into existence and gained increasing prominence within activist and academic circles. In Chapter
1, I discuss how events occurring within, but also outside of the conceptual and physical borders of the U.S. nation-state informed how Asian American students and organizers drew the boundaries of Asian America. In particular, U.S. involvement and imperialism in Vietnam (and
Cambodia and Laos) heavily informed militant Asian American students and organizers’ conceptualization of what it meant to identify as an “Asian American.” Chapter 2 explores conservatism in the 1980s, a decade which saw the growth of an Asian American middle-class following the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that privileged the entry of Asian immigrants with professional skills. Coupled with general backlash against the New Left movements, the
1980s saw articulations of “Asian American” identities which often did not breach the borders of the U.S. nation-state. Asian American students and organizers comprehended “Asian American” identities as shaped predominantly by experiences occurring within the U.S. nation-state’s territorial and conceptual boundaries. Chapter 3 discusses the consequences of this confinement, particularly during national security crises. The chapter address specifically the impacts of anti-
Chinese sentiments in the late 1900s and of the ongoing War on Terror in the early 2000s on
Asian American students and organizers’ relationship to the U.S. nation-state and their conceptions of self. Sugijanto 15
The political leanings of Asian American students and organizers informed their conceptions of panethnic identities, in particular impacting how this cohort saw the relationship between Asian Americans and the idea of the U.S. nation-state. The idea of the nation-state refers to a politically sovereign community (state) that overlaps with a cultural entity (nation).
Lewis and Wigen argue not only that few countries can be uncontestably categorized as nation- states, but also that like “Asia,” the nation-state is a geographical construction human actors impose onto the world.29 Whether or not the U.S. can be considered a single nation within a state is debatable, given, among other factors, federally recognized (and unrecognized) Indigenous nations which exist within America’s territorial borders. This thesis argues that a form of the
U.S. nation-state, a European-American state which perpetually and systematically displaces both Indigenous peoples as well as communities of color from its national culture and politics, does exist. When I evoke the term “national culture,” I adopt Lisa Lowe’s definition of it as
“collectively forged images, histories, and narratives that place, displace, and replace individuals in relation to the national polity.”30 American studies scholar Nayan Shah shows that U.S. state actors constructed the Asian American and immigrant subject through immigration and naturalization laws. These laws excluded political subjects on the basis of race, thus marking particular individuals and communities as “Asian” and therefore undesirable. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. state categorized Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean immigrants as “Asiatic,” thus foreclosing political and economic opportunities to them.31
The nation itself is by definition an exclusionary entity. Historian and political scientist Benedict
Anderson contends that the nation is “an imagined political community – and imagined as both
29 Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 8. 30 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 2. 31 Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 223. Sugijanto 16 inherently limited and sovereign.” He utilizes “limited” to mean that “even the largest of
[nations], encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.”32 Asian Americans at times contested American national culture which perpetually denied them entry, though they also participated in self-identification efforts which mirrored the exclusionary, boundary-making tendencies of the U.S. nation-state.
As both a part of and apart from the U.S. nation-state, do Asian Americans’ articulations of self at various historical moments adopt or move beyond the nation-state paradigm towards new ways of envisioning identity and community? Subaltern studies historians like Partha
Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty have both written extensively on postcolonial nationalism, developing ideas that may inform nationalism in the U.S. context, as well. Chakrabarty raises the question of how European imperialism in conjunction with third world postcolonial nationalism achieved “the universalization of the nation state as the most desirable form of political community.”33 Similar to how post-colonial administrators adopted the nation-state idea post- independence and foreclosed the possibility of conceiving of community via other, non-Western categories, I analyze similar tendencies in my study of Asian Americans’ conceptions of self.
This thesis then poses the broader question of whether or not it is possible to sustain human connections which do not depend on the nation, or the nation-state.
32 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Book: 2006), 6-8. 33 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 19. Sugijanto 17
Chapter 1 - Transnational Frameworks: The Vietnam War and the New Left (1960s –
1970s)
May Chen, one of the founding members of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance
(APALA), once referred to herself as a “product of the 1960s.” As a student who came of age during the decade, she was “politicized by the massive, anti-war, civil rights, student and women’s movements of those times.” At a time when seemingly “everyone was involved in marching, petitioning, teaching and soul searching,” some Asian university students began to mobilize as “Asian Americans.”34 In the late 1960s, U.C. Berkeley student Yuji Ichioka coined the term “Asian American” to refer to a novel, panethnic organizing identity for Asians living in
America.35 The Asian American political, social, economic, and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s challenged institutionally racist forces within the U.S., U.S. imperialism abroad, and capitalist exploitation of racialized labor forces globally. In this chapter, I attempt to analyze periodicals published during the 1960s and 1970s to understand how the politics of Asian
American university students and community organizers informed their conceptions of Asian
America.
Historians of Asian America agree that the Asian American movements of the 1960s and
1970s were largely influenced by the civil rights movements of the mid-to-late twentieth century, the Black Power movement of the 1960s-1970s, and antiwar protests against U.S. aggression in
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The movements were characterized by loose organizations of university students and community activists who mobilized self-consciously under the “Asian
34 May Chen, “Personal Reflections on the Asian National Movements,” East Wind, Spring-Summer 1982, 34. 35 Densho Encyclopedia, Brian Niiya,“Yuji Ichioka,” accessed December 12, 2019, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Yuji%20Ichioka/. Sugijanto 18
American” label to fight against anti-Asian racism and exploitation in the U.S. and globally.36
Daryl Maeda argues that Asian American activists’ adaptations of Black Power’s emphasis on racial identity opened up possibilities for them to also construct a novel racial category for
Asians in America. 37 Gary Okihiro similarly comments that many Asian Americans found their identity through reading Black intellectual figures like W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and Frantz
Fanon.38 These influences illuminated how the goal of the Asian American movements was not achieving white America’s promise of conditional assimilation, but rather Third World liberation.39 During the Asian American movements, those who adopted the term “Asian
American” were thereby stating a commitment to Third World liberation. The “Third World” does not strictly refer to a particular geographical location. It also represents the idea of self- determination for colonial and imperial nonwhite subjects globally. This commitment allowed for Asian American activists to link the domestic struggles of people of color within the U.S. nation-state to decolonization movements in Vietnam, as both were conflicts against the same power structures.
The shifting demographics of Asian populations within the U.S. also guided the formations of Asian American panethnic identities. As articulated by Yến Lê Espiritu, more amicable relationships between various Asian ethnic groups made possible the development of panethnic consciousness during the 1960s and 1970s. These relations resulted partly from the coming of age of a larger number of U.S.-born Asian Americans who were not kept apart by the
36 Maeda, Chains of Babylon, 75. 37 Maeda, Chains of Babylon, 81. 38 Gary Okihiro, Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 24. 39 I use “white America” to encapsulate U.S. national culture and state institutions that construct and uphold white supremacy. Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons,’ ” 299. Sugijanto 19 linguistic or cultural differences of their parents’ generation.40 In addition, white Americans of
European descent often lumped Asians together on the basis of phenotypic similarity, regardless of ethnic differences, into categories like “Oriental.” The same pan-Asian grouping became central for Asian American activists during the Asian American movements, as they rejected categorizations imposed on them to engage in their own formations of “Asian American” identities.41
As characterized by Maeda, Okihiro, and Espiritu, a subset of Asian American university students and community organizers produced Asian American panethnic identities during an era where they shared political views with many other protesting students and organizers. A shared commitment to Third World liberation, as well as the influence of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist critiques, resulted in the construction of transnationally informed Asian American identities. I use “transnationally informed” to mean that Asian American activists constructed these identities by connecting local, as in within the U.S. nation-state, to global acts of physical and economic violence against Third World peoples. Transnational perspectives expanded the amount and types of issues and conflicts activists considered relevant for Asian Americans, thereby allowing for solidarities across ethnic, class, gender, and incarceration statuses. The centrality of the
Vietnam War as an American war against Asians and subsequent antiwar protests for Asian
American students and organizers encouraged these transnational linkages. Furthermore, activists utilized panethnicity to achieve political goals, like the creation of “serve the people” programs. Identity was then as much about individual and collective consciousness as it was about the actions that individuals and communities partook in during the 1960s and 1970s.42
40 Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 27. 41 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 106. 42 Pat Sumi, “What Vietnam Means to Us,” Gidra, January 1972. Sugijanto 20
Key periodicals produced by Asian American university students and activists during this era included the newspaper Gidra, arguably among the most well-known of many publications coming out of the Asian American movements. Gidra staff, originally comprised of five undergraduate University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Asian American students, published the periodical monthly from 1969 until 1974 and obtained nonprofit status for their news organization. At any given point, Gidra had a dedicated group of staff members, though by its July 1973 issue, over two hundred people, encompassing high school students, undergraduate students, graduate students, and working young adults, had at some point been part of the Gidra team.43 Often regarded by scholars and activists as the premier publication of the Asian
American movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Gidra helped shape both individual and collective racial identities. The newspaper provided opportunities for those who had been excluded from the public domain to develop their own viewpoints.44 Evident from various letters to the editors sent in from readers and subscribers, Gidra’s audience spanned from Los Angeles to the East
Coast and Canada. While Gidra explicitly attempted to address a panethnic Asian American audience and to define and redefine what it meant to be Asian American, the staff throughout its original run remained mostly second-generation Japanese Americans.45 In a December 1973 issue, editors wrote that the question of whether Gidra “was an Asian American paper” or “an essentially Japanese American” paper was continuously debated.46
Another publication circulated from the 1960s until the 1980s was Asian Student, later renamed Asian Students Unite!, a newsletter produced by students who were a part of the
43 Glenn Omatsu, “East Coast Asians,” Gidra, April 1970, 26; Gidra, July 1973. 44 Lori Kido Lopez, "The Yellow Press: Asian American Radicalism and Conflict in Gidra," Journal of Communication Inquiry 35, no. 3 (2011): 239. 45 Gidra, April 1970. 46 Gidra, December 1973, 2. Sugijanto 21 progressive pan-Asian coalition, the Asian Student Union (ASU) at University of California,
Berkeley (Berkeley). I focus on sources produced in the greater Berkeley and Los Angeles areas as the Asian American movements of the 1960s and 1970s were largely concentrated around these two localities. Students at Berkeley formed ASU in 1972 in response to a lack of “active
Asian Student movement groups on campus” after the dissolution of the Asian American
Political Alliance (AAPA) following the end of the Third World Liberation Front strikes in
1969.47 In its first newsletter, ASU described the publication as a means to both promote discussion of issues relevant to Asians in America and to encourage direct involvement of students in social movements. The newsletter covered both domestic and international affairs, which ASU members felt equally affected Asian students.48 Similar to Gidra, East Asian students, primarily at least second-generation Chinese and Japanese Americans, dominated the
ASU newsletter editing team, though they reaffirmed their purpose to be a newsletter for all
Asian students.49 Data are not readily available to contextualize the percentage of students at
Berkeley or UCLA that belonged to Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, or other Asian ethnic groups in the 1960s and 1970s. During this decade, Asian Americans still struggled to gain access to post- secondary educational institutions, and University of California administrators included Asian
Americans in their affirmative action policies.50 According to the 1960 U.S. Census, Japanese
Americans and immigrants made up the highest proportion of Asian populations in the U.S., followed by Chinese then Filipino Americans and immigrants. Most lived in the West and
47 Asian Student Union, The Asian Student, May-June 1974, 7. 48 Asian Student Union, The Asian Student, November 1973, 2. 49 Asian Student Union, The Asian Student, May-June 1974, 8. 50 Sharon S. Lee, “The De-Minoritization of Asian Americans: A Historical Examination of the Representations of Asian Americans in Affirmative Action Admissions Policies at the University of California,” Asian American Law Journal 15 (2008): 132-134. Sugijanto 22
Northeast-North Central regions.51 By 1970, the population of each ethnic demographic increased, with Japanese Americans and immigrants still comprising of the largest percentage of
Asians in America.52
Articles within these publications indicated that U.S. imperialism and university students and organizers’ attitudes toward imperialism allowed for them to forge connections between flashpoints of decolonization struggles in Asia to struggles related to systemic inequities within the U.S. The Vietnam War, 1959-1975, was the main, though by no means sole, international conflict that captured the attention of Asian American activists. Their discussions of the War focused mostly on the period marked by U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos following the defeat of France in 1954 and up until the cease-fire between North and South
Vietnamese forces in 1975. Lisa Lowe argues that the War destabilized America’s understanding of itself and was formative in shifting racial and class identifications for various social groups, including Asian Americans.53 Longtime Gidra staff member Bruce Iwasaki wrote in 1973 that through probing the causes of the Vietnam War, Asian Americans discovered “Empire, its rulers, their methods – all at once,” and so the War “developed our national consciousness of being
Asians, Third World People, in America.”54 In particular, students and organizers who were a part of Asian American movements saw the War as an explicitly imperialistic American War against a foreign enemy with an Asian face.55 Thus, they perceived the white antiwar
51 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1960, Subject Reports, Nonwhite Population by Race, PC(2)-1C (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1963), 3-5. The Census Bureau categorized all other Asian as well as non-Asian ethnic groups into an “All other” category in the 1960 census. 52 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population: 1970, Subject Reports, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos in the United States, PC(2)-1G (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1973), x. 53 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 3. 54 Bruce Iwasaki, “You May be a Lover but You Ain’t No Dancer,” Gidra, January 1973, 17. 55 “Brown University,” Gidra, June-July 1970, 5. Sugijanto 23 movement’s slogan of “bring our boys home” to be insufficient in its inability to encapsulate the racialized aspects of the War.56 The influence of conflict in Vietnam on Third World consciousness, though, predated large-scale U.S. involvement during the Vietnam War. Frantz
Fanon, in discussing the First Indochina War from 1946 to 1954, commented that “the great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu is no longer strictly speaking a Vietnamese victory. From July 1954 onwards…a Dien Bien Phu was now within reach of every colonized subject.”57
Asian American activists who evoked the Vietnam War in their writing argued that racial lumping, a byproduct of racism as it operated in the U.S., blurred the distinctions between Asian bodies, regardless of nationality or ethnic origin; racial lumping thereby linked the fates of
Asians within the nation-state to those of Asians abroad. For example, following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk established a government in exile in China. The Red Guard Party, a Marxist Chinese American organization, forewarned that should the Chinese government begin sending aid to Cambodia, Chinese Americans and immigrants would be at risk because of racial lumping, just as Japanese Americans and immigrants were during World War II.58 A few months later, prominent Red Guard revolutionary Alex Hing made similar comments in a letter he submitted to Gidra following his return from North Korea, South Vietnam, and China. In the letter, Hing argued that wars in Asia were connected to the domestic war against Asians in the United States, as was also
56 Espiritu, Panethnicity, 43. 57 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2007), 31. 58 Red Guard Party, “To Love We Must Survive,” Gidra, June-July 1970, 19. Sugijanto 24 demonstrated by Japanese American incarceration. The fate of Asian Americans was then
“intimately bound up with the fate of Asians in Asia.”59
Concerns over acts of racism perpetrated by white American soldiers during combat and upon their return to the U.S. was another force driving the connections between the international and domestic spheres. In an article on G.I. racism against Asian women both in Vietnam and the
U.S., Gidra editor Evelyn Yoshimura commented that “there is little if any difference between
Asian Americans and Asians in America,” and so “racism against them is too often racism against us.”60 The U.S. military trained G.I.s to fight an enemy with an Asian face, which manifested in many self-reported instances of anti-Asian racism and brutality both within the
U.S. Armed Forces and against the Vietnamese people. Some Asian Americans worried that the behavior of veterans when they returned to America would reflect their conditioning in the military. In her article, Yoshimura exemplified how students and organizers repurposed
America’s blurring of the distinctions between “enemy” and “ally” Asian to underscore the importance of panethnic identities informed by transnational linkages.
Asian Americans who were a part of the 1960s and 1970s movements forged ties between communities within the U.S. nation-state and outside the nation-state through the usage of familial language. This usage showcased how activists constructed panethnic identities informed not only by the immediate consequences of linked fate, but also by a Third World consciousness. In 1970, Pat Sumi, celebrated community activist and a frequent Gidra contributor, evoked the Vietnam War conflict to forge new, Asian American panethnic collective memories. She wrote emphatically that “our Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese ancestors have
59 Alex Hing, “Letter,” Gidra, October 1970, 6. 60 Evelyn Yoshimura, “G.I.’s and Asian Women,” Gidra, January 1971, 15. Sugijanto 25 been fighting for five and six generations against racism.”61 Her usage of “our” suggested a deliberate coupling of Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese communities that informed Sumi’s, who was ethnically Japanese, solidarity with other Asian communities located within and outside of the U.S. nation-state’s borders; this solidarity presumably impacted her conception of self and vice versa. More specifically, Sumi pointed at struggles against racism as the shared, unifying experience. One year later, she wrote on U.S. “neo-colonialism” in Laos and emphasized the
“blood relationship” between Asian Americans and the people of Indochina, linked by a “kinship of oppression.”62 Beyond the Vietnam War, mobilization efforts to push for the removal of U.S. military bases in Okinawa similarly utilized familial language, as students and organizers saw the presence of bases as imperialistic. Judy Kanazawa wrote that some Asian Americans felt an affinity to the conflict as they were as “yellow as the Okinawans,” who Kanazawa referred to as her “brothers and sisters.”63 Usage of familial language revealed how these authors conceived of the global scope of Asian American struggles, as well as the global scope of the events that their impacted conceptions of self.
Gidra and Asian Student editors also reinforced the fuzziness between domestic and international boundaries through the calendars they created in their respective publications.
These calendars advanced the notion that Asian American identities were informed by events occurring within and outside the U.S. In 1973 Gidra published a monthly calendar of local events that would be taking place in the Los Angeles area. Editors also included occurrences like the death anniversary of Ho Chi Minh, the execution of Nguyen Van Troi, who gained notoriety for attempting to assassinate then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the National
61 Pat Sumi, “Activism,” Gidra, December 1970, 14. 62 Pat Sumi, “Laos: A Nation in Struggle,” Gidra, March 1971, 13. 63 Judy Kanazawa, “Okinawa,” Gidra, October 1969, 5. Sugijanto 26
Liberation Day of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).64 Furthermore, Asian Student’s May-
June 1974 issue featured a calendar of notable events that had taken place in May, including the
May 4th Student Movement in China, Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, the invasion of Cambodia, and the bombing of Hanoi in 1972.65 By placing these events and anniversaries next to programming meant for local Asian American communities, editors revealed the types of events they felt were important for Asian American readers to know and associate with Asian America. The May issue of Asian Student also had “May – month of struggle” written on its cover page, with the tagline
“one struggle, many forms” on the next page.66 The decisions of both Gidra and Asian Student editors spoke to the importance critiques of imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere had on their conceptions of Asian American panethnic identities.
Asian American students and organizers connected conflict in Vietnam specifically to issues occurring at the local and community level, and this connection informed their conceptions of self, as well. Gidra editors associated violence on the Berkeley and San Francisco
State campuses against Third World Liberation Front student protesters to U.S. aggression in
Vietnam.67 Y. Chao, writing about a confrontation between protesters at Berkeley and the
National Guard as well as local police officers, lamented that “young men had joined the
[National Guard] to avoid fighting in Vietnam. Now they were being taken away...to wage war against other young Americans.”68 By relating local conflicts to the Vietnam War, Asian
American activists made both relevant to their movements. For example, in 1970, Gidra
64 “September Calendar,” Gidra, September 1973, 23. 65 Asian Student Union, Asian Student, May-June 1974, 2. 66 Asian Student Union, Asian Student, May-June 1974, 1. 67 “A Response to Oppression,” Gidra, April 1969, 1. The Third World Liberation Front was a coalition of student groups that formed first at San Francisco State College and subsequently at Berkeley in response to Eurocentrism in curriculum as well as predominantly white university demographics. 68 Y. Chao, “CS It’s A Gas,” Gidra, June 1969. Sugijanto 27 extensively covered the racially motivated firing of Dr. Thomas Noguchi from his position as
Medical Examiner. High schooler Mitchell Matsumura commented that Asians who advocated for Dr. Noguchi should similarly join rallies to oppose the war in Vietnam.69 Matsumura also described the extent to which the War had become part of the daily lives of students. “Since the
Vietnam War, there has been an increase in the direct linkage and complicity between high schools and the war machine. Federal agents, draft boards, ROTC…have been established in every campus,” he observed.70 Through forging linkages between events that occurred within the
U.S. to those outside of the U.S. nation-state’s conceptual and physical borders, Asian American students and organizers crafted panethnic identities and politics informed by America’s global entanglements.
Students and organizers also associated events occurring within the U.S. nation-state’s borders to those outside of its borders in discussions of labor and economic injustices. During one demonstration in the San Francisco Bay Area, Asian community members mobilized against
U.S. foreign policy and domestic poverty. During the demonstration, community members launched joint critiques against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the Chinese Six
Companies, an association of businessmen and well-to-do merchants. Writing for Gidra, Moon
Eng accused the association of impoverishing the Chinatown community to benefit its members economically.71 Further showcasing the porous boundaries of Asian America, Sumi connected
U.S. aggression in Laos to the activities of the Bank of America, “profiteers” of land stolen from
Japanese Americans while they were in the concentration camps. She also connected U.S. violence aboard to Dillingham, “land-stealers” from the Hawaiian people, and Utah Mining and
69 Mitchell Matsumura, “March for Peace,” Gidra, January 1970, 2. 70 Mitchell Matsumura, “Student Rights: We Want What We Deserve,” Gidra, January 1973, 13. 71 Moon Eng, “Asians United,” Gidra, June-July 1970, 2. Sugijanto 28
Construction, “robbers” of San Francisco Bay’s people.72 Critiques of U.S. power structures and state apparatuses then allowed for these activists to discuss and mobilize for a wide array of domestic and international issues.
Asian American students and organizers then saw how intimately connected the self- determination of Asians in the U.S. was to the self-determination of people living in Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos, and elsewhere in Asia. Articulated during a Conference on the War in
Vancouver, Candace Murata wrote in Gidra that Asians in the U.S. and Asians in Indochina were “all Asian and members of the Third World” struggling against the same power structures, namely U.S. imperialism and liberal capitalism.73 In another Gidra issue, Chester Cheng also connected Asians who lived in Asia to Asian Americans and immigrants residing within the U.S. through linking the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the “race extermination” taking place in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He commented that “yellow people are as expendable as the buffalo and the American Indian. We are gooks in the eyes of White Americans.” 74 These discussions linked disparate instances of violence together via an understanding of Asian lives as disposable as far as U.S. foreign and domestic policy were concerned. Such ties also allowed for the entry of non-East Asians, particularly Southeast Asians, into what was, and still is, an Asian
American collective consciousness predominantly characterized by the memories and narratives of East Asian communities.75
Cheng’s usage of the term “yellow” provided insight into who these predominantly East
Asian students and organizers conceived of as Asian, touching on the boundaries and limitations
72 Pat Sumi, “Laos: A Nation in Struggle,” Gidra, March 1971, 13. 73 Candace Murata, “Open Letter from Vancouver Conference,” Gidra, May 1971, 12. 74 Chester W. Cheng, “Hiroshima- Lest We Forget,” Gidra, December 1970, 12. 75 See Anthony C. Ocampo, “ ‘Am I Really Asian?’: Educational Experiences and Panethnic Identification among Second–Generation Filipino Americans,” Journal of Asian American Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 295-324. Sugijanto 29 of Asian American panethnic identities of this era. Beginning in the eighteenth century,
Enlightenment scholars began to place people into some of the racial categories that have survived, albeit with modifications, until the present day. The work of one of the most honored scientists of the Enlightenment, Johann Bluemenbach, had a particularly large impact on modern racial classifications, building on the work of taxonomist Carlus Linneus.76 Bluemenbach demarcated a difference, owing to skin color and other physical characteristics, between people of Asia he termed “Mongolian,” or “yellow” East Asians, from those who were “Malay,” or
“brown” Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders. Testifying to the messy history of racial categories, Blumenbach categorized some South Asians as “Mongolians,” others as
“Caucasians.”77 Shown by Kanazawa’s usage of “yellow” to refer to Okinawans and Cheng’s usage of “yellow” to refer also to Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, “yellow” connotated a political identity as well as a phenotypic one. While difficult to discern from publications, I suspect that some East Asian American students and organizers used the term “yellow” to refer exclusively to Chinese and Japanese communities, while others used the term to refer to East and
Southeast Asians; the stark absence of discussions dedicated to South Asians in Gidra and Asian
Students Unite! suggested that this group was outside the purview of at least some Chinese,
Japanese, and at times Filipino American activists.
Filipino American students and organizers criticized self-proclaimed panethnic organizations and or periodicals that focused on predominantly East Asian issues and narratives.
Formations of Asian American identities during the Asian American movements period were contentious from the moment the term “Asian America” came about. An early issue of Gidra
76 Stephen Jay Gould, "The Geometer of Race,” Discover 15, no. 11 (1994): 65-69. 77 Raj Bhopal, "The Beautiful Skull and Blumenbach’s Errors: the Birth of the Scientific Concept of Race," BMJ 335, no. 7633 (2007): 1308-1309.
Sugijanto 30 featured poetry from Violet Rabaya, a Filipino student, who wrote of her “brownness” as barring her from entry into the “typical oriental” race, comprised of Japanese and Chinese Americans and immigrants. Rabaya mused that “term oriental has been interpreted by most [“non- orientals”] to mean peoples of yellow skin, the Filipino is not yellow, but brown.” This author ultimately concluded that, “my brothers, all, they know my worth - as yellow as they may be,” indicating that panethnicity remained attractive for some non-East Asian Americans on the basis of shared experiences of oppression.78 Criticisms were also found in a letter to the editor featured in Gidra’s May 1971 edition, where a Filipino American reader commented that Gidra did not feature enough Filipino viewpoints, “making us feel as if we aren’t Asian, to the point where we’ll stop buying Gidra.”79 For predominantly East Asian American editing teams, entry points for Filipino American narratives and viewpoints were often critiques of U.S. liberal capitalism, found in articles discussing class and more specifically the United Farm Workers labor union.
Another entry point was critiques of U.S. global hegemony, specifically in discussions of how the U.S. held “imperialist control over the economy and politics” of the Philippines.80
Transnational linkages and critiques of the U.S. nation-state attenuated some of these tensions, though they did not resolve them.
Asian American activists during this era demarcated the boundaries of Asian America not only along ethnic lines. Panethnic identities require the blurring of distinctions between ethnic groups, but also along various class, gender, and incarceration statuses. Transnational linkages facilitated the difficulties in building cohesive Asian American identities, though fissures did arise. In particular, flashpoints of U.S. imperialist aggression like the Vietnam War and the
78 Violet Rabaya, “I am Curious [yellow],” Gidra, October 1969, 7. 79 Gidra, May 1971. 80 “Katipunan Ng Mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP),” Gidra, January 1974, 3. Sugijanto 31 critiques of the U.S. nation-state it invited allowed for the integration of some of the most disenfranchised and stigmatized individuals into activists’ purview of Asian America. Tensions, often along ethnic and class lines, nevertheless arose. Activists’ productions of Asian American identities heavily informed by Third World liberation and critiques of U.S. imperialism and liberal capitalism influenced who these Asian Americans considered belonged to Asian
American communities.
Asian American panethnic identities produced during the 1960s and 1970s Asian
American movements were highly attuned to issues of class. Students and organizers were as informed by critiques of imperialism as they were by critiques of capitalism. Historian Philipps-
Fein argues that during the anti-Vietnam War movements of the era, many students turned against businessmen and capitalism, as well as many other institutions.81 Marxist-Leninist-
Maoist theories heavily influenced some of the most vocal Asian Americans activists during this time.82 Anti-capitalist critiques contributed to the formation of Asian American identities that encapsulated and centered the experiences of working-class Asian Americans and immigrants.
Julia Yoshinaga, in a Gidra article, wrote on her frustrations that during a protest at UCLA, the
“middle-class Oriental families” in the Crenshaw area did not come out in support of protesting students.83 Amy Uyematsu similarly criticized the “yellow people” who “attained middle-class incomes and feel that they have no legitimate complaint against the existing capitalist structure.”84 Student organizers were also aware that they themselves occupied privileged class positions in being able to access in higher education. Most of the Asians fortunate enough to
81 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010), 155. 82 Espiritu, Panethnicity, 45. 83 Julia Yoshinaga, “In the Community,” Gidra, June-July 1970, 2. 84 Amy Uyematsu, “Emergence of Yellow Power,” Gidra, October 1969, 8. Sugijanto 32 attend college were the ones who came from environments that embraced middle-class lifestyles and values, Gidra contributor Bruce Iwasaki once argued.85
The class critiques of the Asian American movements also positioned big business interests, at times those owned by Asian Americans or immigrants, as existing outside the boundaries of a bona fide Asian American community; these critiques were most evident in discussions of urban renewal and redevelopment of ethnic communities. One of UCLA Asian
American Political Alliance (AAPA)’s published organizational principles was the abolishment of economic discrimination, as “even within the Asian-American community we find Asian businessmen exploiting other Asians.” They went on to write that because, at the time, an overwhelming majority of Asian Americans were working-class, the AAPA must serve the interests of the working-class and not the “few rich Orientals who exploit their own brothers.”86
Examples of these business interests included the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (RPA).
The members of Berkeley’s Asian Student Union criticized the RPA for attempting to destroy the Japanese American community through displacing families and individuals to make way for revenue-generating developments.87 In a provocative speech given at a rally against redevelopment in Little Tokyo and reprinted in Gidra, George Umezawa criticized the large
Japanese corporations that won building contracts in the area from the U.S. government for benefitting at the expense of locals. He also connected events occurring within the U.S. to those outside the U.S. by evoking the Vietnam War. Urban renewal, “this government-controlled program,” Umezawa contended, was “similar to U.S. involvement in Vietnam” in that it was
85 Bruce Iwasaki, “Woodstock/Third World Nation,” Gidra, October 1970, 5. 86 Gidra, August 1969. 87 Asian Student Union, Asian Student, November 1973, 13. Sugijanto 33
“systematically denying the local people their right to re-build on their own.” 88 Dean Toji argued in a separate Gidra issue that businesses like Kajima Corporation, a construction company, and
Bank of Tokyo were “a predatory presence in Little Tokyo.”89 Claiming an Asian American identity then meant committing to dismantling a capitalistic political economic system that in particular harmed lower-income members of Asian America.
A particular flashpoint where issues of class and imperialism erupted was the two-week art and cultural Japan Week Festival, which took place in San Francisco in 1973. Some Asian
Americans interpreted the festival as a diversion for impending renegotiations of U.S.-Japan trade relations and renewal of the U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty. A coalition of Asian American groups like the AAPA and the Red Guard staged protests at the festival as they felt that big businesses, including Bank of America, Standard Oil, and Wells Fargo, and the Japanese government that funded the Festival, were “prostitut[ing] Japanese culture and offers little to our community.”90 The demarcation between the interests of Japanese business and government officials and the “community,” presumably the Asian American community, indicated that to be
Asian American during this period was to subscribe to a particular class politics.
Transnational linkages also made possible the formations of panethnic identities inclusive of some of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised members of society: incarcerated individuals, members of street gangs, and people addicted to drugs. Asian American activists, both those within carceral institutions and those on the outside looking in, critiqued the institutional racism and classism inherent in the justice system, which penalized and harassed disproportionately poor people of color. These critiques were found in Gidra, particularly in the
88 George Umezawa, “Redevelopment…or the Rape of Little Tokyo,” Gidra, February 1973, 10. 89 Dean Toji, “The Housing Crisis in Little Tokyo and A Case for Blackmail in Seeking Reparations,” Gidra, December 1973, 7-10. 90 “Japan Week,” Gidra, September 1969. Sugijanto 34 form of letters sent in from incarcerated Asian Americans. In 1972, these communications became a part of a regular feature entitled “Joint Communications.”91 Asian American students and organizers active during the Asian American movements conceived of incarcerated youth and adults as integral members of the community. Activists created organizations like Asian
American Hard Core and Asian Joint Communication, both of which focused on serving people currently incarcerated and those recently released. These local service organizations were a part of many other “serve the people” programs, derived from the Black Panther Party’s programs, that sought to develop the political consciousness of both individuals who ran the programs and those who used the program’s services. Community education and consciousness-raising initiatives also did not pass over incarcerated populations. One that occurred at the Youth
Training School (YTS), a California Correctional Institution for the California Youth Authority, included an ethnic studies courses and seminars for Asian inmates. These seminars allowed for students and organizers to inform incarcerated youth of the thoughts expressed by Asian communities at-large.92
The inclusion of previous and current gang members into activists’ conceptions of Asian
American identities provided insight into how transnational critiques of power influenced the scope of Asian America. Authors in Gidra saw street gangs as a phenomenon ripe for critiques of racism and U.S. liberal capitalism. Throughout 1973, Gidra had a reoccurring feature entitled
“Them Bad Cats” focused on unpacking the politics behind street gangs. In one article, George, who used to be a part of the Constituents, connected street gangs to the Asian American movements. Both would exist “as long as you have racism and the economic class structure of
91 Three Asian Brothers, “Letters to the Editors,” Gidra, December 1970. See also Gidra, November 1970; “Joint Communications,” Gidra, March 1972; Gidra, April 1974. 92 Craig Ishii, “YTS Happening,” Gidra, October 1970, 15. Sugijanto 35 this society.” Russell Valparaiso, a former member of the Tiny Black Juans, also argued that gangs existed because “the System…[is] in the interest of the people who have big corporate interests in Vietnam like Bank of America.”93 Valparaiso specifically discussed the Vietnam
War, underscoring how Asian American activists evoked this war to critique the actions of the
U.S. nation-state. By committing themselves to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics, Asian
American activists conceived of a heterogeneous mixture of individuals as integral members of
Asian America.
Asian American students and organizers wrote about drug addiction, and incarceration due to drug-related charges amongst the youth, in transnational terms. Those who used and were addicted to narcotics were critical members of the Asian American movements, evidenced by the existence of organizations like the Yellow Brotherhood, Asian Sisters, and Search to Involve
Pilipino Americans. Each of these organizations served Asian Americans currently or previously addicted to drugs. In writing about and organizing around addiction, some Asian Americans saw drug usage as the result of fissures in personal identity caused by racism and assimilationist pressures.94 These sympathies reaffirmed an Asian American political, organizing identity that was staunchly anti-racist and anti-capitalist. In a eulogy written by Merilynne Hamano of Asian
Sisters for Clara Ueda, who died of a drug overdose, Hamano stated:
Sometimes it's hard to integrate rhetoric with reality, to see how sexism, racism, and capitalism affect us…But at times, we see how much they are a part of us, how they can destroy us... Clara's death reflects the gross contradictions of sexism, racism, and capitalism which destroyed her and still affects all of us, individually and collectively.95
93 Jeff Furumura, Tom Okabe, and Roy Nakano, “Them Bad Cats,” Gidra, January 1973, 7. The Constituents and Tiny Black Juans were two gangs active in the mid-1950s. 94May Fu, “ ‘Serve the People and You Help Yourself’: Japanese-American Anti-Drug Organizing in Los Angeles, 1969 to 1972," Social Justice 35, no. 2 (2008): 80. 95 Merilynne Hamano, “Thoughts of Remembrance for Clara,” Gidra, May 1972, 8. Sugijanto 36
Business interests underpinned the linkages activists conceptualized between racism and capitalism, particularly those of pharmaceutical giants like Eli Lilly and their purposeful bombarding of markets with barbiturates. Some of the Gidra staff members were also cognizant of the linkages between drug usage, poverty, penal institutions, and U.S. aggression abroad. Tom
Okabe wrote on a rally held in Little Tokyo with the three pronged theme of “Vietnam, drugs and redevelopment.” Okabe argued that “corporations...who are prolonging the war because of their interests in Southeast Asia, [are] killing our youth through the overproduction of drugs, and threatening our older people’s homes...through Redevelopment.”96 Editors also dedicated
Gidra’s March 1971 issue to “Street Asians,” referring to those with unstable housing conditions often due to drug-related issues, incarceration, or gang activity. In the same issue, Gidra featured a special report on U.S. aggression in Laos, perhaps intentionally providing a direct linkage between the two phenomena.97
As the political climate of the 1960s and 1970s informed Asian American panethnic identities, some activists utilized these identities to advance feminist causes. Asian American students and organizers decried the sexism rampant in the Asian American movements and pointed to the “triple oppression” of women along gender, race, and class lines.98 Activists advocated for the advancement of Asian American and immigrant women’s liberation through transnational bonds, as well. Movement women frequently used images of North Vietnamese women taking up arms and joining in war efforts to offer an alternative image of the “Asian woman.” For example, the March 1970 cover image of Gidra was of a Vietnamese woman holding both a baby and a machine gun. The same issue featured articles written by Vietnamese
96 Tom Okabe, “On the Home Front,” Gidra, February 1973, 9. 97 Gidra, March 1971. 98 Espiritu, Panethnicity, 48. Sugijanto 37 women, many of which detailed how they organized themselves into militia units.99 To be an
Asian woman was then to be a part of the Third World and to be engaged in a struggle to reject a
“society which will destroy lives in Vietnam for economic gain.” This same society “degrades human relationships by perpetuating limited, sexist roles for women and men.”100 The Vietnam
War solidified the role of women as integral parts of any anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement, while feminist critiques themselves allowed for a deeper understanding of gendered violence and oppression globally.
Beyond strictly Asian American and immigrant communities, the transnational politics that Asian American activists engaged in allowed for the formation of broader solidarity networks between them and other communities of color. These networks spoke to how they conceived of Asian American panethnic identities during this era as defined by a commitment to
Third World liberation, domestically as well as globally. For example, Merilynne Hamano argued in a Gidra article focused on the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) reclaiming of
Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973 that Indian nations were “just as much conquered nations as the colonized nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”101 In addition, a Gidra editorial on the United Farm Workers strike in 1973 called for Nisei, meaning second-generation Japanese
American, farmers to unite themselves with farmworkers, particularly Mexican Americans and immigrants who at times bore the brunt of Nisei farmers’ racism. Editors argued that both communities were fighting against a common enemy that benefitted from local farmer- farmworker tensions, agribusiness. The “farmlands of California have long served as a stronghold for powerful corporate interests [Wells Fargo Bank, Butte Gas and Oil]....the large
99 Photo spreads of women in Vietnam joining the People’s Army were published in the following editions of Gidra: March 1970, May 1972, and June 1972. 100 Brian Wakano, “Relationship,” Gidra, April 1972, 10. 101 Merilynne Hamano, “Nation Building at Wounded Knee,” Gidra, April 1973, 1. Sugijanto 38 corporations continue to reap in huge amounts of wealth off the labor of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, [and] small farmers,” editors argued.102
During the Asian American movements era of the 1960s and1970s, radical Asian
American students and organizers aligned panethnic identities with anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and so “revolutionary and socialist in implication.”103 In this time period, Asian American activists, heavily informed by the politics of the era, entertained conceptualizations of Asian
American panethnic identities unbound by the borders of the United States. While they organized within Asian American national movements, students and organizers linked physical and economic violence occurring within and outside of the U.S. nation-state to one another, particularly focusing on the Vietnam War and war profiteering. Asian American activists thus drew transnational linkages that not only allowed for the creation of bonds between disparate ethnic Asian communities, but also between various racial groups. These linkages resulted from, and also reinforced, Asian American activists’ commitment to Third World liberation during this era.
In Gidra’s December 1972 issue, Vince Katow remarked that the “Asian American identity is not something that is defined once and for all…identity is always changing, always seeking redefinition.”104 Asian American students and organizers constantly redefined and renegotiated panethnic identities in order to imagine new connections and sever old connections.
In particular, these identities shift alongside changes in the politics and or economics of the U.S. nation-state. Alongside broader trends in the U.S. political economy, Asian immigration and migration to the U.S. continued to alter the ethnic and class makeup of Asian America in the
102 “The Wheels of Justice Do Not Move as Fast as Nature Grows Grapes,” Gidra, October 1973, 5. 103 B.I., “Searching for Trajectory,” Gidra, April 1974, 11. 104 Vince Katow, “Search for Identity – a Process,” Gidra, December 1972. Sugijanto 39
1980s and onwards. Indicated by ASU’s 1979 newsletter, institutional forces, like the university, continued to also encroach upon gains students and community organizers made in the 1960s.105
These changes necessitated the formation of new political linkages to unite individuals across racial, ethnic, class, and other lines.
105 Asian Student Union, Asian Students Unite!, Winter 1979, 7. Sugijanto 40
Chapter 2 - Within the Nation-State: Changing Population Demographics and the New
Right (1980s – 1990s)
Nelson Nagai, one of the original members of the Asian American youth group Yellow
Seed, wrote that after the 1989 Cleveland Elementary School massacre of predominantly
Southeast Asian refugee children in Stockton, California, members of the then defunct Yellow
Seed regrouped. “The massacre in itself was not a surprise to us; what was surprising was that we know enough to get together” Nagai commented. Organizing as part of the Yellow Seed,
Nagai reminisced, taught him and fellow members to “care for the Asian community.” The collective proceeded to contact Southeast Asian community members and, among other things, succeed in getting a full-time counselor hired at the Cleveland School and acquiring Stockton’s first Asian American History Week.106 During the 1960s and 1970s, the Yellow Seed was a support organization for Asian working-class youths comprised of Chinese and Japanese
Americans. That the organization went on to aid Southeast Asian community members reflected not only the changing demographics of Asian American and immigrant populations in the 1980s, but also an expansion in who students and organizers conceived of as a part of Asian America.
In other ways, students and organizers also narrowed their conceptions of Asian
American panethnic identities when compared to the previous era. Erich Nakano, a student at
Berkeley and member of the Asian Student Union, remarked that the Asian students of the 1980s generation were “unfamiliar with the struggles [and the politics] of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”
Community organizer Glenn Omatsu argues that the shift from the New Left era to the rise of the
New Right in the 1980s also coincided with a shift in what the category “Asian American” meant to Asians in America. This category, birthed out of the Asian American movements that tackled
106 Nelson Nagai, “Yellow Seed,” Gidra, 1990, 72. Sugijanto 41 fundamental questions about power and the source of oppression, became by the 1980s a category focused less so on politics and more so on cultural and ethnicity.107 While most of the authors that I discuss in this chapter saw Asian American as a political identity, other self- identified Asian Americans during this decade may have understood “Asian American” differently.
This chapter then attempts to explore, through periodicals, how students and community organizers expanded and yet simultaneously narrowed their conceptions of Asian American identities in light of conservative trends, as well as changes to community demographics.
Asian American students and community organizers saw the 1980s as a period marked by a conservativism in U.S. politics, political economy, and national culture. Students in particular were, Erich Nakano wrote, “confronting the challenges of the move to the right in society overall, Reaganomics, and deepening class and national stratification.”108 A nonprofit organization, the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), argued that Ronald Reagan’s policies also encouraged “anti-immigration, chauvinism which directly contributed to the increased violence against Asians” during the decade.109 In attempting to understand the shift between the Asian American movements of the 1960s and 1970s to the 1980s, Omatsu argues that militant, grassroots organizing during past decades resulted in a crisis for U.S. ruling classes.
The elite subsequently launched an ideological and economical “corporate offensive” against the masses which culminated in Reagan’s ascent to the presidency in 1980.110 In many industries,
107 Omatsu, “ ‘Four Prisons,’ ” 299. 108 Erich Nakano, “A Look At Today’s Asian Pacific Student Movement,” East Wind, Fall/Winter 1983, 20-21. 109 Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), “AARW Support,” Newsletter, September 1984, 5. 110 Omatsu, “ ‘Four Prisons,’ ” 307-308; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010). Sugijanto 42 this offensive entailed a chiseling away of wage and benefit gains obtained in previous decades, as well as mass layoffs.111
The 1980s was also a period that saw explosive growth in both the size and heterogeneity of Asian American communitiefs. According to the U.S. Census, the number of Asians and
Pacific Islanders in the U.S. went from approximately 3.7 million in 1980 to 7.3 million in 1990.
In 1980 as well as 1990, Chinese Americans and immigrants compromised the highest proportion of Asians, followed by Filipino, Japanese, Asian Indian, Korean, then Vietnamese populations. Most communities made homes for themselves in the Western states.112 The resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the effects of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act that privileged the entry of professional
Asian immigrants, both contributed to this rise. The children of the latter cohort, many of whom came of age in the 1980s, were products of middle-class backgrounds and benefitted from expanding job opportunities in white-collar fields like law, medicine, and education.113
This chapter focuses on the viewpoints of students and community organizers situated in
California, though it also introduces opinions from Boston, Massachusetts. The Asian American movements of the 1960s and 1970s were largely concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area,
Los Angeles, and New York City.114 Bringing in sources from Boston, a city with a sizable
Asian American and immigrant population, allows for a glimpse into the regional similarities and or differences in constructions of panethnic identities. The thoughts expressed by Bostonian
111 Omatsu, “ ‘Four Prisons,’ ” 309. 112 US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, General Population Characteristics, PC80-1-B1 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1983), 140; US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, We, the American Asians, WE-3 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1993), 1. 113 Omatsu, “ ‘Four Prisons,’ ” 312. 114 Daryl J. Maeda, Rethinking the Asian American Movement (London: Routledge, 2012). Sugijanto 43 students and organizers may also indicate how activists’ physical ties to the institutions (like
Berkeley) and localities in which the Asian American movements flourished impacted their conceptions of panethnic identities. I attempt to distinguish, where possible, historical actors who came of age in the 1980s from organizers who actively mobilized in the 1960s and 1970s.
Key publications created for, and written by, Asian Americans during this decade included Gidra, East Wind, and the AARW’s Newsletter. Gidra staff members regrouped in
1990 for a 20th anniversary edition where they solicited the work of, as written by the issue’s editors, “Chinese American, Korean American, Southeast Asian American, and Pilipino
Americans.”115 The explicit inclusion of Southeast Asian Americans in particular spoke to how the demographic changes in Asian American and immigrant populations expanded activists’ conceptions of Asian America. Some Gidra staff members went on to write for the East Wind, a national periodical published by Getting Together Publications that ran from 1982 until 1989.116
Many of the East Wind’s editors were activists who had come of age during the antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s and remained active in Asian American communities as older adults. These experiences underpinned the magazine’s overall leftist positionality, and staff sought to create a publication that advanced the unity of Asian people as a whole.117 The AARW was a nonprofit organization created in 1979 to “unite all Asians,” to promote “the Asian
American identity,”118 and to “express the Asian American experience through art, culture, and historical education.”119 In 1984, AARW Director Julian Low stated that the AARW was “the
115 Evelyn Yoshimura, “Editorial Introduction” Gidra, 1990, 1. 116 “What was the League of Revolutionary Struggle?,” Unity Archive Project, accessed January 10, 2020, https://unityarchiveproject.org/what-is-lrs/. Getting Together Publications was the publishing company of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), a nationwide organization formed from the union of I Wor Kuen, a Marxist collective of Asian Americans, and the August 29th Movement, a Chicano communist organization. 117 Eddie Wong, “Introducing EAST WIND,” East Wind, Spring/Summer 1982, 2-3. 118 Julian Low, “New Director for the Workshop,” Newsletter, October 1984, 2. 119 AARW, “Introducing This Issue,” Newsletter, January-February 1984, 1. Sugijanto 44 first organization in New England to try and reach all Asian groups and to identify itself as Asian
American, and not just a particular nationality,” testifying to the panethnic self-consciousness of the collective.120 The AARW, comprised of undergraduate students, recent graduates, and working professionals, began publishing monthly newsletters in July of 1983. By November of that year, they sent newsletters out to “nearly 1,000 individuals and organizations, both locally and out-of-state.”121
For the perspectives of specifically university students, I look at Asian Students Unite!,
Magandá, and Voices. By 1981, Asian students previously denied entry into institutions of higher learning came to constitute around 20% of Berkeley’s student population.122 Berkeley’s
ASU produced Asian Students Unite!, while Filipino American Berkeley students began publishing their own magazine, Magandá, in 1990.123 Voices is an ongoing literary publication that students at Tufts University began publishing in 1977. More specifically, Tufts University’s
Asian Students Club, renamed the Tufts Asian American Society in 1990, produced the magazine. By 1990, the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Indian Subcontinent student associations all supported the publication, though most of the editors and contributors to
Voices were East Asian.124 Voices staff sought to work towards helping students “realize that we have a separate and real identity [as Asian Americans].”125According to Elizabeth Ahn Toupin, who was Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Tufts in 1984, the Asian student population in the 1980s included recently arrived immigrants as well as second, third, and fourth-
120 Julian Low, “New Director for the Workshop,” Newsletter, October 1984, 2. 121 AARW, “Introducing this issue,” Newsletter, November 1983, 1. 122 ASU, “Asian American Studies For Whom? Students or the University,” Autumn 1981, 3. 123 Ray Orquiola Jr, “Premiere: Editor’s Note,” Magandá, February 1990, 5. 124 Voices, 1990. 125 “Editor’s Note,” Voices, 1982. Sugijanto 45 generation American-born Asians. It also included students who were “penniless refugees” and
“wealthy refugees,” as well as students who were “professional or skilled workers” and students who “may simply be related to earlier established immigrants.”126
Similar to during the Asian American movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in the 1980s,
Asian American students and community activists found panethnicity to be a useful political organizing tool, particularly given the increase in anti-Asian violence. While many of them subscribed to left leaning politics, their critiques of anti-Asian violence did not always result in critiques of imperialism and capitalism. Likely as a result, they increasingly saw Asian American identities as built upon shared experiences occurring more or less exclusively within the U.S. nation-state. Activists who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s were committed to Third
World liberation and conceived of Asian American panethnic identities as transnationally informed. These radical Asian Americans saw U.S. imperialism and liberal capitalism as forces that operated within and outside of the U.S nation-state’s borders. Many of them continued to work within Asian American communities, and their writing in publications like East Wind and
Gidra’s 20th anniversary edition attested to how some of these older Asian Americans retained their transnational perspectives. The 1980s then marked a significant shift in U.S. politics, political economy, and national culture that influenced how Asian American students and community organizers saw themselves as well as others as “Asian American.” The three types of experiences I discuss to illustrate this point are the threat of anti-Asian violence and sense of shared victimization, struggles against the image of the model minority, and ethnic-specific histories conceptualized as relevant for all Asian Americans, namely Japanese American incarceration.
126 Elizabeth Ahn Toupin, “Random Notes on Asian Students: The New Invisible-Visible Minority of East Coast Schools” Voices, 1984, 5. Sugijanto 46
Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes
Anti-Asian violence became a key impetus for the formation of linkages between disparate Asian ethnic groups, and outbreaks of violence influenced how Asian American activists of the time conceived the individuals and identities represented by Asian America.
According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as of 1986, no government data existed capable of determining “accurately the level of activity against persons of Asian descent, or whether the number of incidents has increased, decreased or stayed the same.”127 Regardless, the sheer quantity of articles centered on anti-Asian violence analyzed below attest to how many students and community organizers saw anti-Asian violence as on the rise. For example, the
AARW published a special report in 1987 entitled “To Live in Peace” dedicated to combating rising anti-Asian violence in the Boston area.128 Victimization within the U.S. nation-state became an experience shared by “all” Asians in America, resulting in what academic Yến
Lê Espiritu terms “reactive solidarity.” As a result of the public’s inability to distinguish between different Asian ethnicities, Asian Americans suffer “sanctions for no behavior of their own, but for the activities of others who resemble them,” and so anti-Asian violence lent itself to the formation of a “protective pan-Asian ethnicity.”129 Anti-Asian violence and a shared sense of victimization became important for students and organizers’ conceptions of Asian American identities and resulted in an expansion, however tenuous, of Asian America to encompass recently resettled Southeast Asian refugees as well as Korean Americans. Phenotypic differences between for example East and South Asian Americans and immigrants may have simultaneously
127 United States Commission on Civil Rights, Recent Activities Against Citizens and Residents of Asian Descent (Washington, DC, 1986). 128 AARW Civil Rights Capacity-Building Project, To Live in Peace…Responding to Anti-Asian Violence in Boston (Boston, MA: Asian American Resource Workshop, 1987). 129 Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 134-135. Sugijanto 47 disrupted the formation of truly pan-Asian identities, as South Asian narratives remained largely absent from panethnic publications.
The wrongful conviction of working-class Korean American Chol Soo Lee was one flashpoint of anti-Asian violence that elicited nationwide responses from a diverse cohort of
Asian Americans. In 1973, Lee was convicted of murdering Yip Yee Tak, a Chinatown gang advisor, in California and sentenced to life imprisonment. Some Asian American students believed that white witnesses framed Lee. Berkeley’s ASU argued that “although more than 60 persons witnessed the killing [of Tak], only six white tourists cooperated with the police.” Of the six tourists, three chose a five-year-old photo of Lee and named him as the murderer. 130 Lee’s conviction was overturned in 1979 with the arrival of a new witness, though while imprisoned, he was charged with the murder of fellow inmate Morrison Needham and placed on death row, though Lee claimed self-defense. Berkeley’s ASU also contested this conviction, as during his trial for Needham’s murder, “the jury, void of any Asian faces, could not help but be influenced by the climate of fear that was created.”131 Largescale efforts to overturn Lee’s Chinatown murder conviction and later his death row sentence began in early 1978 when Asian American activists brought the case to the attention of Korean American investigative reporter K.W. Lee.
Organizing began in the Korean community, though it became panethnic in scope with the growth of several Free Chol Soo Lee defense committees in California. Some of these committees gathered financial contributions from as far as Hawaii, Texas, Washington, D.C., and
Chicago.132
130 ASU, “Free Chol Soo Lee!!,” Asian Students Unite!, Winter 1980, 2. 131 ASU, “Free Chol Soo Lee!!,” Asian Students Unite!, Winter 1980, 2. 132 Grace J. Yoo, Mitchel Wu, Emily Han Zimmerman, Leigh Saito, “Twenty-Five Years Later: Lessons Learned from the Free Chol Soo Lee Movement,” Asian American Policy Review 19 (2010): 73. Sugijanto 48
Lee’s case “placed Korean Americans in the spotlight, at center stage in a pan-Asian political drama,” marking a shift from when Korean Americans felt excluded from Chinese and
Japanese American-dominated panethnic spaces.133 The case then reaffirmed the place of Korean
Americans in Asian America. Japanese American attorney Ranko Yamada, involved in a Free
Chol Soo committee as a university student, recalled that Lee’s case gathered the support of
Korean Americans and immigrants, Asian American revolutionaries, ministers, businessmen, and students, who spearheaded the bulk of the organizing. Yamada also wrote that Asian
American community organizers worked to bring the case “to working and poor people” to have them identify with Lee’s struggle.134 Berkeley’s ASU once sponsored an educational workshop on Lee and argued that his case “stands as a clear indictment against a society and a criminal justice system which victimizes an innocent man because of racism, oppression of ethnic minorities and discrimination against the poor.”135 ASU students connected Lee’s case to U.S. political and economic conditions and so opened up channels for solidarity across class, as well as racial and ethnic, lines. Lee’s case catalyzed a panethnic organizing effort that evoked and strengthened Asian American consciousness.
Similar panethnic organizing occurred after the 1982 racially-motivated murder of
Vincent Chin in Michigan by two white men, an event considered by many Asian Americans “to be [the] archetype of anti-Asian violence in this country.”136AARW staff dedicated their 1987 To
Live in Violence report on violence against Asians in Boston to Vincent Chin, attesting to the place Chin’s case occupied in Asian Americans’ consciousness.137 In a separate editorial, AARW
133 Yoo, “Lessons Learned,” 76. 134 Ranko Yamada, “What Price Justice?: A Commentary on the Acquittal of Chol Soo Lee,” East Wind, Fall/Winter 1983, 17. 135 ASU, “Free Chol Soo Lee!!”, Asian Students Unite!, Winter 1980, 4. 136 Espiritu, Panethnicity, 135. 137 AARW Civil Rights Capacity-Building Project, To Live in Peace, iii. Sugijanto 49 staff argued that “a wave of anti-Asian violence that is sweeping the country” ultimately killed
Chin. They then proceeded to list violent attacks that had taken place in Boston against Asian women, specifically Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Korean women, as well as Japanese workers.
Furthermore, AARW staff identified factors contributing to the uptick in violence, like stagflation in the early 1980s, as “whenever the American economy deteriorates, minority groups have been scapegoated,” they wrote. Other factors included “Japanese economic competition, influx of Indo-Chinese refugees, cultural ignorance, and the ever-presence of racism.”138 Asian
American students and organizers interpreted the upsurge in anti-Asian violence as the product of changes to the U.S. political economy. Panethnicity became a useful organizing tool to unite disparate Asian ethnic communities together in response to rising hate crimes.
The arrival of Southeast Asian refugees into the U.S. post-War solidified, through local outbreaks of violence against Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian communities, Asian
American students and community organizers’ conceptions of Southeast Asians as part of Asian
America. Asian American activists’ extensive focus on the Vietnam War in the earlier era was crucial for the expansion in their conceptions of panethnic identities to include non-East Asian
American communities. An article published in the AARW in 1984 showcased why the Vietnam
War remained significant for the Asian community as a whole. AARW editors wrote, regarding white Vietnam veterans who firebombed a Buddhist temple in Athol, Massachusetts, that the attack represented a reminder “that the racist character of the Vietnam War continues to impact…Asians in America today.”139
138 AARW, “Editorial: A $3,000 License to Kill a Chinaman,” Newsletter, July 1983, 1. 139 AARW, “Asians For Justice Update,” Newsletter, March 1984, 4. Sugijanto 50
Anti-Asian violence became a central issue influencing how students and community organizers conceived of Asian American identities, seen through connections made between the
Vincent Chin case and local instances of Southeast Asian violence in the Boston area. These connections associated cases of violence against Chinese Americans and violence against
Southeast Asian Americans, and Asian American organizers saw both as equally relevant for
Asian American communities as a whole. In 1983, AARW Program Director Peter Kiang went on a bilingual Chinese radio program to discuss the significance of the Vincent Chin case, but also of “local attacks against Vietnamese and Cambodians.” Kiang’s presentation connected the
“the sharp rise in anti-Japanese sentiment in 1981-82 to the brutal Detroit murder of Vincent
Chin in 1982 to the fatal stabbing of Anh Mai in Dorchester this past summer.”140 Anh Mai was a Bostonian Vietnamese resident stabbed to death by a white marine in 1983. Kiang not only brought up Southeast Asians in a radio program specifically geared towards Chinese Americans and immigrants, but he also linked instances of violence against Chinese, Japanese, and
Southeast Asian communities together. In addition, the Vincent Chin Ad hoc Committee Seeking
Justice for Chin, based in Boston, renamed itself Asians for Justice, denoting a self- consciousness regarding the scope of the collective’s purpose. They organized to support Anh
Mai, with one of their goals being “to gain visibility as Asian Americans fighting for civil rights.”141 Southeast Asian Americans then entered into conceptions of Asian America as a result of violence and shared experiences of victimization. Physical violence also allowed for connections made with marginalized communities outside of Asian America, thus expanding solidarities with these individuals. When mobilizing for Anh Mai, Asians for Justice wrote an
140 AARW, “Responding to Violence Against Asians,” Newsletter, November 1983, 6. 141 AARW, “Anh Mai Trial to Begin,” Newsletter, April 1984, 7. Sugijanto 51 article on the case that evoked not only the memory of Vincent Chin, but also that of William
Atkinson, a Black Bostonian who was “cursed and beaten by a gang of white youth” and as a result struck by an oncoming train.142 Also related to Anh Mai, the AARW editorial board wrote that while “outrage against Vietnamese in South Boston, Cambodians in East Boston, and
Cambodians and Vietnamese in Chelsea” must be met with a “united struggle” encompassing
“Blacks and Hispanics and working-class Whites.143
While anti-Asian violence resulted in an expansion of Asian America to include Korean
Americans and Southeast Asian American refugees, Asian American students and organizers’ as a whole continued to marginalize South Asian Americans from Asian America. According to a
Population Reference Bureau Inc. report from 1989, “Asian Indians” made up 10% of all Asians in America.144 Testifying to the unifying power of anti-Asian violence, in 1991, Nisha Mehta, active in a Boston-based Indian group for women, stated that while the “cultural and historical circumstances of South Asians” were different from many other Asian Americans, they shared
“many common concerns with the larger Asian American community.” One of these concerns,
Mehta discussed, was anti-Asian violence, as with the Vincent Chin case.145 In another AARW newsletter, editors released an article on the Anh Mai trial and included a note on violence against other Asians in Boston, including that against Sashi Nayak, an Indian musician who three white youths harassed.146 Discussions of other instances of violence against South Asians, like the infamous Dotbusters case that received press coverage from the New York Times, remained
142 AARW “Asians For Justice,” Newsletter, January-February 1984, 3. 143 AARW, “Editorial: Anti-Asian Violence,” Newsletter, June 1985, 2. 144 Robert Gardner, Bryant Robey, and Peter C. Smith., Asian Americans: Growth, Change, and Diversity (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, Inc., 1989), 3. 145 Nisha Mehta, “South Asians in the U.S,” Newsletter, August 1991, 8. 146 AARW, “Anh Mai Trial Postponed Until August,” Newsletter, July 1984, 9. Sugijanto 52 absent from panethnic periodicals. The Dotbusters were a hate group based in Jersey City, New
Jersey that terrorized local South Asian communities in 1987.147
Asian American students and organizers’ inclusion of South Asians narratives and communities was not consistent, testifying to the tenuousness of South Asians’ place within
Asian American consciousness. In an AARW newsletter, editors published an article in 1984 on an Asian American Student Teacher’s Conference, for which AARW produced bilingual photo panels concentrating on issues related to various ethnic communities within Asian America, panels of the Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Chinese.148
While the AARW did not conceive of South Asian Americans as part of Asian America in their
1984 conference, by 1985, when the AARW sponsored another conference with The Children’s
Museum to address the needs of educators working with Asian populations, one of the workshops was on “Resources on India and Indians in America.”149 However in 1988, when
Richard Chang commended the Asian American magazine Rice in an AARW Newsletter, he failed to mention South Asians. Chang appreciated the magazine’s panethnic scope, as it included “all Asian groups, including ‘Koreans, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese and
Pacific Islanders.”150
Struggles Against the Model Minority Stereotype
A common struggle against the pervasiveness of the model minority stereotype also united Asian American students and organizers together. Many articles in student and community periodicals during this time period focused on combating the model minority as the public’s dominant image and understanding of Asian Americans. “Model minority,” as it
147 Michel Marriott, “In Jersey City, Indians Protest Violence,” New York Times, October 12, 1987. 148 AARW, “Asian American Studies: Teachers’ Conference,” Newsletter, November 1984, 3-4. 149 AARW, “Teachers Conference Seeks Volunteers,” Newsletter, March 1985, 5. 150 Richard Chang, “Rice: Food for Thought,” Newsletter, November 1988, 8. Sugijanto 53 operates in the U.S., is a label ascribed to a community that is perceived to be socioeconomically successful, measured by markers like income and educational attainment. The term has most often been used to refer to Asian Americans, though Jewish American communities also have distinct histories with the model minority stereotype. In 1966, sociologist William Petersen used the term “model minority” in a New York Times Magazine article to refer to the socioeconomic success of specifically Japanese American families, success that Petersen attributed to Japanese culture.151 While Petersen was the first to apply the specific term “model minority” to Asian
American communities, the origins of the term date back to World War II. Not coincidentally, the term arose in prominence during a period of urban unrest in the U.S., a time when students and community organizers critiqued capitalism, racism, and imperialism, stoking fear in the establishment.152 The term also spread to become an identifier for non-Japanese Asian American and immigrant communities, as well, ignoring the heterogeneity of socioeconomic statuses found within these communities. For example, Berkeley student Ed Perez wrote an article in Magandá in 1990 addressing these class differences. Perez interviewed three Filipinos who were “products of the third wave of Filipino immigrants, the middle-class exodus of professionals from the
Philippines in the late-60s/early-70s.” One of the interviewees, Mike Irlandez, a student at
Berkeley, observed that “[in California]...I noticed that a lot of the domestic labor force, people who are bellboys or busboys, are Pilipino...most of the Pilipinos I knew in Kentucky were professionals, doctors and lawyers.”153
151 William, Petersen, "Success Story, Japanese-American Style," New York Times Magazine 9, no. 6 (1966): 20. 152 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2020), 42. 153 Ed Perez, “Pilipino Diversity in America,” Magandá, February 1990, 11. Sugijanto 54
Politicians, the media, and white Americans used the model minority stereotype to restore faith in the values and success of liberal capitalism whilst simultaneously wage war against
Black and brown communities, as well as the poor.154 Reagan, who evoked and deployed images of the Black “welfare queen” during his 1980 presidential campaign bid, remarked in 1984 that
Asian Americans had achieved the American dream through hard work.155 Model minority, as a historically mediated political, ideological, and economic discourse, then assigns exceptionalism to Asian American and immigrant subjects in order to weaponize them against other communities of color. Sandy Leung’s, a Tufts University student, creative writing piece showcased this weaponization. In her story, a white neighbor attempted to solicit an Asian family’s signature on a petition to prevent a Black family from moving into their neighborhood.
The white neighbor commented that “we like you Orientals. You keep your lawn clean and kids quiet,” while “those coloreds are different. They rather live off welfare than work.”156 Leung’s story ended with the Asian family refusing to sign the petition as white neighbors had in the past also shared a petition to deny them a home in the neighborhood. Leung then saw Black welfare dependence and model minority as two inextricably bound stereotypes.
Asian American students and organizers during the 1980s believed that to be Asian
American was to position oneself against the model minority image, thereby limiting the types of individuals who could claim Asian America. For example, AARW Executive Director Carlton
Sagara wrote that the work of the AARW contributed “to a definition of the Asian American
154 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 227-228. I would argue that communities of color also utilize the myth, at times. 155 Ronald Takaki, “The Myth of the ‘Model Minority,” in Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, ed. David M. Newman (Washington, D.C.: SAGE Publishing, 1995), 255-259. 156 Sandy Leung, “Neighborhood,” Voices, 1980, 38. Sugijanto 55 community that points beyond the definition of Asian Americans as the ‘model minority.’”157 In another Newsletter article, Erich Nakano condemned Arthur Hu, an Asian student who filed a complaint against Berkeley’s affirmative action policies for being discriminatory against Asian
Americans. Nakano argued that “Asians [emphasis mine] have no interest in joining in on attacks upon others [referring to other communities of color] who have similarly faced racism and injustice.”158Does Hu’s positionality, then, inherently place him outside of the “Asian” identity and negate his claim to “Asian-ness”? Denying Asian Americans who identify as model minorities entry into Asian America indicated the ways in which Asian American activists engaged in boundary making when conceiving of Asian American identities.
The Creation of Collective Histories
Asian American activists framed their sense of selves as Asian Americans also through forging collective histories based on particular historical flashpoints, and they at times evoked collective histories for organizing purposes. Students and community organizers did not consider all experiences part of Asian American collective history, as they evoked particular histories more than others, and some not at all. Histories specific to particular ethnic groups that took on collective significance during this time period included Japanese American incarceration, embodied in the national push for Redress and Reparations (R/R). The R/R campaign saw
Japanese Americans, as well as other Asian Americans, seek monetary restitution and an apology from Congress for mass incarceration during World War II.
Asian American students and community organizers described the significance of R/R as something relevant for all Asian Americans. In Asian Students Unite!, ASU students argued that
157 Carlton Sagara, “Inside,” Newsletter, August 1988, 2. 158 Erich Nakano, “Are Asian Americans Against Affirmative Action?,” Newsletter, September 1990, 7. Sugijanto 56
R/R was significant for Asian Americans and immigrants who were not of Japanese descent as it touched on a “long legacy of racism and oppression Japanese, like other Asian nationalities, faced throughout their history in this country.” Given these similarities, “the demand for Redress and Reparations (R/R) within the Japanese American community has become an issue of the
Asian Movement as a whole.”159 ASU students wrote that they had, as an Asian American organization, “taken up the struggle for R/R because we feel that we too have been affected by the Camps.”160 The movement for R/R allowed for solidarities between various Asian ethnic communities. Meg Malpaya Thornton, Filipino American director of Search to Involve Pilipino
Americans, Inc. (SIPA), an agency serving Filipino youth in Los Angeles, also wrote on her support for R/R. When legislators passed R/R into law, Thornton commented that “this victory is important for all the Asian/Pacific communities and other minority peoples because it affirms our rights as Americans.” For Korean American Jerry C. Yu, an administrator at a Korean youth center in Los Angeles that served immigrant and low-income families, the importance of R/R for
Korean Americans was that “Asians are perceived to all be the same.”161 A shared sense of collective history, as well as contemporary experiences of racial lumping, informed conceptions of Asian American panethnic identities as well as solidarities.
Asian American students and community organizers also connected R/R to events occurring outside the borders of the U.S., namely those that occurred in the Middle East like the
Iran Hostage Crisis. The Crisis, spanning from 1979 to 1981, occurred after Iranian university students, in rejecting U.S. intervention in Iranian politics and affairs, took over the U.S. Embassy
159 ASU, “America’s Concentration Camps: Redress and Reparations – The Time is Now,” Asian Students Unite!, Autumn 1980, 1 and 6. 160 ASU, “Japanese Community,” Asian Students Unite!, Autumn 1981, 1, and 5-8. 161 Meg Malpaya Thornton and Jerry Yu, “Redress and Asian/Pacific Unity,” East Wind, Spring/Summer 1989, 46-47. Sugijanto 57 in Tehran, Iran, and held American diplomats hostage. In an Asian Students Unite! feature, the
Los Angeles Community Coalition on Redress and Reparations, supported by Berkeley’s ASU shared their thoughts on fallout resulting from the Crisis. The U.S. government, media, and segments of public life, they wrote, positioned Iranian Americans as “scapegoat[s] for larger domestic and international problems confronting the United States.”162 As “Asian Americans,” the ASU continued, “we are especially sensitive to the current anti-Iranian situation and the mob violence, threats of deportation or ‘protective custody,’ and government harassment,” suggesting that to be Asian American was to identify with a particular history of oppression at the hands of the U.S. nation-state. On the East Coast, also on a piece centered on R/R, Carlton Sagara wrote for the AARW that Executive Order 9066 [where President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized
Japanese American incarceration] was “but one example of a long history of violence directed against Asian Americans.” Oppression of minorities within America also included, he wrote,
“proposals to intern Chinese Americans during the Korean War, and more recently, Iranian
Americans during the Hostage Crisis.”163 What is not as apparent in these critiques of anti-Arab demonization within the U.S. domestic space were explicit critiques of U.S. imperialism in Iran.
While the memory of R/R allowed for solidarities between Asian Americans activists and Arab
Americans, these solidarities did not extend to the Iranian people outside the U.S. nation-state.
Compared to during the Asian American movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian
American activists who came of age during the 1980s limited their critiques of major geopolitical events like the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Persian Gulf War to events occurring within the U.S. nation-state. In particular, how these activists responded to the Gulf War spanning from 1990-
162 ASU, “Perspectives on Iran,” Asian Students Unite!, Winter 1980, 4. 163 Carlton Sagara, “Redress and Reparations 1986,” Newsletter, February 1986, 9. Sugijanto 58
1991 elucidated how different their political leanings were from their predecessors. Referred to as the “Gulf TV War” by academic Douglas Kellner, the Gulf War was the first globally televised war where media apparatuses that mass-produced images of the war spectacle for public consumption.164 As with the Iran Hostage Crisis, when Asian American students and organizers raised critiques of the Gulf War, they did not explicitly call for an end of the Gulf
War or charge that the War was imperialistic. Rather, they called for the end of increased surveillance of Arab Americans within the U.S. nation-state. In a University of California, San
Diego (UCSD) Asian American-specific periodical, Momentum, student Cheryl Soriano discussed anti-Arab sentiment during the Gulf War and pointed to the “FBI interrogation of Arab
Americans” as one example of how the Gulf War elicited harassment against Arab Americans.165
The political climate of the 1980s, namely the weakening of New Left movements and the rise of the New Right, as well as the historical amnesia between different generations of organizers likely played roles in this limitation.166 Throughout the 1980s, fewer Asian American students and organizers explicitly aligned themselves with Third World liberation. As Omatsu also argues, Asian American students and organizers then delinked Asian American identities from their radical, transnationally informed roots, as articulated and developed during the Asian
American movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This delinking thus resulted in a confinement of
Asian American identities to events that occurred within the borders of the U.S. nation-state.
The institutionalization of Asian American political organizing may have also explained why activists’ critiques of U.S. actions became, at times, limited and constrained to the nation- state. In Gidra’s 20th anniversary edition, Rocky Chin, an attorney for the New York City
164 Douglas Kellner, “The Persian Gulf TV War Revisited,” in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (London: Routledge, 2004), 146. 165 Cheryl Soriano, “Editorial: Wartime Hysteria,” Momentum, March 1992, 5. 166 Barbara Epstein, “The Antiwar Movement During the Gulf War,” Social Justice 19, no.1 (1992): 117. Sugijanto 59
Commission on Human Rights, and May Ying Chen, who worked on Gidra’s 1971-1972 women’s issue, explored the significance of Asian Americans becoming involved in the political process to support David Dinkins’ municipal campaign in New York City. In other articles,
Mabel Teng, co-chair of the San Francisco Chinese Progressive Association, and Jerry Yu, then president of the Los Angeles-based Korean American Coalition, similarly pointed to the importance of Asian American involvement in the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign.167 These arguments focused on Asian Americans’ growing significance as an electoral bloc and marked a shift from the 1960s and 1970s period. During that era, “most young people vehemently rejected involvement in electoral politics,” like Eddie Wong, who commented “Many of us never voted in the ‘60s; why bother when the choice was Nixon or Humphrey?” 168 With the 1980s rightward shift and growing conservatism, though, “the debate about ‘working within the system’ vs.
‘working outside the system’ ” became “idealistic and impractical.” 169 For example, AARW’s
September 1991 issue was dedicated to “Asian American Politics” and featured many articles on institutional politics, like running for public office and registering to vote.170
Asian American students and community organizers conceived of Asian American panethnic identities held together by common experiences occurring within the nation-state.
These experiences included shared experiences of anti-Asian violence, shared commitment to reject the model minority image, and shared understandings of specific historical events as relevant for all Asians in America. Elaine Song wrote in an AARW Newsletter on how “Asians in America” share “common experiences in the U.S. as racial minorities. The ties that bind
167 Rocky Chin and May Ying Chen, “Political Power for Asian Americans in the 1990s,” Gidra, 1990, 57; Mabel Teng, “The Challenge of Asian Empowerment,” Gidra, 1990, 56; Jerry Yu, “Seoul to Soul: Seoul to LA in Twenty Years,” Gidra, 1990, 50. 168 Eddie Wong, “Still Mad After All These Years,” Gidra, 1990, 59. 169 Rocky Chin and May Ying Chen, “Political Power for Asian Americans in the 1990s,” Gidra, 1990, 57. 170 AARW, “Asian American Politics,” Newsletter, September 1991, 1. Sugijanto 60 us…include a common history and common treatment in the U.S.” 171 Song’s conception of
Asian American was that of an identity forged from commonalities rooted in shared experiences that occurred within the U.S. nation-state. Similarly, Tufts University student Chin Tang wrote that despite divisions along ethnic lines, “the Asian American community needs to focus on elements that are common to Asians in America…Issues such as racism, identity, bicultural exposure and alienation.” Tang placed a limitation on Asian America as located within the U.S. nation-state, shown by his usage of “Asians in America.”172 The Voices editorial team in 1982 echoed this sentiment in stating “all Asian-Americans have common experiences in American society.”173
These sentiments stood in stark contrast to the thoughts shared by celebrated activist Yuri
Kochiyama, active during the Vietnam antiwar movements. Kochiyama evoked Asian American collective histories in a speech given at an Asian Women’s Conference at Mount Holyoke
College. Unlike with examples above, Kochiyama’s argument was transnational in scope and in critique. She stated that Asian women were united by “a history of feudalism, foreign domination, colonialism, Asian national traditions, Western chauvinism and racism.” Oppression united Asian women together under the panethnic term “Asian,” and more broadly, under the category of “Third World women, international women.” Kochiyama then argued that “struggles inflaming El Salvador, Namibia, the Middle East, Philippines, Eritrea, East Timor, Afghanistan” must be understood “in terms of U.S. involvement and imperialism.”174 Kochiyama’s
171 Elaine Song, “Asian Concerns: Nakasone’s Remarks: Threat to Third World Unity,” Newsletter, November 1986, 9. 172 Chin Tang, “Asian Americans: Community and Unity,” Voices, 1989, 15-16. 173 “Editor’s Note,” Voices, 1982. 174 Yuri Kochiyama, “Asian Women: Past, Present and Future,” Gidra, 1990, 12-14. Speech given at East Coast Asian Student Union (ECASU) Asian Women’s Conference at Mount Holyoke College. Sugijanto 61 perspective, centering on how oppression operated on the global scale, informed how she conceived of Asian American identities and solidarities.
Demographic changes and conservatism in the 1980s resulted in articulations of Asian
American identities which often did not breach the borders of the U.S. nation-state. Asian
American students and organizers saw panethnicity as shaped predominantly by experiences occurring within the U.S. nation-state’s borders and delinked Asian American identities from
Third World liberation. A sense of shared victimization resulted in an expansion of Asian
America to include Korean Americans and Southeast Asian Refugee Americans, while pushing back against the model minority stereotype somewhat constrained the boundaries of Asian
America. Interpretations of Japanese American World War II incarceration experiences as part of an Asian American collective history also informed the boundaries of Asian American panethnic identities during this time. Simultaneously, placing conceptualizations of Asian America solely within the context of the U.S. nation-state likely limited the appearance of the 1960s and 1970s radical critiques of liberal capitalism and U.S. imperialist violence. This effectively stripped
Third World liberation ideologies that transcended borders of the nation-state from conceptions of Asian American panethnic identities. Fixation on the nation-state then foreclosed opportunities for solidarity both within the U.S. and on a global scale.
Sugijanto 62
Chapter 3 - Limitations of the Nation-State: National Security Threats and the Boundaries of Panethnicity (1990s-2000s)
“When is a Muslim defined as a spy or a terrorist? Perhaps, it is in the same place where
[an Asian] is defined as disloyal,” mused the parents of United States Army chaplain James
Yee.175 Yee, a Chinese American Muslim chaplain, was attached to the U.S. Army and ministered to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In 2003, U.S. government officials arrested Yee under suspicion of espionage after locating classified documents in his possession. Yee spent 76 days in solitary confinement and faced the death penalty.176 The comments made by Yee’s parents exposed two contradictions. First, their lament highlighted the tension between Muslim and American identities, especially in the post-September 11 2001 world wherein Yee’s case served as but one of many examples of increased state surveillance and violence against Muslim
Americans. The second tension, dating back to the first major wave of Asian migration to the
U.S. in the 1850s, was one between Asian and American identities.177 Yee’s parents touched on the strained relationship Asian and Muslim political subjects had to the U.S. nation-state, as state apparatuses like the government, the administration, the police, and in this case the army, perceived Muslim and Asian Americans as dangerous and so decidedly un-American. And yet, some Asian American students and organizers conceived of panethnic identities as bound to the
U.S. nation-state. In this chapter, I analyze the tensions in the relationship Asian Americans have had to the U.S. nation-state within the context of burgeoning national security crises in order to
175 Angie Guan, “History Repeats Itself: Parallels Between the Wen Ho Lee & Chaplain Yee Case,” Hardboiled, 2003, 7. 176 James Polk and Bob Franken, “Muslim Chaplain Proposes to Resign,” CNN, May 5, 2004, https://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/03/11/muslim.chaplain.resigns/index.html (accessed February 24, 2020). 177 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, ix. Sugijanto 63 understand how the nation-state played a critical role in the shifting boundaries of Asian
American panethnic identities in the 1990s and early 2000s period.
The Asian American and immigrant population continued to swell throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. According to U.S. Census data, the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. went from 7.3 million in 1990 to 11.9 million in 2000. Chinese Americans and immigrants made up the largest proportion of the Asian population in 2000, followed by Filipino,
Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and finally Japanese American and immigrant communities.178
While some Asian American students and organizers in the late 1990s and early 2000s located Asian America within the nation-state, others saw Asian America in more transnational ways. Concern over the economic and security threats posed by China in the 1990s, as well as the global terrorist threat post-the 2001 bombings of the World Trade Center in New York, called into question students and organizers’ understandings of panethnic identities. These case studies marked periods where particular members of Asian America, namely Chinese Americans and South Asians, became “un-American” national security threats, and so existed outside of the political and cultural institutions of the nation-state. The heightened designation of “un-
American” status to Asian Americans by various media commentators, for example, presented a contradiction of sorts for Asian American students and organizers. Some of these activists remained committed to advancing “Asian America” as located within, and informed strictly by events occurring in, the U.S. state. This chapter explores the consequences of activists’ conceptions of Asian American identities as solely defined by experiences occurring within the
178 US Department of Commerce, We, the American Asians, 1; US Department of Commerce, Economic and Statistics Administration, US Census Bureau, We the People: Asians in the United States, CENSR- 17 (Washington, DC: US Printing Office, 2004), 4. Sugijanto 64 physical and conceptual borders of the U.S. nation-state. To do so, it focuses on Asian American students and community organizers’ responses to anti-Chinese sentiments and the War on Terror.
To elucidate how students and organizers conceived of the boundaries of Asian American panethnic identities during this historical juncture, this chapter features discussions of publications like Gidra, the AARW Newsletter, Hardboiled, Voices, South Asian Literary and
Art Magazine (S.A.L.A.A.M.), and South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection (SAMAR).
Gidra editors, supported by institutions at UCLA, attempted to revive the magazine as a quarterly publication and published from Spring 1999 to Fall 2001. At Berkeley, the ASU began publishing a university-funded progressive periodical, Hardboiled, in the late 1990s.179
According to their Summer 1999 edition, Hardboiled staff comprised of predominantly East
Asians, though it included some Southeast and South Asians students. The periodical attempted to bring about political and social consciousness in Berkeley’s Asian and Asian American communities, which by 1999 made up almost half of the student population at the university.180
The students who contributed to Hardboiled were by no means representative of the Asian
American community as a whole at Berkeley. Hua Hsu, a columnist for the newspaper, wrote that “during my four years here at Berkeley, I am often struck by how uneducated our [Asian
American] community is regarding issues of education, our own identity, and other communities-of-color.” Instead, Hsu went on, “all we have to worry about now is getting paid.”181 At Tufts University, South Asian students developed their own literary magazine in
2000 entitled S.A.L.A.A.M. Nationwide, South Asian progressives and leftists also developed
179 Hardboiled, April 1999, 18. The footer on this page reads: “Hardboiled: 63% more instances of the words ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ than the competition.” 180 Hardboiled, Summer 1999, 2. 181 Hua Hsu, “I Have Some Bad News. Ask Me About It,” Hardboiled, Summer 1999, 1. Sugijanto 65 their own magazine entitled SAMAR, which began publishing biyearly in 1993 to fill “a need for a publication that fosters serious debate within the South Asian community.”182
The China Threat
China’s significance as a growing player in the global economy, and therefore also a growing security threat, introduced new challenges for Asian American students and organizers.183 Within a subset of U.S. society, anxiety and fear around the threat allegedly posed by the Chinese state resulted in the conferring of enemy alien status to Chinese Americans and immigrants. Asian American Studies scholar Kent Ono contends that in the 1990s and early
2000s, government leaders as well as the media used Asian Americans as “scapegoats,” in constructing “all Asian people as enemies” as well as foreigners, regardless of citizenship status.184 The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and subsequent loss of the USSR as America’s key adversary resulted in the construction of China as the U.S.’s most significant communist foe.
Events like Hong Kong’s return to China as well as China’s growing economic strength resulted in concerns over China’s potential to challenge U.S. global hegemony, as well as the “potential danger Chinese Americans pose to the nation-state.”185 While some students continued to conceive of Asian America as confined by the borders of the U.S., politicians, media pundits, and public sentiment placed them squarely outside of its borders. Testifying to the instability of their place, in April 2001, when a U.S. reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet
182 SAMAR, Winter 1992, 2. 183 Kandice Chuh, “Asians Are The New...What?” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy Schlund-Vials (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 222. 184 Kent A. Ono, “From Nationalism to Migrancy: The Politics of Asian American Transnationalism,” Communication Law Review 5, no.1 (2005): 2. Ono provides many examples of the role politicians and the media had in fanning the flames of the “China threat.” He discusses extensively the 1996 campaign finance controversy, where politicians and journalists jointly accused the People’s Republic of China of attempting to influencing the Clinton administration partly through monetary contributions to the Democratic Party. The controversy spurred in the publishing of articles such as one in the National Review on March 24, 1997, where illustrators depicted Bill and Hilary Clinton, as well as Al Gore, racially caricatured as Chinese. 185 Ono, “From Nationalism to Migrancy: The Politics of Asian American Transnationalism,” 2. Sugijanto 66 in mid-air, AARW member Michael Liu argued that a “China standoff” would mark the state of
Asian America in the 21st century. 186 It “appears that China will be our country’s 21st century boogie man,” Liu mused. He then discussed the retaliation against Asian Americans, particularly
Chinese Americans, following the plane collision. Liu pointed to a Houston DJ who called for a
“boycott of Chinese restaurants in response to the standoff over the U.S. spy plane.” 187 Liu’s comments suggested how some Asian American community organizers understood the highly conditional nature of Asian Americans’ claim to the U.S. nation-state.
Asian American students and organizers evoked panethnicity in light of anti-Chinese sentiments in the 1990s, though they did so in a manner that reaffirmed Asian American identities as defined by events occurring within the U.S. nation-state. One case which showcased how activists conceptualized of Asian America strictly within this context was the Wen Ho Lee case. Lee was a Taiwanese American nuclear scientist who worked at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as a part of the University of California. The U.S.
District Court for the District of New Mexico charged Lee with espionage for allegedly conveying confidential U.S. nuclear arsenal information to the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) in 1999, and Lee was subsequently placed in solitary confinement without a trial. He was later acquitted of most charges.188 The Lee case occupied a paramount place in the minds of various Asian American students and community organizers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, prior to the 9/11 terror attacks. National security became an increasingly salient concept in which to justify systematic disempowerment, on an institutional level, as well as targeted hatred, on an
186 Patty Davis, Kelly Wallace, and Lisa Rose, “U.S. Spy Plane, Chinese Fighter Collide,” CNN, April 1, 2001, https://www.cnn.com/2001/US/04/01/us.china.plane.02/index.html (accessed February 24, 2020). 187 Michael Liu, “AGITAsian: The Census and Hints for 21st Century,” Newsletter, May/June 2001, 3. 188 Matthew Purdy, “The Making of a Suspect: The Case of Wen Ho Lee,” New York Times, February 4, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/us/the-making-of-a-suspect-the-case-of-wen-ho-lee.html (accessed February 24, 2020). Sugijanto 67 interpersonal level, against a subset of Asian Americans in the 1990s and early 2000s. As reported in an AARW Newsletter feature in 2000, Margaret Fung, executive director of the Asian
American Legal Defense Fund, referred to the Lee case in a New York Town Hall meeting before the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as the
“defining civil rights issue” of the time for Asian Americans. Fung drew further parallels between Lee’s case and the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, as both played on the stereotypes of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners whose loyalties to the country are always in question,” thereby linking Japanese and Taiwanese Americans tog3ether.189 One year later, Gidra dedicated its Summer 2001 publication to Lee’s case. The issue featured a piece written by Lee’s daughter, Alberta, who connected the U.S. government’s treatment of her father to its treatment of “people who are Muslim American, or Indian.”190 Alberta showcased how a shared sense of victimization occurring from experiences of marginalization within the U.S. national security state provided an opportunity for the linkage of various Asian ethnic communities together.
During this time period, some Asian American groups had begun to return to conceptions of Asian America informed by the 1960s and 1970s transnational critiques of injustice. One such group was the Asian Left Forum (ALF), a collective of self-identified leftist individuals as well as organizations based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia. The Forum, comprised mostly of twenty-somethings, was formed in 1998 following the first nationwide meeting of young as well as veteran Asian American self-identified Leftists.191 They agreed on a
189 “Asian Americans React to the Wen Ho Lee Case,” Newsletter, September 2000, 1. 190 Alberta Lee, “U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Imagination: Pop Secret: About Wen Ho Lee,” Gidra, Summer 2001, 11. 191 Diane Fujino, and Kye Leung, “Radical Resistance in Conservative Times: New Asian American Organizations in the 1990s,” in Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, eds. Fred Ho, Carolyn Antonio, Diane Fujino, and Steve Yip (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2000).The ALF arose at a point Sugijanto 68 series of plans for the organization that included “[incorporating] an anti-imperialist and internationalist framework,” as well as “[supporting] self-determination in [the] Third World,” both efforts reminiscent of those adopted by Asian American students and organizers active in the 1960s and 1970s. 192 The issues ALF members felt were worth speaking on reflected the transnational outlook of the Forum. Issues included the North Atlantic Treaty Organisations
(NATO) bombing of the former Yugoslavia (Kosovo) in 1999 and the subsequent beginning of
NATO and U.S. occupation of Serbia. ALF released a statement against U.S. decision to partake in the bombings, connecting military activity in Kosovo to events taking place within the U.S.
Members wrote, “Just as Serbia has been terrorized and is now occupied, Police are terrorizing black, brown and yellow people in the United States, and are an occupation force in our communities...People of color are under attack, and hostile Police occupy our communities.”
ALF understood both occurrences as connected by a common oppressive power, the U.S. state.
Subsequently, ALF, along with the Black Radical Congress and New Raza Left, formed the
People of Color Against the War coalition and organized antiwar demonstrations in June of 1999 in response to the bombings. 193 In justifying their actions, ALF advanced their definition of what it meant to be Asian America, a definition connected to war occurring both within and also outside of the U.S. nation-state. “As Asian Pacific Islanders,” they wrote, “war has been an integral aspect of our experience. We have seen how war has torn apart our families, destroyed
where other racial and ethnic groups reformed leftist collectives. For example, Black communities congregated in June of 1998 for a Black Radical Congress. 192 Asian Left Forum (ALF), “History of the Asian Left Forum,” BuddhaHead, ALF, accessed March 31, 2020, http://www.buddhahead.org/design/alf_web/History.htm. 193 Asian Left Forum (ALF), “NATO/US Are Responsible for ‘War Crimes’ in Serbia. Police Are Responsible for Crimes Against People of Color in the United States,” BuddhaHead, ALF, June 19, 1999, http://www.buddhahead.org/design/alf_web/pcawon.htm (accessed March 31, 2020). Sugijanto 69 our communities...we have learned to question the U.S. government any time it makes claims to use military intervention for ‘humanitarian purposes.’ ”194
ALF members also evoked Japanese American incarceration in their efforts to make sense of U.S. military strikes in the former Yugoslavia, as a part of NATO. In critiquing U.S. and
NATO justifications of the bombings as forms of “humanitarian aid,” ALF members stated that it was “humanitarian aid” from the U.S. during the World War II which resulted in Japanese
Americans and immigrants forced “into concentration camps ‘for their own protection.’ ” Unlike
Asian American students and organizers discussed previously in this chapter, self-identified
Asian American leftists who were a part of the Forum linked incarceration within the U.S. to events occurring outside of the U.S. state’s borders in their critiques of U.S. state actions. The latter included U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia during the twentieth century, which catalyzed the plight of refugees displaced from their homelands. ALF then dedicated themselves to genuinely fighting for human rights, in a manner which was “directed against U.S. imperialism” in places such as Burma (Myanmar), Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hawai’i, and Okinawa.
Ultimately, “for Asian Pacific peoples and all of the world’s peoples, there can be no human rights or self-determination until the naked aggression of U.S. imperialism is checked,” they contended.195
The Global and Domestic War on Terror
Concerns over China’s rise and the national security threat Chinese Americans in particular allegedly posed to the nation-state, as well as critiques of U.S. actions in Eastern
Europe, attenuated seemingly overnight on 11 September 2001. The 9/11 attacks on the World
194 Asian Left Forum (ALF), “Los Angeles Asian Left Forum Makes Statement Against War in Kosovo,”BuddhaHead, ALF, accessed February 24, 2020, http://www.buddhahead.org/design/alf_web/onkosovo.htm. 195 ALF, “Los Angeles Asian Left Forum Makes Statement Against War in Kosovo.” Sugijanto 70
Trade Center and Pentagon marked the official beginnings of the global War on Terror, forcing
Asian American students and organizers to, among other things, confront the task of redefining the margins of Asian America and contending with their relationship to, and placement within, the U.S. nation-state. Cases of interpersonal and systemic violence enacted under the guise of national security swiftly rose after 9/11. South Asian Americans, Arab Americans, and Muslim
Americans, as well as individuals who generally “appeared Muslim,” saw an uptick in cases of physical violence and racial profiling following the terror attacks.196 For example, as of 2002, according to a Human Rights Watch Report, South Asians “accounted for the highest number of persons detained by the U.S. government,” with “292 persons…detained following the
September 11th attacks.”197
In attempting to critique violent state actions, Asian American students and community organizers again evoked Japanese American incarceration. The mass roundup of Japanese
Americans during World War II served, both in Wen Ho Lee’s case as well as in the post-9/11 context, as an example of the U.S. government designating particular political subjects within the nation-state as threats to national security. In contemporary times, the U.S. government targeted
Muslim Americans, Arab Americans, and South Asian Americans and immigrants under the guise of national security through apparatuses such as the newly created Department of
Homeland Security, as well as the 2001 USA PATRIOT ACT (USAPA). The Act awarded law enforcement and security agencies increased powers and resources to combat terrorism and has
196 Charu Chandrasekhar, “Flying While Brown: Federal Civil Rights Remedies to Post-9/11 Airline Racial Profiling of South Asians,” Asian American Legal Journal 10: 215-52; Craig Considine, “The Racialization of Islam in the United States: Islamophobia, Hate Crimes, and ‘Flying While Brown,’ ” Religions 8, no. 9 (2017): 165. Charu and Considine discuss the intersections of race and Islamophobia to show, among other things, shared experiences of racial profiling within Muslim American as well as non-Muslim-identifying communities in the U.S. Charu outlines the experiences of South Asians racially profiled as “brown” and “Muslim-like.” 197Chandana Mathur, “A Decade of SAMAR,” SAMAR, Summer/Fall 2002, 49. Sugijanto 71 disproportionately affected Muslim Americans and individuals racially profiled as Muslim.198
Times of warfare then called into question individuals’ relationship to the nation-state. The War on Terror, among other developments during this time period, challenged this mode of identification, as the U.S. state, through its policies, questioned the claim various individuals laid to America.
When non-South Asian activists placed incarceration during World War II in conversation with increased state surveillance, detainment, and deportations of Muslim political subjects, as well as South Asian Americans and immigrants profiled as Muslim, they built potential solidarities, at least rhetorically and historically, with South Asian Americans. Violence under the guise of national security thus resulted in a, albeit tenuous and limited, expansion of conceptions of Asian America. In AARW’s May/June 2002 issue, Don Misumi detailed that year’s Day of Remembrance program, a day commemorating the incarceration of Japanese
Americans. Misumi noted that organizations like the Arab American Anti-Discrimination
Committee, the Islamic Society of Boston, as well as the National Sikh Coalition were in attendance, as were the AARW and the JACL. The Day of Remembrance programming “made the connection between what happened to the Japanese Americans in 1942 to the situation facing people of Middle Eastern descent today [referring specifically to the detainment of Muslim
Americans as well as the PATRIOT ACT].” Misumi then commented on how “in Japanese
American communities across the country, there was almost immediate and vocal condemnation of post-9/11 rise in racial profiling and hate crimes that labeled…groups ‘terrorists.’ ”199 In contrast to critiques made during the 1960s against the Vietnam War, Misumi, as well as some
198 Kam C. Wong, "The USA Patriot Act: A Policy of Alienation," Mich. J. Race & L. 12 (2006): 165. The Act has resulted in increased airport profiling as well as detention and deportation (in violation of due process) of Muslim American, Arab American, and South Asian American and immigrant communities. 199 Don Misumi, “Civil Liberties Under Threat,” Newsletter, May/June 2002, 1 and 3. Sugijanto 72 other Asian American organizers, did not extend critiques of violence occurring within the nation-state in the form of incarceration and detainment of “people of Middle Eastern descent” to those occurring outside of the nation-state, like the global War on Terror. Differences from the
1960s New Left period were perhaps not only a result of vastly differing political climates, but also indicative of thought processes inherited from Asian American students and organizers of the previous decade. These organizers largely conceived of “Asian America” as an identity exclusively defined by events that occurred within the borders of the U.S. state.200 While Misumi did not critique the War on Terror as imperialistic or explicitly position himself against U.S. aggression abroad, some Asian Americans who were a part of other progressive organizations did. For example, the Third World Within, a coalition of many groups, some specifically Asian
American, based in New York City (NYC) opposed the U.S. waging war in Iraq and
Afghanistan, as well as racism within the U.S.201
Some South Asian Americans writing for SAMAR also interpreted violence under the guise of national security in more global terms. SAMAR staff dedicated their Summer/Fall 2002 issue to the War on Terror. The issue began with editors alerting readers of the deportations of
Filipino and Pakistani immigrants in late June of 2002. SAMAR editors then connected events occurring within the U.S. nation-state to those outside of it, arguing that the “blanket detentions that have terrorized our [South Asian] communities” in the U.S. were reminiscent of state violence occurring in “El Salvador, Palestine, Brazil, apartheid South Africa,” as well as
“Japanese American internment.”202 They then critiqued deportations, and more broadly, U.S.
200 See also Lilian Nakano, “From 12/7 to 9/11,” Gidra, Fall 2001, 9-10. Nakano spoke during a vigil in California’s Little Tokyo for those who had been subject to hate crimes post 9/11, and she evoked Japanese American incarceration to oppose discrimination against Middle Eastern-presenting people. 201 Shauna Lo, “Potluck Discussion Focuses on Hate Crimes and Anti-War Activism,” Newsletter, November/December 2001, 2. Third World Within was coalition of approximately twenty groups in New York City. 202 “Homeland Security,” SAMAR, Summer/Fall 2002, 2. Sugijanto 73 state violence against these communities, as byproducts of “US imperialism on steroids, be it through the blatant support of client states like Israel, the insouciant inventory of excess in previous adventures like the Afghan War, or the brazen contemplation of future turkey shots in
Iraq.”203 New York University (NYU) undergraduate student Manu Vimalassery similarly positioned a critique of the War on Terror within the context of other acts of U.S. state violence, both domestic and global in scope, in that the vague boundaries of a war on terrorism allowed the
U.S. state to “indefinitely...wage war on domestic and international communities, much like the
‘War on Drugs.’ ” Vimalassery then wrote of an incident occurring in 1998 where NYC Police commissioner Howard Safir deployed the police force to disrupt protesting taxi drivers. Safir justified his actions by likening protesting taxi drivers to “a terrorist threat,” thereby,
Vimalassery argued, marking all dissenting political subjects as “outside of the nation.”204
Vimalassery’s use of the phrase “outside of the nation” was reminiscent of the comments made by Chaplain Yee’s parents, as both probe the strained relationship Asian Americans had to the U.S. nation-state, as non-white political subjects easily labeled, and perhaps perpetually labelled, as disloyal, suspect, dissenting, terrorist. Differences found in SAMAR articles may be attributed to its authorship base, heavily comprised of academics and well-known radical leftists, compared to, for example, general community members who contributed to the AARW
Newsletter.205 Not all South Asian American and immigrant youth shared Vimalassery’s more transnational perspective. Raza Mir, a SAMAR contributor and self-described “FOB (fresh off the boat) leftist,” relayed his frustration at how “second generation [South Asian] comrades reflected
203 “Homeland Security,” 2. 204 Manu Vimalassery, “Passports and Pink Slips,” SAMAR, Summer/Fall 2002, 20. “Terrorist” in this context to mean that someone exists and operates outside of the U.S. nation-state. 205 The AARW did feature the work of a fair share of academics, and many of their interns were college and university students similar in age and educational status to Vimalassery. Sugijanto 74 all organization issues through the lens of what does it mean to be a desi206 in the U.S. [emphasis mine].”207
These South Asian American and immigrant authors were not the only ones to understand national security as informed by events occurring within and outside of the U.S. nation-state. Gidra, staying true to its transnational perspective, published a Fall 2001 magazine specifically dedicated to responding to 9/11. The “state of emergency issue” was an explicit response to the 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S. government responses. The publication featured articles centering on various U.S. wars, like the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War
(roughly 1955-1975) and the Afghanistan War (1979-1989), suggestive of how Gidra staff forged intentional connections between 9/11 and histories of U.S. imperial aggression elsewhere in Asia. Gidra also, in the footnotes of each page in the publication, noted other instances of U.S. aggression like the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy (1893), the invasion of Samoa (1887-
1889), the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) in which the government deployed U.S. troops, the invasion of Philippines (1899-1902), the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(1945), a CIA-backed coup in Indonesia (1965), and the invasion of Laos (1971).208 The absence of South Asian-specific events from this timeline likely reflected that no equivalent, militaristic acts of aggression like U.S. colonization of the Philippines or U.S. aggression in Vietnam existed to defined U.S.-South Asian relations. The Boxer Rebellion and CIA-backed coup in Indonesia, compared to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Vietnam War, were seldom mentioned in other Asian American publications of this time period. The absence of South
Asian-specific events from this particular timeline then indicated the relatively peripheral
206 Desi is a loose term which refers to people with ties to the Indian subcontinent. 207 Raza Mir, “A Review of Sunaina Maira’s Desis in the House,” SAMAR, Summer/Fall 2002, 56. 208 Gidra, Fall 2001. Sugijanto 75 position South Asian-specific matters played in East and Southeast Asian Americans’ conception of “Asian American” prior to the War on Terror period.209 In the introduction to their periodical,
Gidra editors posed the question of what it meant to be an Asian and or Pacific Islander
American, stating that “rampant racist attacks upon Muslim and Arab Americans, and ‘Middle
Easter-appearing’ people reveal that we must question the boundaries that define the
Asian/Pacific Islander community.”210 The editors’ testimony is a direct testament to the ways in which times of war and the positioning of particular subjects as national security threats resulted in a reconfiguring of the boundaries of Asian America. Students and organizers who connected events occurring within the U.S. nation-state to those outside of it facilitated this reconfiguration.
The global and domestic War on Terror, unlike the Vietnam War, did not serve as a geopolitical event which facilitated a substantial broadening of Asian American students and organizers’ conceptions of panethnic identities to wholly include South Asian Americans and immigrants. Prior to 9/11, during the 1990s and early 2000s, South Asian Americans did quantitatively appear more frequently in panethnic organizations and publications compared to earlier periods. For example, Koshy Matthews, an Indian American, served as the Executive
Director of the AARW, a panethnic nonprofit organization, in the late 1990s.211 South Asian
American students at times critiqued the exclusivity of Asian American panethnic identities.
Tufts University student Mita Prakash, though, reminded Voices readers of the connotations
209 This absence is not to say that South Asian history in the U.S. began in the twenty-first century. For example, Pakistan allied itself with the U.S. during the Cold War. Even earlier, during the early twentieth century, Indian American and immigrant revolutionaries within the U.S. advocated for liberation of India from Great Britain. Many of them organized under the Ghadar Party, and dozens of Ghadar activists stood trial in 1918 in San Francisco for conspiring a revolt in India, a violation of U.S. neutrality. See Manela Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self- Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. 210 “In Whose Name?,” Gidra, Fall 2001, 2. 211 Newsletter, February/March/April 1995. Sugijanto 76 attached to the “Asian” label in the early 2000s. While “South Asian would fall under
‘Asian’…it is common knowledge, that if one checks ‘Asian’ on an application form, the assumption is that the applicant is East Asian. South Asians must therefore resort to checking the
‘Other’ box or risk being misrepresented.”212 The fragility of panethnic Asian American identities came into sharper focus during times of national crises, as well. Activist Helen Zia recounts that while attending an Asian American-specific community event held soon after 9/11, one Asian American politico commented, regarding the terrorist attacks and U.S. preparations for global warfare, that “at least it’s not Chinese Americans this time.”213
South Asian Americans’ participation in long-distance nationalism and their ties to other nation-states may have also impeded the entry of South Asian Americans into Asian America. In both panethnic and South Asian-specific publications, activists wrote on the ties specifically
Hindu South Asian Americans and immigrants felt to the Indian nation. Indian nationalism within the U.S. at times took on the form of right-wing Hindu nationalism, or support for the
Hindu Right, which in the 1980s rose in prominence on the Indian subcontinent.214 Vijay Prashad describes right-wing Hindu nationalism as the tendency for individuals to attribute the “most significant element of [Indian] national culture” to a “syndicated form of Hinduism.” 215 Prashad and activist Biju Matthew argue that members of the Indian American bourgeoise in particular have supported the Hindu Right and asserted a “post-nationalist ethnic identity” along religious
212 Mita Prakash, “Identity,” S.A.L.A.A.M., Spring 2001, 21. 213 Helen Zia, “Oh, Say, Can You See?” in Asian Americans on War & Peace, eds. Russell Leong and Don T. Nakanishi (Los Angeles: University of California Asian American Studies Center Press, 2002), 2. 214 Biju Matthew and Vijay Prashad, “The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 3 (2000): 524. 215 Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000), 121. Prashad specifically attempts to understand Hindu nationalism, which within recent years, he argues has attributed the “most significant element of national culture” to a syndicated form of Hinduism.” Sugijanto 77 lines as “Hindu Americans.”216 In Gidra’s 2000 edition, Nikhil Shah also argued that “anti-
Indian violence” in America denied Indian immigrants entry into U.S. national culture, thus driving them to towards right-wing Hindu nationalism in efforts to create political and cultural community. In constructing community, Shah warned, these immigrants were “unable or unwilling to accept the various changes that had taken place in India” and instead clung to a static image of the place they had left behind. 217 Identifying as Hindu American may have impeded the same individuals from conceiving of themselves as Asian American, though not to rid Asian American actors of culpability in constructing political networks of solidarity that often did not include South Asian Americans as a whole. For Asian American students and organizers who mobilized Asian American identities to achieve solidarities with other marginalized communities, adherence to right-wing nationalisms would have also been wholly incompatible with their goals. During the early 2000s, a time when Muslim Americans came under increased state scrutiny, self-identified Hindu American adherents to right-wing politics offered little solidarity to Muslim South Asian Americans. “Hindu American” then reveals that transnationally informed identities did not necessarily coincide with or advance progressive politics. They also had the potential to sever ties as opposed to build ties between individuals and communities.
Asian American students and organizers’ conceptualizations of panethnicity as strictly defined within the context of the U.S. nation-state contributed to the absence of mass, pan-Asian organizing in solidarity with South Asian Americans and immigrants post-9/11; it may have also contributed to the absence of widespread Asian American panethnic organizing against U.S.
216 Matthew and Prashad, “The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva,” 532. The Hindu Right does not refer to all individuals who identify as “Hindu.” Rather, it refers to those who mobilize the ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hindu American’ identities to achieve a particular exclusionary politics. 217 Nikhil Shah, “Native Indians: Conservatism in the South Asian Community,” Gidra, Spring 2000, 10- 11. Sugijanto 78 intervention in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). As sociologist Ariela Schachter argues,
Asian American panethnic organizations were generally unprepared to defend South Asian hate crime victims in the U.S. post-9/11.218 Post-9/11, when a subset of Asian Americans became increasingly suspect in the eyes of the U.S. national security state, some Asian American students and organizers remained committed to defining Asian American experiences as those that occurred strictly within the U.S. nation-state. Some left-leaning Asian American students and organizers, for example those who wrote for Gidra and SAMAR, did connect increased violence against Muslim and South Asian Americans and immigrants occurring within the U.S. state to American global imperialism. Transnational conceptualizations often coincided with a broader conception of communities considered to be Asian American, as well as a broader conception of issues relevant to Asian American communities. Demonstrated by Don Misumi and suggested by Raza Mir, these transnationally informed viewpoints were not advanced by the entirety of progressive, left, and or liberal-leaning Asian American students and organizers.
When activists conceived of only events occurring within the U.S. nation-state as relevant for
Asian Americans, they impeded the formation of broader solidarity networks connecting South
Asians to East and Southeast Asian Americans; they could have crafted these solidarities on the basis of shared experiences of imperialism, as the ALF did. In addition, historian Vijay Prashad contends that the exclusion of South Asians from popular understanding of the types of individuals encapsulated by “Asian America” arose from shifting understandings of the term
“Asian American” itself. South Asians, Prashad argues, entered the U.S. in substantial numbers
218 Schachter, “Finding Common Ground?,” 148. Sugijanto 79 in the 1980s, after Asian Americans lost sense of the transnational, Third World liberation connotations of the term “Asian American.”219
The role Pacific Islanders (PI) occupied in discussions of Asian America are revealing in considering the harm that coalition identities like “Asian America” could wreak on the communities meant to be encompassed within its purview. The systematic and institutionalized grouping of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities together began with the U.S.
Census Bureau in the 1980s. While radicalized Asian students and organizers advanced the term
“Asian American” as an organizing tool in the 1960s and 1970s and at times conceived of Pacific
Islanders at Asian, historian Sucheng Chan argues that state agencies adopted the panethnic
“Asian Pacific American” category as “they found it convenient to lump together the various
Asian groups and people from the Pacific Islands as Asian Pacific American.”220 Sociologist
Michael Omi contends that the census is a bureaucratic, state-controlled site for the construction of Asian American identities, namely in that the census defines as well as reinforces social categories, like “Asian Pacific American.”221 Asian Americans then found themselves not only lumped into a racial category created by fellow Asian Americans, but also by way of state- enforced bureaucratic categories.
Many self-identified Asian American students and organizers used the state-derived term
“Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA)” or its variants “Asian American and Pacific Islander
(AAPI)” and “Asian Pacific Islander (API)” uncritically, without much discussion of how PI narratives fit into a broader discussion of Asian America. Conversations on the positioning of PIs as separate from Asian America and yet lumped together within the “API” label were a large
219 Prashad, Karma of Brown Folk, 107 and 111. 220 Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), xvi. 221 Michael Omi, “Racial Identity and the State: The Dilemmas of Classification,” Law & Inequality 15 (1997): 7-23. Sugijanto 80 focus of Hardboiled’s 2005 issue. David Ga’oupu Palaita, then a PhD student at Berkeley, criticized Asian Americans for “upholding…a political label [API] that does not address Pacific
Islander issues,” as “Asian America has constantly ‘othered’ the Pacific Islander body.”222
Another PhD student at Berkeley, Michael Gumatato Tuncap, similarly argued that there existed a “lack of Pacific Islander representation throughout the various API clubs [importance here is that they were labeled API] here at Cal [Berkeley].” Tuncap also pointed at the ways in which
Southeast Asians may feel similar dissonance with the “Asian American” label as a coalition label, as “many South East Asians also identify with our [PI] frustrations of being forced into this large umbrella term that ultimately excludes the non-East Asian ethnicities.”223 By uncritically adopting the term “API,” Asian American students and organizers adopted an oppressive practice of the U.S. nation-state. I use “oppressive” to mean that uncritical usage of the term “API” ignores, among many other things, the histories and current realities of how non- indigenous Asian Americans participate in the continued occupation of stolen indigenous land.
Post-9/11, some Southeast Asian American students and organizers similarly explored how the panethnic “Asian American” category excluded Southeast Asian as well as Filipino communities, histories, and narratives. For example, Berkeley student Amanda Hwang wrote an article in Hardboiled on the Hmong and Mien people indigenous to China, many of whom settled in present-day Laos. Following U.S. aggression in Indochina, particularly as American forces enlisted Hmong and Mien peoples as anticommunist fighters, many became refugees and resettled in the United States. While researching for her story, Hwang shared the thoughts of one fellow student who remarked that “little mention of the Hmong community in American history
222 David Ga’oupu Palaita, “Let the Navigators Traverse the Seas Until They Have Found a Home…,” Hardboiled, 2005, 5. 223 Michael Gumataotao Tuncap, “The Pacific Islander movement at Cal and UW,” Hardboiled, 2005, 4. Sugijanto 81 or even in Asian American History” existed.224 Berkeley PhD student Joanne Rondilla articulated similar sentiments in relation to Filipino Americans and immigrants. “Although
Pilipinos are considered to be Asian Americans,” Rondilla argued, “there is a long and hidden history of Pilipinos actually contesting this position because like our Pacific Islander brothers and sisters, Pilipinos have felt like ‘special guests’ within this pan-ethnic identity.” In her article, featured also in Hardboiled, Rondilla quoted ethnic studies scholar Rick Bonus who described the position of Filipino Americans in relation to Asian America as “included, but under protest.”225
These examples suggest that students and organizers’ utilizations of Asian American panethnicity could reinforce oppression and engage in the nation-state practice of creating and enforcing boundaries. Historian Benedict Anderson details in his study of nations and nationalism how a state, through institutions of power such as maps and censuses, imagined its political subjects.226 For example, mapmakers and viewers conceptually construct kinship based off of a particular image of a nation-state’s territory, necessarily a territory with demarcated borders. Census-makers and census-takers distill a plethora of identities into discrete, unambiguous categories. “The fiction of the census is that everyone in it, and that everyone has one - and only one- extremely clear place,” Anderson writes.227 The census then serves to sharply demarcate the boundaries of various communities and social identities, like “Asian
American.” While Asian American students and organizers did not proliferate publications with
224 Amanda Hwang, “Finding a Homeland,” Hardboiled, 2003, 4. 225 Joanne I. Rondilla, “Other than Asian: Pacific Islanders In and Outside Asian America, Hardboiled, 2005, 3. “Filipino” is the Anglicized spelling of a term which refers to the people of the Philippines, while “Pilipino” utilizes a spelling more in-line with how speakers the Philippine languages. Some use the spelling to confer an act of defiance against Spanish as well as U.S. imperialism. 226 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 167-8. Anderson also discussed the role of museums. 227 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 169-70. Sugijanto 82 maps or censuses, they did demarcate the boundaries of Asian America by remaining bound to conceiving of Asian American panethnic identities as limited to the nation-state. By defining only events that took place within the U.S. state as relevant for Asian Americans, students and organizers may have somewhat limited the potential for crafting broader transnational solidarities particularly during the ongoing global and domestic War on Terrorism.
The heightened designation of “un-American” status to Asian Americans by media pundits and politicians challenged Asian Americans’ right to belong in America. It also challenged how Asian Americans themselves used the U.S. nation-state as a reference point for conceiving of panethnic identities. Historical actors’ conceptions of Asian America as solely defined by experiences occurring within the nation-state stripped Asian American identity from its radical potentials and limited solidarities. Throughout this time period and dating back to the very inception of the term “Asian American,” some South and Southeast Asian American students and organizers critiqued the exclusively of predominantly East Asian Americans’ evocation of panethnicity. Pacific Islander students similarly critiqued the oppressive nature of the panethnic “Asian Pacific American” label. Furthermore, panethnic organizations failed to robustly respond to hate crimes committed against South Asian Americans and immigrants, and no widespread anti-War on Terror Asian American collective emerged. Julie Carl, a Berkeley student who wrote a piece in Hardboiled on exploitation of Forever 21 workers, said it best, that creation of the Asian American category was meant to result in “some semblance of unity and cooperation.” When “ties of unity are those that choke rather than help,”228 panethnicity ceased to be a useful tool for achieving justice.
228 Julie Carl, “Exploiting Our Own: Asian American Communities Exploit Their Newest Immigrants,” Hardboiled, 2004, 4. Sugijanto 83
Conclusion
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned in March of 2020 of an increase in hate crimes perpetrated against Asian Americans and immigrants as the coronavirus pandemic continues.229 Some commentators have racialized the novel coronavirus outbreak, referring to it as the “Chinese flu,” and utilized the pandemic to fuel nativist sentiment. This crisis has once again dislodged Asian Americans and immigrants from the U.S. nation by positioning them, like the virus, as foreign threats.230 Asian American activists have wasted no time in both responding to the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and mobilizing resources for the most vulnerable within
Asian American communities.231 The pandemic has also shown the ways in which community- produced publications continue to be a forum through which Asian Americans and immigrants make sense of their fluctuating statuses in America, and globally.
Susan Park and the Gidra Collective, in their email of April 18 2020 to the magazine’s subscribers, notified readers of an upcoming “Asian American in the Time of Covid-19 Shock
Crisis” issue (“Gidra Second Print Issue Update”). A group of “multigenerational and economically diverse Asian American activists and students from UCLA and USC,” the Gidra
Collective, revived Gidra in late 2019. The boundaries of Asian American communities, as well as their politics and the politics of the time, have changed since Gidra’s last publication in 2001.
229Josh Margolin, “FBI Warns of Potential Surge in Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans Amid Coronavirus,” ABC News, March 27, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-warns-potential-surge-hate-crimes-asian- americans/story?id=69831920 (accessed April 29, 2020). I am 230 Becky Little, “Trump’s ‘Chinese’ Virus Is Part of a Long History of Blaming Other Countries for Disease,” TIME, March 20, 2020, https://time.com/5807376/virus-name-foreign-history/ (accessed April 20, 2020). 231 This goes for well-established Asian American nonprofit organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) as well as more grassroots collectives like the Asian American Feminist Collective. The latter group sent out a Google Form in March via their social media networks to solicit stories of anti-Asian hate, as well as to solicit submissions for this publication. See “Coronavirus/COVID-19 Resources to Stand Against Racism,” Asian Americans Advancing Justice.org, March 23, 2020, https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/covid19 (accessed April 20, 2020); Salonee Bhaman, Rachel Kuo, Matilda Sabal, Vivian Shaw, and Tiffany Diane Tso, Asian American Feminist Antibodies (Care in the Time of Coronavirus), March 2020. Sugijanto 84
And yet in their first issue after returning, published in December of 2019, the Collective reaffirmed that Gidra and the Gidra Collective remained, as they were in 1969, “anti-imperialist and anti-war.”232
During the Asian American movements of the 1960s and 1970s when UCLA students first published Gidra, a commitment to Third World liberation informed how activists conceived of nascent Asian American identities. Broader politics of the era, like the influence of Marxist-
Leninist-Maoist critiques, resulted in Asian American students and organizers constructing transnationally informed Asian American identities. Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, these groups continued to mobilize Asian American identities to expand and at times limit intraracial and interracial solidarities, as well as solidarities along class, gender, and more lines. During the 1980s, influenced by changing demographics of the Asian population in America, as well as a rightward shift in national politics, students and organizers stripped Asian American panethnic identities from their most radical potentials. This stripping coincided with them binding Asian American panethnic identities to experiences occurring within the borders of the nation-state. By the 1990s and early 2000s, national security crises in the form of anti-Chinese sentiment and the War on Terror destabilized Asian Americans’ claim to the U.S. nation-state. And yet activists continued to conceptualize of Asian American identities as solely defined by experiences occurring within the physical and conceptual borders of the U.S. nation-state. Unlike the Vietnam War, the War on Terror then failed to serve as a geopolitical event that broadened Asian American students and organizers’ conceptions of panethnic identities to include South Asian Americans.
232 “Mission Statement and Core Values,” Return of Gidra, December 2019, 4.
Sugijanto 85
Given the ways through which phenotype, ethnicity, national origin, class, and religion fracture the category of Asian American, the most inclusive conceptions of Asian America must be the ones most successful at addressing these fractures. When students and organizers located
Asian America strictly within the bounds of the U.S. nation-state, they stripped Asian American panethnic identities from its more radical potentials. The lack of widespread, panethnic Asian
American mobilizing for South Asian victims of hate crimes following 9/11 as well as against the global War on Terror attest to the limitations of nation-state thinking. As articulated by more radical organizers throughout the late 1960s until early 2000s, U.S. imperialism, either in the form of physical warfare or capitalist economic policies that have disrupted livelihoods, was an integral part of Asian American experiences. And yet some activists failed to conceive of the imperialist and capitalist motivations underlying the War on Terror as Asian American issues.
This thesis does not however come close to capturing the full extent of the heterogeneity in students and organizers’ conceptions of Asian America. Future research would do well to, for instance, explore how panethnicity operated for Asian American communities that existed at oppressions not adequately discussed in this thesis. Queer, disabled, undocumented, multiracial, and adoptee Asian Americans, among others, likely conceived of Asian American panethnic identities in starkly different ways. A project that explores panethnic identity formations for populations with political leanings vastly different from the left leaning students that were the focus of this thesis would also provide valuable insights. Studying Asian Americans advancing moderate or conservative politics may reveal the ways in which Asian American panethnic identities could become tools to sustain the status quo or to advance inequality.
While the Asian American movements of the 1960s and 1970s saw activists develop transitionally informed conceptions of Asian America, by no means were those movements Sugijanto 86 perfect or comprehensive in scope. Times have also changed since the 1960s. Interdisciplinary scholar Susan Koshy, writing in the late 1990s, argues that “we have entered a transnational era where ethnicity is increasingly produced at multiple local and global sites rather than, as before, within the parameters of the nation-state.” Koshy describes specifically how the globalization of capital and migration of peoples have blurred the boundaries of the nation-state and so impacted the linkage some Asian American political subjects feel towards Asia.233 Her insights may also be applied to a reconfiguration of the boundaries of the political imaginary that is Asian America to go beyond simply the U.S. nation-state. Asian Americans identities and mobilization efforts do not have to be strictly informed by events occurring within the U.S. nation-state. During time periods like when subsets of Asian Americans become irrevocably “un-American,” Kent Ono argues for a reconsideration of Asian American nationalism. Ono urges for the creation of Asian
America imagined communities that are transnational, as opposed to national in scope. He calls on Asian Americans to “de-link from a nation, race, and culture-specific set of logis,” and to
“embrace the concept of migrancy…perpetual dislocation, curiosity, and persistent change.”234
During the time of coronavirus, the need for communities to care for one another has never been more urgent, particularly as state institutions have failed miserably in protecting the most vulnerable populations. Who counts as Asian American and what Asian American identities mean are then critical questions that will shape how Asian American and immigrant communities mobilize within themselves. These questions will also impact how Asian
Americans stand, or fail to stand, in solidarity with other populations. In considering which factors should inform Asian American panethnic identities, I suspect that no sustainable or truly inclusive Asian American movement can be limited to the boundaries of the nation-state. The
233 Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 336. 234 Ono, “From Nationalism to Migrancy,” 8. Sugijanto 87 factors that have led to the arrival of Asians in America as well as the issues that Asians in
America face are global in scope. As in previous eras, Asian America today encompasses an incredibly diverse range of people that identify and dis-identify with the label “Asian American.”
A movement that does justice to the complexity of Asian America entails destabilizing ideas of
Asian Americanness as definable and static. It must also be committed to locating, challenging, and dismantling existing power structures. Doing so will lead to the development of mobilization efforts that place Asian American issues in direct contact with the issues of other marginalized communities. Perhaps it is during this time of great strife that Asian Americans as a whole will strengthen efforts to redefine themselves and build solidarities that will build an alternative, more just collective future.
Sugijanto 88
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