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Marginals, Citizens, Subjects: The Perilous Foundations of
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MARGINALS, CITIZENS, SUBJECTS: THE PERILOUS FOUNDATIONS OF
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

BY
Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Program in American Studies

2003

ABSTRACT

MARGINALS, CITIZENS, SUBJECTS: THE PERILOUS FOUNDATIONS OF
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

BY

Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu

This dissertation examines the philosophical
impasse of Asian American Studies, which consists of a
reiteration of biological and cultural racialisms within
counterhegemonic strategies meant to counter the processes of
marginalization and racialization. By addressing marginality,
citizenship, and subjection, which are the three major
conceptual moments/registers that determine knowledges about
Asian America across the twentieth century, this dissertation
argues for a re-orientation of the field which can untether
the thinking of Asian America from the yoke of racial
domination.

In the first chapter, the history of the concept of
”marginality” is examined in relation to its academic
origins: the Chicago School of Sociology. The concept of
marginality rests upon notions of racial assimilation and
biological amalgamation and remains intact in current Asian
Americanist thought. The racial foundations of American law
are addressed in the second chapter in relation to Japanese
American internment and the reparations movements. Because
Asian American citizenship is an articulation of the racial
exception which resides at the core of the 0.8. legal system,

it is argued that Asian American Studies must develop a

theory of its relation to the state that addresses the
limitations of ”inclusion" and ”full" citizenship. In the
final chapter, the problem of racial subjection is explored
in light of contemporary strategies which are meant to secure
the academic “place" of Asian American Studies. Rather than
argue for a reconsolidation of Asian American identity, this
dissertation contends that the field must commit itself to a
radical critique of its foundations in order to develop
viable epistemological alternatives. Asian American
literature is read as a strategic response throughout,
intervening in debates surrounding the three major concepts;
the works of Younghill Kang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae
Lee, R. Zamora Linmark, Toshio Mori, Fae Myenne Ng, John
Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto are examined for alternative ways to
think of Asian America’s possible futures. This study seeks
to understand the limits of various Asian American Studies
projects by exploring the perilous notions of racial identity
that inhabit the heart of contemporary literary,

sociological, and historiographical works.

Copyright by
ANTHONY SZE-FAI SHIU
2003

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without
the comments and support of my committee: Victor Jew, Sheng-
mei Ma, Theresa Melendez, and Scott Michaelsen. I would like
to single out Scott Michaelsen for his generosity, candor,
and active advocacy. His friendship and scholarly acumen are
unparalleled, and I have benefitted from his help in
innumerable ways.

As always, my parents and sister have proven to be my
strongest supporters. Nicole's assistance and encouragement,
especially with legal issues, has been outstanding. Albert
and Pat Shiu have endured twenty-four straight years of my
education; I surely would be disoriented without their
assistance and love.

The Asian American community at Michigan State
University deserves special recognition. Their resolve in the
face of continued marginalization has been an inspiration.

The monetary support of the Urban Affairs Program, the
College of Arts and Letters, the Program in American Studies,
and the ALANA office has been exceptional. I would like to
personally thank Dr. Maxie Jackson, Dr. Yevonne R. Smith, Dr.
Peter Levine, Dr. Stephen Rachman, and Evette Chavez for
their warmth and kindness.

Cecilia Samonte has been an integral part of my life for
longer than she can imagine. I am continually inspired by her

patience, resolve, and commitment. Mahal ko. Always.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
THREE VIEWS OF PROGRESS... ......... .............. ....... ....1
E. San Juan, Jr., Gramsci, Counterhegemony ........... ..7
Lowe' 3 Moving Athwart .................... . ......... .21
Palumbo-Liu, Particulars, and the Canon...............32
Beyond and Before the Project(s)......... ...... .......42
CHAPTER 1
MARGINALITY REVISITED........... ...... ...... ....... ........48
Marginal Sociology ................................. ...52
Interests ........................... ...... ...... .55
Strangers ................... . ......... ...........67
Marginality......................................71
Qualifications.... ............ ......... ..... ..........75
Asian American Responses ............... ...............84
CHAPTER 2
EXCEPTION(AL)/INTERNMENT ................................. .103
Absent(ing) Hindsight ............... . ...... ..........112
Error and Recompense.................................119
Literary Challenges...... ....... .. ......... ..........138
CHAPTER 3
PRODUCING ASIAN AMERICA ................................... 161
”To Be a Solution": South Asian America........ ..... .178
Framing Asian America ............... ..... ....... .....188
Imagining............. ........ ............... ..... ...208
WORKS CITED ..... ............ ............. .......... ....... 226

vi

Introduction: Three Views of Progress

He walked along, thinking, searching, thinking and
probing, and, in the darkness of the alley of the
community that was a tiny bit of America, he chased
that faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it

continued to take shape in mind and heart.
—John Okada1

That a backward people or social group may need a
coercive external discipline so as to be educated
in the ways of civilisation does not mean that they
should be reduced to slavery, unless one considers
all state coercion to be slavery.

-—Antonio Gramsci2

Asian American cultural studies, at present, faces a
predicament. The dilemma emerges in terms of how Asian
Americanists attempt to understand the production of Asian
American subjects and their proposed solutions meant to
counter marginalization and racialization. For the purposes
of this introduction, I will examine the works of three
prominent Asian Americanists: E. San Juan, Jr., Lisa Lowe,
and David Palumbo-Liu; these three scholars, arguably, have
produced the most work on the ”question" of Asian America,
and their work undoubtedly demonstrates a high level of
theoretical/philosophical rigor and sophistication. Each
scholar's attempt to solve the problem of race relies on a
specific mode of engagement, like Lowe’s and San Juan's

reliance on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, that ends up

 

l Okada, John. No-No Boy. 1957. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1995.
251.
2 Gramsci, Antonio. “Antonio Labriola [1]." Further Selections

from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and Trans. Derek Boothman. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 1995. 159.

 

replicating the very ideas that they seek to counter. The
limitations of each argument presented reveal how, at the
forefront of the field, the grounds of Asian American
cultural studies have reiterated that which should be
dismissed: a reliance upon racia1(ist), exclusionary logics
without either a dismissal of the calcified, particular
“Asian American" identities which are produced via exclusion
or an evacuation of hierarchies of power within Asian
America. Political intervention, cultural production, and
Asian American subjectivity can only be thought of, as I will
demonstrate below, as ”war" or competition-~1ike the
Gramscian concept ”hegemony"--and this ultimately determines
the ways that each theorist's exit strategies from the
problems (and ravages) of race end up being exclusionary in
principle. In other words, each theorist's work meets a
theoretical threshold that cannot be crossed; their
strategies repeat and replicate the racial domination they
seek to counter. Hence the epigraphs above: while Ichiro in
No-No Boy chases the ”faint and elusive insinuation of
promise"--arguably a future without exclusions--we are
reminded that even radical theorists like Antonio Gramsci
have no problem, unwittingly or not, prescribing a kinder,
gentler "discipline" in order to pursue counterhegemonic
ends.

In “On Asian American Cultural Projects," Lisa Lowe
claims that ”some cultural forms can succeed in producing

alternatives in the encounter with ['the law, capitalist

exploitation, racialization, and gendering']" (49). This
statement demands a number of questions, not least of which
is how to define ”cultural form" and what its exact
relationship to Asian American “culture" is. Likewise, do
these ”alternatives"--produced in encounters with varying
forms of interpellation and (materialist) determination--
point in a specific direction, fundamentally altering the
conditions that produce a need for alternatives in the first
place? In another vein, Palumbo-Liu and San Juan are
concerned with the history of subjectivities and racisms.
Palumbo-Liu declares that a task ”more worthwhile" than
offering “alternatives" is to ”ascertain at each historical
moment the nature of . . . [Asian American] subjectivity . .
. and what it might teach us about our own historical
situation" (Agiag_13); concomitantly, San Juan endorses
studies that “posit historically demarcated racisms and then
proceed from there" (Racial 46). Strategies that call for the
study of how the history of subjectivities or instances of
racism.can help develop a future politics are still unclear
in terms of describing how such strategies will help address
and counter the forces and institutions that create the
grouping ”Asian American," and I maintain that the primary
way of addressing this problem is to reassess the
epistemological foundations of the term.”Asian American" and,
in the end, develop new ways of thinking about and addressing
subjectivity and subjection that refuse to replicate common

(and debilitating) conceptions of race. This introduction

seeks to understand the current modes of envisioning a future
(or futures) in current Asian American cultural studies in
terms of their logical trajectories and proposed ends.

In his introduction to the collection Questions of
Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall addresses the fundamental
problem with the concept of ”identity": ”Throughout their
careers, identities can function as points of identification
and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to
leave out, to render ’outside', abjected" (5, emphasis in
original). "Difference"--be it in the form of “identity" or
in claiming a group status or culture--is constituted by an
exclusion, and I will show how this exclusion is perpetuated
by, for example, Lowe’s discussion of Asian American culture
below. Because the use of difference is often ”foundational”
instead of descriptive, the introduction and instantiation of
difference in analysis is fraught with peril, and we should
be attuned to how both difference and identity are mobilized,

especially in terms of critiques meant to counter racial
exclusion in the first place.3 Kent Ono perceptively points

out that Asian American Studies needs to be (re)evaluated in
terms of what it purports to represent:

The very idea of Asian American, as a collective

 

3 In Being,8inqular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy uses the terms

“distinction” and ”foundation" in order to stress the danger of
mistaking a distinction of social position, like class or race, for a
foundation or origin:
Undoubtedly, the task is wholly a matter of not confusing
distinction and foundation; in fact, this point contains
everything that is at stake philosophically, ethically, and
politically in what is brewing [se trame] around
'identities' and ‘subjects' of all sorts. (Being 152)

assignation, is a problematic issue. Indeed, Asian
American can only be theorized as an imaginary
discursive formation, with no possibility of ever
describing, containing, or producing such a
community. (Ono 75)
Since the only "real" Asian American constituency is produced
through racialization—-Asian Americans don't just “appear"--
then the central problem facing Asian American studies is how
to confront and change the various structures of power that
govern, regulate, and call into being specific Asian American
lives.

As a result, I will focus here on problems concerning
the ”social." Apart from relying on notions of economic
determination or prescribing ways to counter the Western
canonical literary tradition, it is essential to grasp how
economic, political, and institutional contexts imagine and
envision their subjects and constituencies. In her discussion
of Chinese intellectuals, Rey Chow argues that the social
must be cleared of racialisms and essentialisms before
structural change takes place:

Before any structural changes are introduced at the
level of the party-state, changes need to be
introduced, however imperceptibly, at the ”social"
level . . . Future change as such is, of course,
imaginary. Its possibility is that of providing an
alternative to what is currently being dismantled

and demolished. (Chow 92)

Social changes--imaginary by circumstance--will be the focus
of this introduction; I will assess San Juan's, Lowe's, and
Palumbo-Liu’s projects and the ”solutions' presented in terms
of the social. Implicit in my analysis is that ”subjects"
are, according to Judith Butler, always formed in
subordination and that "this subordination provides the
subject's continuing condition of possibility": ”This
attachment [to subordination] in its primary forms must both
come to be and be denied, its coming to be must consist in
its partial denial, for the subject to emerge" (Butler 8,
emphasis in original). From San Juan's reliance upon a
Gramsci that (re)instates ”intellectual" exclusion and
educational coercion to Lowe’s use of “culture" to counteract
the effects of capital to Palumbo-Liu's new ”ethnic canon” of
literary texts based upon non-judging judgements, each
strategy approaches the subject of subordination by first
introducing their own brand of subordination in order for the
Asian American subject to emerge. This new subject(ion)
remains racialized in the first instance, proof that the
techniques and technologies for providing ”alternatives" are,
in fact, (re)iterations of the very contexts they seek to
dispel and hold at bay. Further, these new solutions of/to
subordination envision nothing past said subordination;
subjection continually remains, unable to be mobilized in
order to confront and reduce/eliminate the forces of
domination. As such, ”unworking" the work of power as a goal

is unthinkable. It is only through the examination of

strategies that are exclusionary in principle that we can
develop a mode of thinking that, in principle, will allow
Asian American Studies to realize that ”faint and elusive"
possibility of equality.

E. San Juan. Jr.L Gramsci. Counterhegemony

E. San Juan, Jr. is perhaps the most prolific Asian

Americanist. In this section, I will address how San Juan's
trenchant critiques of postcolonial theory, transnational
capital, and "identity politics" are jeopardized by his deep
investment in and indebtedness to the works of Antonio
Gramsci. I contend that analyses that deploy Gramsci's
concepts of ”hegemony" and ”counter-hegemony" risk
reiterating exclusion and, as a result, are dangerous if used
to formulate alternatives to racialization. In his most
committed treatment of Gramsci’s work, Beyond Postcolonial
Theory, San Juan defines his theoretical stance against
current developments in critical theory, especially
postcolonial theory:

Postcolonial Theory, in brief, can be read as

metaphysical idealism masking its

counterrevolutionary telos by denying its own

worldly interest and genealogy. It occludes its own

indeterminacy by deploying psychoanalytical and

linguistic conceptual frameworks that take

market/exchange relations for granted. (9)
What is troubling about this stance--a marking of the

”psychoanalytical and linguistic” as counterproductive and

indeterminate-—is that San Juan implies that there is a
determinate, if not determining, space/area that needs to be
foregrounded in postcolonial theory: market/exchange
relations; dividing the world into ”real" and secondary
concerns, he later chides Lisa Lowe's work as ”vapid
formalist culturalism” that is “impotent to influence the
political wars of position and movement within the expanded
or integral state form" (182). And the assertion of a
”misdirected" nature of postcolonial theory carries over to
Asian Americanist works. San Juan continues, noting the
inadequacies of postmodernist theory by rejecting all
projects that deal with the ”social" at the ”expense" of an
analysis of capital:
[P]ostmodernists celebrate the alleged dispersal of
power into shifting and arbitrary sites of the
social field. This move, I submit, effectively
disables any long-range collective project of
discovering and possible Archimedean point at which
the whole system [of global capital] can be
dismantled. (165)
Perhaps the most intriguing claim San Juan makes deals with
the ”Archimedean point" or center that he hopes will be
“dismantled" through a collective theoretical project. This
central point/authority is eventually addressed as ”hegemony"
in his work, and the counter-hegemonic--that which enables a
dismantling of global structures of power and domination-—

becomes the primary concept that drives San Juan's critiques.

Overall, San Juan proposes a two-fold strategy for
countering racialization, domination, and imperialism. First,
he astutely locates Asian and Asian American literature in a
complex sociohistorical context that other critics often
ignore or downplay. Second, San Juan develops a Gramscian
analysis to create a theory of (re)education the relies upon
the formation of ”organic" intellectuals; as such, his
thoughts rest on a foundation of intellectual coercion and
assimilation. In Racial Formations/Critical Transformations,
San Juan criticizes Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a
Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans as a
”positivist-empiricist valorization of ‘lived experience'
[that] is carried out within the master narrative of
evolutionary, gradualist progress" (101). Then, San Juan
casts doubt on any “tactical” strategy that attempts to
assert an ”indigenous Otherness":

[If we can’t challenge the] logic of liberal,
possessive individualism.and the seductive lure of
consumerism . . . I suspect that the only recourse
is to revive versions of individualist metaphysics,
the most popular of which is ”identity politics,"
that is, the tendency to base one's politics on a
sense of identity . . . From a strategic angle,
this tactical move recuperates an autochthonous
will, an indigenous Otherness if you like. (104)
This doubt, however, soon emerges as a growing contradiction

in San Juan's work; clearly wary of “identity politics" and

any other “strategic angle” in others’ works, he is still
committed to a conception of (and minimal investment in) the
”autochthonous"-—a figure before (or without) relation to the
outside world. For example, he rhetorically asks:
Should we (”natives” of internal/external colonies,
Fanon's ”wretched of the earth") repudiate both the
Enlightenment paradigm and its antithesis, the
ludic play of cyborgs and nomads in favor of
autochtonous [sic] programs enacted by "specific
intellectuals” and the testimonios of indigenous
survivors? (Hegemony 9-10).
The answer is, conditionally, yes, though this isn't readily
apparent; as I will demonstrate below, organic intellectuals-
-akin to “specific intellectuals"--and indigenous status take
center—stage in San Juan’s use of the concept ”hegemony."
What is readily apparent, however, is San Juan's
investment in establishing a relationship of alterity between
the ”canon" of American literature and Asian/Asian American
literary works. After lucidly arguing that "white supremacist
standards" form the traditional canon in a ”pluralist" vein
that ”preserves material inequality and justice," San Juan
offers his alternative:
I propose that we deploy the concept of ”emergent
literature,” which, according to Wlad Godzich, does
not refer to literatures of developing or
underdeveloped countries; rather, it refers to

”literatures that cannot be readily comprehended

10

within the hegemonic view of literature that has
been dominant.”4 . . . Our task resembles that of

comprehending the postmodern sublime (Kant via
Lyotard) whose conception is intuitively accessible
but somehow resists articulation and
representation. (Beyond 191)
The hegemonic conception of literature, then, cannot easily
accommodate Asian American literature; indeed, Asian American
literature emerges out of a history of immigration
regulation, “determinate forms of [cultural and aesthetic]
value" that emerge out of white supremacist standards, and
”geopolitical actions between Asian nations and the United
States" and should be contextualized as such (192). Likewise,
San Juan trenchantly argues against using Filipino American
writing to affirm the “immigrant paradigm of Euro—American
success" (”In Search" 219). Despite this committed stance,
San Juan claims the lack of a historical, political, and
economic analysis of literature--especially in terms of
postcolonial theory--leads to the ”salient question of
agency, the intentionality of transformative practice" being
”elided" (Beyond 7). This turns out to be ”problematic" for
”people of color seeking to affirm their communal identities
and autochtonous [sic] traditions" (7). There is a dilemma,
however, in terms of how ”agency” in the service of

”transformative practice"--practice that is a counter-

 

4 Godzich, Wlad. ”Emergent Literature and the Field of Comparative

Literature." The Comparative Perspectiyg on Literature. Ed. Clayton
Koelb and Susan Noakes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. 35.

11

hegemonic response to hegemony-—relates to autochthonous
traditions: how can ”original" traditions “know” the
historical development of oppression and exclusion? And how
does any sociohistorical context impinge, if at all, on the
autochthonous traditions (and peoples) that inhabit San
Juan's text?

San Juan's helpful critique of the canon and his desire
to ”uplift” the oppressed is undermined by his investment in
Gramscian logics of hegemony and subalternity. In order to
affect a ”radical transformation of grassroots consciousness
and practice”--an explicit goal of all of his work--San Juan
relies upon notions of subaltern ”consciousness" and
”psychology" that demand reeducation in order to counter
racialist and imperialist practices (”In Search" 219).
Instead of viewing the subaltern as a product of colonial and
imperialist practices and discourse, San Juan develops his
own definition that relies upon his investment in the idea of
a “peasant psychology": ”One other way of defining the
subaltern condition is to consider it as a terminal point
before the beginning of self-awareness, before the critical
elaboration of the inventory of infinite 'traces' deposited
by this historical process” (Beyond 89, 97). This ”self-
awareness," a ”consciousness" that must be developed, is
centered on a telos of development that depends upon a
programmatic determination of educational standards and
evaluation. San Juan's strategy, then, is to (re)educate the

masses/peasants so that they can comprehend the ”totality" of

12

social forces and human agency, especially since the ”peasant
lacks a knowledge of the institutions of the modern state"
(88). What is essential to note here are the key differences
between ”psychology" (a mental/psychological state) and
”knowledge" (a comprehension of the social terrain), a
difference between ”nature" and ”rank."

Knowledge, then, is only one part of San Juan's project
of developing ”grassroots consciousness and practice," mainly
because subalterns are defined by a constitutive ”lack" that
is in need of ”not just political leadership of an alliance
or classes but also moral and intellectual leadership of a
historical bloc of forces engendered in the process of
revolutionary transformation" (Beyond 87). The moral
”leadership" that San Juan deems necessary for transformation
actually recapitulates the hierarchy and condescension of the
racial/colonial/imperial systems that create subalterns in
the first place; subalterns are naturally ”uncivilized" and
brutal, demanding the strong arm of social and intellectual
coercion in order to effect counterhegemony. This much is
evident when San Juan quotes Gramsci concerning the role of
intellectual leadership:

Again, Gramsci stresses that the transcendence of
subalternity requires organization and education:
”Organized in this way, the peasants will become an
element of order and progress; left to themselves,
incapable as they are of waging any systematic and

disciplined action, they will become a disordered

13

rabble, a tumultuous horde driven to the cruelest
barbarities." (90-91, emphasis added)5

The notion of an inevitable backsliding of the masses or the
”mob"-like nature of the subaltern is always buttressed by a
schedule of intellectual development, as Gramsci points out
in his essay “The Study of Philosophy":
When one's conception of the world is not critical
and coherent but disjointed and episodic, one
belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of mass
human groups. The personality is strangely
composite: it contains Stone Age elements and
principles of a more advanced science, prejudices
from all past phases of history at the local level
and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be
that of a human race united the world over.
(Selections 324)
Implicit in this statement is Gramsci’s maneuver to establish
a hierarchy of exclusion; quite starkly, the prospect of
”mass human groups" is analogous to a sort of confusion or,
at best, a muddled and ”prehistoric" epistemology that smacks
of ”savagery"; while characterizing the group as salvageable,
Gramsci opens up a space for what he deems positive change
through education. Because of the ”savage" nature of the
subalterns, San Juan deems it necessary to alter their

”mental habits" so that they can fall in line with his own

 

5 Gramsci quote from: Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Political

Writings 1910-1920. Ed. Quintin Hoare. New York: International
Publishers, 1977. 86-87.

 

14

counter-hegemonic, revolutionary program; it is difficult to
tell where the ”nature" of the peasantry ends and their
”consciousness" begins, and the lack of a clear distinction
in San Juan's work runs the risk of merely pathologizing
subalternity as a “condition marked by the absence of a will”
(Beyond 95).

”Organic intellectuals"—-the “specific intellectuals"
mentioned above--become the ”organizers of group mentalities"
for San Juan (Hegemony 48). Indeed, he begins his History and
Form: Sslectsd Esssys_by claiming that his “project" is ”to
become an organic intellectual of the Filipino working
masses" (10). And even though Gramsci contends in his essay
”The Intellectuals" that ”All men are intellectuals,” it is
clear that some are more intellectual than others (Selections
9). San Juan declares that the ”process of establishing
hegemony" never ”happens" but is mediated by a new category
of organic (as opposed to traditional) intellectuals whose
command over material and intellectual knowledge endows them
with a "directive" power to fashion ideologies that gradually
become ”common sense" through a complex network of consensus
formation (Hegemony 62). Much like the ”critic" in his work,
the organic intellectual “activates a principle of
transformation" that ”entails an inventory comprised of the
systematizing and refinement of 'common sense,’ together with
the socialization of philosophical and scientific concepts
that can move society forward by releasing suppressed human

potential” (64). While San Juan uses fairly non-judgmental

15

terms like “consensus formation" in these passages, he also
omits a key Gramscian term that, because of its definition,
drastically changes the function and meaning of education and
“consensus": ”good sense."

”Good sense,” for Gramsci, comes about after organic
intellectuals give direction to the subaltern masses. The
masses possess “common sense," which is like a religion in
that it ”cannot constitute an intellectual order because they
[the masses] cannot be reduced to unity and coherence even
within an individual consciousness, let alone collective
consciousness" (Selections 326). Common sense must eventually
become, through intellectual mediation, good sense, which is
sense that comes into being after the masses ”realize fully
that whatever happens is basically rational and must be
confronted as such, and that one should apply one's power of
rational concentration and not let oneself be carried away by
instinctive and violent impulses" (328). ”Savagery," in this
instance, can be contained. Gramsci continues:

One can see from these examples that the terms have
quite a precise meaning: that of overcoming bestial
and elemental passions through a conception of
necessity which gives a conscious direction to
one’s activity. This is the healthy nucleus that
exists in "common sense,” the part of it which can
be called ”good sense" and which deserves to be
made more unitary and coherent. (328, emphasis

added)

16

Though there is a ”healthy nucleus” in common sense, it is
difficult not to imagine that what Gramsci is calling for is
more than just a “development" that ends in good sense for
the masses. ”Overcoming bestial and elemental passions" is a
particularly violent and striking phrase, one shot through
with a language not just of ”maturation" or development, but
of ablation or destruction; the very thing that makes good
sense good sense is also the process by which the masses are
reinvented--despite having a ”healthy nucleus”--in order to
become more unified and coherent. Gramsci simultaneously
utilizes a language of development--”The philosophy of praxis
. . . [leads the ’simple'] to a higher conception of life"-—
and of creation--”precisely in order to construct an
intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible
the intellectual progress of the mass"—-in a gesture that
calls for the fashioning and generating of the "simple" for
counterhegemonic ends (332).

As such, the role of organic intellectuals in motivating
the masses/peasantry/subalterns/simp1e resembles a
”civilizing" mission in that counterhegemony can only succeed
through the manipulation of those ”below" the intellectuals.
This fashioning of the masses exposes the exclusionary basis
for Gramsci’s supposedly inclusive praxis. He justifies the
necessity of intellectuals and details how they help develop
”critical self-consciousness" in the masses:

Critical self-consciousness means, historically and

politically, the creation of an élite of

17

intellectuals. A human mass does not ”distinguish"
itself, does not become independent in its own
right without, in the widest sense, organising
itself; and there is not organisation without
intellectuals, that is without organizers and
leaders, in other words, without the theoretical
aspect of the theory-practice nexus being
distinguished concretely by the existence of a
group of people ”specialised” in conceptual and
philosophical elaboration of ideas. (Selections
332)
Here it is evident that the process of developing good sense
is very much a top-down affair. I want to stress that
Gramsci's language is neither equalitarian nor totalitarian--
everyone can ”become" critically self-conscious--but, rather,
he relies on a certain logic of ”assimilation"--by which I
mean a certain ”forgetting" implicit in his use of
”overcoming"—-that centers not only on bringing the masses
into the intellectual fold but also killing off any
retrograde passions that may have existed in the first place.
This process of popular asceticism—-or ablation of all that
has come before in terms of (mass) subjectivity--eventually
leads to the masses being able to exert counterhegemony in
order to change the State; Gramsci continues:
Every relationship of ”hegemony” is necessarily an
educational relationship and occurs not only within

a nation, between the various forces of which the

18

nation is composed, but in the international and

world-wide field, between complexes of national and

continental civilisations. (350)

This type of educational relationship is crucial to note; the
charge of the “elite" intellectuals in educating the ”savage"
masses contains, at its foundation, an exclusion. And despite
Gramsci's desire to ”create a hierarchy, but one which [is]
open," there is nothing to guarantee that the ”new"
counterhegemonic hierarchy is significantly different from
the hegemonic hierarchy that allows the counterhegemonic to
come into being (Antonio 50).

Gramsci's work has a specific trajectory: to transition
from a hegemonic State to an ”ethical state." In ”State and
Civil Society," Gramsci argues:

But, in reality, only the social group that poses
the end of the State and its own end as the target to be
achieved can create an ethical state--i.e. one which
tends to put an end to the internal divisions of the
ruled, etc., and to create a technically and morally
unitary social organism. (Selections 259).

The difference between the ”State" and the "ethical state" is
rooted in the idea that the social will be ”unitary," but the
question still remains as to how the ”standards" of morality
will be decided upon and implemented. At this particular
moment, Gramsci leaves a fissure in his formulation: the end
of the State--that which creates hierarchy and exclusion--can

only come about by a social group that “poses,” but may never

19

realize, the end of the State. In ”Utopia," an essay the
predates the Prison Notebooks_by at least eleven years,
Gramsci offers up a disturbing vision of freedom:
Dictatorship is the fundamental institution
guaranteeing freedom, through its prevention of
coups de main by factious minorities. It is a
guarantee of freedom, since it is not a method to
be perpetuated, but a transitional stage allowing
the creation and consolidation of the permanent
organisms into which the dictatorship, having
accomplished its missions, will be dissolved.
(Antonio 50)
In order to create ”Utopia"—-and Gramsci is writing just
after the Russian Revolution--resistance or counterhegemony
cannot exist; hence, the only guarantee of freedom is not the
(supposed) dissolution of the dictatorship, but the assurance
that dissent no longer exists. The “moral" leadership here--
leadership that is entrusted to end dictatorial domination—-
must be unconditionally trusted by the masses-~no questions
tolerated. Despite the time-lag between “Utopia" and essays
like "State and Civil Society," the same kind of
relationships are deployed using different concepts.

As a result, when San Juan identifies ”cultures of
resistance" as holding the key to a more equalitarian future,
we should wonder exactly what is being resisted and what
future beyond the reinstantiation of hierarchy--moral and

intellectual, this time--is possible. wendy Brown contends

20

that resistance is often uncritical of its aims or
mission(s): ”Resistance stands against, not for; it is
reaction to domination, rarely willing to admit a desire for
it, and it is neutral with regard to possible political
direction" (Brown 22). When Gramsci calls for an end to all
internal divisions, he curiously elides any explanation of
how both violence and the ablation of subjectivity for the
masses play a large role in his creation of a division-less
state. As a result, San Juan's work advances a notion of
counterhegemony that replicates the very exclusions-—racial,
colonial, and capitalist—-that enable counterhegemony to
emerge as a political strategy and possibility. And the
Gramscian proclamation that ”Possibility means 'freedom'," at
this moment, rings hollow: counterhegemonic possibilities, as
such, underwrite domination (Selections 360).
Lowe's Moving Athwart

In the introduction to The Politics of Culture in ths_
Shadow of Capital, Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd attempt to think
through the possibilities for ”cultural formations” and
counterhegemonic alternatives in a world of globalized
capitalism. They contend that ”culture" should constitute ”a
site in which the reproduction of contemporary capitalist
social relations may be continually contested" because
culture should be understood as neither “commodified” nor
”aesthetic" but, rather, as ”imbricat[ed] in political and
economic relations" (Lowe and Lloyd 26). While I will discuss

the dangers of Lowe's conceptions of culture and cultural

21

formations below, I would like to stress how Lowe's and
Lloyd's envisioned future--a future marked by greater and
greater confrontations between local cultures and the
economic/political state apparatuses that undermine and
dominate them--is constituted by avoidance: ”Our moment is
not one of fatalistic despair; faces turned toward the past,
we do not seek to make whole what has been smashed, but to
move athwart the storm into a future in which the debris is
more than just a residue: it holds the alternative" (27,
emphasis added). Two points in this passage bear elaboration.
First, moving athwart--to shuttle between points—-is a
lateral movement; to move "into a future" would demand a
confrontation that Lowe and Lloyd cannot admit into their
formulation. Likewise, the resistances that would constitute
a moving athwart will not fundamentally address the ”storm"
that leaves destruction in its wake. Second, the ”debris"
created by the ”incessant violence of the new transnational
order with its reconstituted patriarchies and racisms" will
constitute a future "alternative" (26). This poses two
problems: literally, there is (re)eobbling of those cultural
forms that have been “smashed"--without rethinking how to
address the conditions of their destruction in the first
place--and, figuratively, there is a ”residue” that comprises
the debris that will produce the alternative which, in
another context, will refer to an investment in (and reliance
upon) racialization. This residue eventually leads Lowe, in

her other writings, to recapitulate the logic of

22

racialization in her attempt to comprehend and develop an
Asian American cultural politics.

In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics,
Lowe relies upon Gramscian notions of hegemony in order to
imagine a future predicated upon the difference(s) of culture
within the United States. She writes: ”When a hegemony
representing the interests of a dominant group exists, it is
always within the context of resistances from emerging
groups" (69); these resistances vie for the right to
determine future hegemonies, where hegemony is the "process
by through which a particular group gains consent to

determine the political, cultural, and ideological character
of a state" (205).6 The question remains, as with San Juan's

work, of how to break out of this shuttling and volleying
between the resistant and dominant, out of the highly
determined circuit of (consensual) power that, in the end, is
premised on nothing but the trust that those counterhegemonic
forces who gain hegemony will not replicate that which has
been overthrown. Immigrant Acts, as a result, relies upon
this logic and circuit of power and Lowe’s analysis seems
stalled by the concepts of culture and resistance, from which

she calls for a “non-essentialist" essentialism to undergird

 

6 Lowe does remark in her notes that hegemony is a ”suggestive

construct” and not an “explicitly interpreted set of relations"
(Immigrant 204). She also suggests that ”We must go beyond Gramsci's
notion of hegemony" because the “'social’ is an open and uneven terrain"
(204). It is unclear how an ”open and uneven terrain" can mobilize any
strategy of (counter)hegemony, and Lowe does not offer any extended
analysis of what, specifically, in Gramsci's thoughts about hegemony
"we" must go beyond--if there is a ”beyond" that can still be called
”hegemony."

23

present and future Asian American cultural politics without
aiming to evacuate the racial origin of such a politics. In
the end, Lowe’s analysis is unable to escape the grasp of

race, and Asian American identities and subjectivities--the
very things that allow for resistance to emerge--are built

atop the ”residue" of racialization to create a more free
Asian America.7

Lowe's concept of culture, initially, relies upon
”memory”:

Culture is the medium of the present-~the imagined
equivalences and identifications through which the
individual invents lived relationships with the
national collective--but it is simultaneously the
site that mediates the past, through this history
is grasped as difference. . . . It is likewise in
culture that individuals and collectivities
struggle and remember and, in that difficult
remembering, imagine and practice both subject and
community differently. (Immigrant 2-3, emphasis in
original)

What seems problematic in this formulation is the Asian

 

7 Lowe's analysis depends heavily upon the notion of contradiction

as it relates to nation, citizenship, and race: “the concept of the
abstract citizen--each formally equivalent, one to the other—-is defined
by the negation of the material conditions of work and the inequalities
of the property system" (Immigrant 2). I find Lowe's work here
perceptive and smart; my protests, though, are lodged on the terrain of
the social and the resolution(s) that she proposes. Beyond material
conditions and racialized, gendered working conditions, Lowe, as we will
see, relies heavily upon a sort of cultural “essence" that corresponds
to what Asian Americans “remember, and what they forget” (2).

24

Americans’ “invention" of a relationship with the ”national
collective"; I take the “national collective" to mean
Americans and the formation of American subjects/citizens" as
a whole. Yet the distinction between the ”historical" and
“lived" relationships is confusing; the historical already
creates the racialized subject--through immigration
restrictions and alien land laws, for instance--but the
"lived" relationship must be created. Situating a self within
the national ”narrative,” the Asian American subject is
imbued with a large memory, one that responds to the
remembered histories that ”contradict the abstract form of
citizenship" (2). But what secures such memories and, even if
such memories are marked by ”fragments, shocks, and flashes
of disjunction," what insures the securing of meaning for
them? (2). The meaning of memory is marked by difference—-in
the practice of ”subject and community”--without relation
(hence ”imagining") or, rather, the relation the prevents
identification with the national narrative makes possible
this alterity. Such a characterization of non—relationality
allows Lowe to label Asian American productions as
”countersites to U.S. national memory and national culture”
(4). Also, Lowe posits that racial differentiation allows
“images, memories, and narratives" to be ”rearticulated in
Asian American culture through the emergence of alternative
identities and practices" (12). The difficulty with this
Asian American ”cultural” constitution is that the very

forces of racialization that produce alterity are the same

25

constraints that mark and produce ”culture"; this does not

move beyond racialization but beside it-—“athwart"--allowing
such racializations to still exist unchallenged.8 Put another

way, the condition of possibility for the constitution of an
Asian American subject is the very basis for the subject’s
culture; suffering becomes productive and it is only through
suffering--and not an engagement with the actual production
of subjects through domination by citizenship for Lowe--that
such a subject can emerge.

Lowe goes on to argue that when inequalities cannot be
resolved, culture "erupts" and through it ”alternative fonms
of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are rmagined"
(Immigrant 22). Shifting from ”difference" to "alternatives"
is strategic, and Lowe’s discourse relies upon such a shift
so that she can accommodate the irreducibility of the (Asian
American) subject that was, previously, fairly easy to
produce. She continues:

Cultural identities come from somewhere, have
histories. But, like everything which is
historical, they undergo constant transformation.
Far from being eternally fixed in some
essentialized past, they are subject to the

continuous ”play” of history, culture and power.

 

8 See, for example, Wendy Brown, who argues that ”Such images of

freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the
organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced and
without addressing the subject constitution that domination effects,
that is, the constitution of social categories” (7, emphasis in
original).

26

(64)
It is apparent that Lowe is unwilling to pin anything down in
terms of "cultural identities," save that they change in
history; however, such an unwillingness brings into relief
the difficulties of her racial schema: first establishing a
strict relationship to the citizen-subject, Asian American
cultural identities are subject to a ”constant
transformation.” The vacillation between State-induced
subject construction and a benign sort of creativity in
relation to identity is intriguing, but this relation is
shored up by another definition: ”The making of Asian
American culture includes practices that are partly
inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented" (65).
Culture and cultural identity here both forecast a sense of
racial ”ownership"--”inheritance" and ”invention”--over
culture due to the ability to invent something still tied to
an Asian American identity. Also, such identities are
dependent upon racial logic: the one who ”creates" must also
be racialized in the first instance in order to become a
legitimate (or authentic) creator. What seems like a pushing
at the boundaries of racialized identities becomes,
logically, a reification of such identities and, in the
process, the social categories and forces that produce the

Asian American subject are used as currency for purchase into

a realm of ”cultural identity."9

 

9 Spivak discerns between the “descriptive" and ”transformative"

levels of the constructed nature of “class," which sheds light on the
problem of investing in a racialized identity:

27

This concept of cultural identity leads Lowe to a
discussion of how Asian Americans who are Asian Americanists-
-indeed, there is no other relationship proffered-—should
approach their work and theorizing:

I argue for the Asian American necessity to
organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans,
but at the same time, I inscribe this necessity
within a discussion of the risks of a cultural
politics that relies on the construction of
sameness and the exclusion of difference. (68,
emphasis in original)
What theorizing ”as" an Asian American entails is not
elaborated upon, but the condition of being Asian American--
the problem of being racialized as such--is used in service
of political efficacy. Nancy speaks to the dangers of this
dynamic by pointing out “[I]dentity makes difference: it
presents itself as preeminently different from all other
identity and from all nonidentity; relating itself to itself,
it relegates the other to a self (or to an absence of self)
that is different" (§;£;g_10, emphasis in original). Instead
of investing in a transformative theoretical praxis, Lowe's
”difference"--cultural or otherwise—-always appears against a

backdrop of self-positioning. Making difference--

 

“Class" is not, after all, an inalienable description of
a human reality. Class consciousness on the descriptive
level is itself a strategic and artificial rallying
awareness which, on the transformative level, seeks to
destroy the mechanics which come to construct the
outlines of the very class of which a collective
consciousness has been situationally developed. (In Other
205, emphasis in original).

28

manufacturing difference that moves beyond the descriptive
towards the ontological--provides Lowe with a stable ground
out of which to work as an Asian American(ist) theorist. The
problem, though, of what is excluded in the constitution of
the “as" comes back to haunt Lowe's later formulations.
Lowe's discussion of the term “Asian American" in
Immigrant Acts moves towards a transformative definition, as
opposed to the identity of Asian American(ness) discussed
above that secures difference without offering up any
tangible alternatives or modes of action against racialized
conditions. I will quote Lowe at length:
The grouping “Asian American" is not a natural or
static category; it is a socially constructed
unity, a situationally specific position, assumed
for political reasons. It is “strategic in Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak's sense of [positive
essentialism]. . . . The concept of ”strategic
essentialism" suggests that it is possible to
utilize specific signifiers of racialized ethnic
identity, such as ”Asian American," for the
purposes of contesting and disrupting the
discourses that exclude Asian Americans, while
simultaneously revealing the internal
contradictions and slippages of “Asian American" so
as to unsure that such essentialism will not be
reproduced and proliferated by the very apparatuses

we seek to disempower. (82)

29

Yet in the original, Spivak is at pains to point out that the
strategy of strategic essentialism is contradictory, a
strategy that ”adheres to the essentialist notion of
consciousness, that would fall prey to an anti-humanist
critique, within a historiographic practice that draws many
of its strengths from that very critique” (In Other 206-7).
Ono addresses Lowe’s passage in the following:
While problematizing essentialized identities is a
major focus of her essay, toward the end of it,
Lowe nonetheless recuperates an authentic and
essentialized notion of Asian American. Thus, her
problematization of the term becomes a strategic
essentialism of it; Lowe readjusts its meaning to
more full address the imperative exigencies of
difference. (Ono 72)
Whatever the ”exigencies of difference" entail, the
difficulties that Lowe’s analysis face are rooted in her
final project which is to ensure that essentialism will never
be used again by the very apparatuses of power being railed
against; in other words, Lowe aims to strategically
essentialize in order to prevent further essentializing while

still relying on essentializing to discuss Asian American

”culture.”“’1dkewise, strategic essentialism will only

 

10 Kawash, as with Spivak and Ono, points out the contradictory
position people of color are placed in when confronted with the color
line, and offers a way to mediate the ”real" and illusory foundations of
race in American society without relying upon a naturalized notion of
race:

The critical task, then, is to confront the essentialism of
the color line without resorting to yet another version of

30

disempower apparatuses and not, presumably, the
counterhegemonic movements, like Asian American cultural
politics, which will eventually assume the hegemonic
position. Though she makes a gesture towards positioning
”Asian Americans" as a “socially constructed unity," such a
move negates all that she has written before that moment,
especially in her reliance upon ”cultural difference".
Because of this, Immigrant Acts is ambiguous and, at worst, a
continuation of the very discourses and practices that
disempower Asian Americans in the first place. In her
discussion of Chinese intellectuals' reliance upon a
”Chinese" identity, Rey Chow argues that “at specific moments
[”Chinese-ness”] becomes the source of oppression and
catastrophe which they will try to survive” (Writing 98). The
catastrophe of reiterating ”race" and racialization as the
(unacknowledged) founding concepts/practices for a future
Asian American cultural identity is evident, and such a
reiteration can do nothing to transform the very laws,

institutions, and practices that create "Asian Americans” in

the first place.11

 

essentialism that would function as a naturalizing
explanation for the way things are. The color line
continually both produces and maintains social order and
hierarchy. Therefore, it must be addressed doubly, as both
the origin of an absolutely real [social and political]
division and as the product of an utterly false and
impossible distinction [the biological]. (19-20)

11 In “Canon, Institutionalization, Identity: Contradictions for

Asian American Studies," Lowe presents an analysis of the canon that is
quite similar to the arguments that David Palumbo-Liu advances.
Unfortunately, Lowe also reproduces the investment in biological
racialisms evident in my analysis of Immigrant Acts; she revised this
essay for Immiqrsnt Acts as ”Canon, Institutionalization, Identity:
Asian American Studies." One example of this (re)investment in race is

31

Palumbo-Liu, Particulars. and the Canon

 

In Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger claims that in rich industrial
democracies, the ”public intelligentsia" ”deride ideological
politics, large-scale projects of institutional reform and
popular political mobilization as romantic and impractical"
(4). As a result, the “practical problem-solving by experts"
eventually allows politics to ”degenerate into short-term and

episodic factional deals, struck against a background of

 

the following:
Asian American literary texts often reveal heterogeneity
rather than producing regulating ideas of cultural unity or
integration. On one level, this heterogeneity is expressed
in the unfixed, unclosed field of texts written by authors
at different distances and generations from the ”original"
Asian culture. (“Canon" 53)
What this “distance" means-—literally or figuratively--goes unexplained
in the article, and Lowe revises the end of the sentence in Immigrant
Acts: ” . . . different distances and generations from cultures as
different as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Philippine, Indian, Vietnamese,
and Lao--or in the case of Hawaiian and Pacific Islander cultures, not
immigrants at all but colonized, dispossessed, and deracinated" (43,
emphasis in original). Whether “distances" can be tied to a notion of
”assimilation"--texts that may be, through some calculus, more
“American" than ”Asian"--is unclear, but the criteria for determining
what an Asian American text is relies upon, in part, a determination of
how the text relates to a culture that is determined by geopolitical
borders and an ”original" homeland culture; this appears in distinction
to those texts from Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, which reflect
colonization and dispossession: texts (and subjects) that emerge in
relation to the dominant and not apart from it (nor in an
“autochthonous” mode, which would express a cultural/racial relationship
premised on alterity).

Also, Lowe lauds Elaine H. Kim's Asisn AmsriqspyLiterature: An
Introduction to the Writinqs and Thsir Socisl Conts§§_(Philadelphia:
Temple UP, 1982) by claiming that importance of establishing a social
context for Asian American literature because it “resists the formal
abstraction of aestheticization and canonization" (“On" 54, emphasis in
original). San Juan, in a particularly blunt passage, points out the
dangers of this ”social context" because Kim, in her discussion of
Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart (1946. Seattle: U of Washington
P, 1973), subscribes to the “immigrant paradigm of Euro-American
success” instead of ”perceiving the deviancy of Bulosan's text" from
this paradigm" ("In Search" 219). Social context, in this light, is no
guarantee for avoiding the traditional criteria for canonization.

32

institutions and assumptions that remain unchallenged and
even unseen" (4). Much like Lowe’s advocacy for strategic
identities to counter hegemony, the short-term and episodic
outlooks that are, in the immediate sense, mobilized by the
promise of counterhegemonic change do not address the
fundamental, constitutive conditions of mainstream Asian
Americanist counterhegemonic politics: the presence of
institutions (and institutional regulations) that provide the
context and grounds for the emergence of oppositional
politics. Likewise, ”transformative" and “solidaristic”
politics, as described by Unger, is a way to realize ”the
interests and ideals of [group interests] through the step-
by-step change of a set of arrangements" that will “revise
the content as well as the context of recognized interests
and professed ideals" (11). What is missing in San Juan's and
Lowe's critiques (as well as transformative politics in
general), though, is the ”visionary element in politics,"
which would provide us with the ”intimation of a different
world, in which we would become (slightly) different people,
with (slightly) revised understandings of our interests and
ideals” (12).

In his writings on the dynamic of the universal and
”its" particulars, as well as his pieces on the canon, David
Palumbo-Liu attempts to create a space for minority discourse
and literature within the structure of the university. At the
same time, Palumbo-Liu’s critique relies upon notions of

”idioms” and counterhegemony-—as understood by both Lowe and

33

San Juan—-to develop a new vision of aesthetic and cultural
inclusion; the "visionary," then, is compromised and
unmentionable. In “Universalisms and Minority Culture,"
Palumbo-Liu notes a contradiction located within the
universal: “So, how can one speak of the 'minor' if not in
differentiating the space of universality, thereby breaking
the illusion of its democratic distribution of its attributes
and noting that it actually dispenses its entitlements
unevenly?" (188, emphasis in original). Astutely arguing that
the fundamental relationship between the particular and the
universal is one of exclusion, he contends that the two terms
are ”mutually inclusive and in fact, constitutive" (199).
This allows Palumbo-Liu to argue that what is needed is a new
view, an outlook that sees ”reconfiguration [of the
universal] as a site of a politicized aesthetics" that can
serve as ”one possible mode of intervention . . . to
radically contest the content of the universal" (202,
emphasis in original).

In his introduction to The Ethnic Canon: Histories,
Igstitutions. and Intsrventions, Palumbo-Liu continues his
call for the reconfiguration of the ”universal" in terms of a
specific target: the Western literary canon. But because his
intervention relies upon a strange logic of minority
discourse as "idiom," his strategy replicates much of the
thought embodied in Lowe's “strategic essentialism" and San
Juan's thoughts on ”peasant" consciousness. ”[R]evisionist

practices may suffer from remaining contained within

34

hegemonic social and pedagological practices," asserts
Palumbo-Liu, so “the goal [of Ths_§§hgig_§sggg_and minority
discourse in general] is to resist the essentializing and
stratifying modes of reading ethnic literature that make it
ripe for canonization and co—option" (17). He goes on to
establish a shifting sense of alterity for minority discourse
by using a “linguistic analogy": ”minority discourse" has
”the status of an idiom” (17). Universals and particulars are
mutually constitutive for Palumbo-Liu, but a space remains
where ”idioms have the weakness of being incomprehensible or
only partially understandable outside their particular
community of speakers" because ”they operate with relative
autonomy from the ideological formations of the dominant
linguistic code" (17, emphasis added). Drawing out the
analogy, minority discourse, as opposed to being constituted
by the dominant (and vice-versa), can (and does) function in
a relatively ”free" and sovereign manner since it is ”located
in [the hegemonic's] proximity but not engulfed by it" (17).
The logic of mutually constitutive entities here is
contradicted by ”strategic" ”relative autonomy”; minority
discourses and literature have an ”idiomatic code" that can
be ”recognized" and, in turn, such discourses need to
preserve their ”latitude as a counterdiscourse" and “ability
to designate a shifting open space outside the hegemonic"
(17). If the counterhegemonic, as argued in relation to San
Juan and Lowe, is already contained within the hegemonic and

replicates many of the hierarchical relationships perpetuated

35

by the dominant, then there can be no ”shifting open space"
apart from the hegemonic that isn't also a part of it.

Palumbo-Liu attempts to address this problem of the
particular through a conception of “critical
multiculturalism," a multiculturalism that avoids the
“celebrating [of] the plurality of cultures by passing
through them appreciatively” (Introduction 5). Traditional
(or "pluralist") multiculturalism participates in a
”monocultural discourse" that ”has argued for a single
nonmative culture to which all may subscribe voluntarily
while in fact forcing a consensus from those on the margins"
(5). The ”idiom(s)" here, then, become ”cultures" for
Palumbo-Liu, and these ”cultures," through “critical
multiculturalism" can produce an ”ethnic canon.” But it is
difficult to tell the difference between what may be
“cultures” and what may just be ”race" in another guise.
Palumbo-Liu's analysis here hinges upon a lack of specificity
when dealing with the concept of ”culture"; as a result, the
trajectory of his critique remains unclear, save the
possibility that his theory cannot formulate a world
different from the traditional vision and dynamics of
hegemony and counterhegemony.

Palumbo-Liu continues much in the same vein as San Juan
and Lowe in terms of linking the struggles of culture to
growing transnational capital:

Within this revision of corporate capitalism as

transnational, cultural ”difference" is an

36

important element to ”domesticate” and make not
only unobstructive, but attractive. This attraction
is in part derived from its translatability, that
is, commodification. (Introduction 5)
Though his aim is admirable--locating the problem of
”difference” as a result of consumption--there is a reliance
on the concept of ”translatability"; put another way, the
strength of the “idiom” is also the weakness of cultural
difference: both can be “domesticated" or "recognized" at
which point challenges to the hegemonic can no longer exist.
There is also a complementary problem that emerges in
relation to this recognition: apart from the ”unrealness" of
commodification, there is something ”untranslatable" and
”real" about culture before commodification; yet the
untranslatable cannot participate in a “critical
multiculturalism” since this project, in the first instance,
is concerned with how to approach minority literatures and
cultural production in a just manner in light of
transnational capital. Commodification, then, emerges as an
inevitability, and the minority “code" or discourse--
unwittingly for Palumbo-Liu--loses its status as
counterhegemonic interlocutor.

Palumbo-Liu, undeterred, develops a theory of critical
multiculturalism but replicates Gramsci's hierarchical
dynamic between intellectuals and students, who are placed in
the silent, unmentioned position of the masses outside of

official discourse. He further defines critical

37

multiculturalism:
However, there is a key difference in the way a
critical multiculturalism can be constituted; while
the traditional canon is based on a presumed set of
accepted texts . . . an ethnic canon should be
always in revision and contestation, its critics
conscious of both its historical and ideological
constructedness and their own pedagological goals.
(Introduction 14, emphasis in original)
While the pedagological goals of such a project are not
elaborated upon, Palumbo-Liu's criticism of a set canonical
inventory for traditional literary texts doubles back on
itself by positioning the ”ethnic” critic as the one who
participates in the contests and dialogues over what ethnic
texts are included and which are jettisoned in this new,
critically multicultural canon. Like Lowe's ”cultural
identities” that are always in ”play" in relation to power
and history, Palumbo-Liu’s critical multiculturalism is mired
in an indeterminacy that hands over the power of
determination to an anonymous set of critics that must
negotiate their place in the canon's constructedness while
also considering their pedagological goals. Likewise, the
problem of ”consciousness" reemerges in relation to the
problem of the canon.
The ”indeterminacy" of the ethnic canon's textual
inventory plays a crucial role in the formation of a critical

multiculturalism, yet Palumbo—Liu does not question the very

38

concept of canons and canonization in the first place. He
cites Spivak on the question of the canon: “There can be no
general theory of canons. Canons are the condition of
institutions and the effect of institutions. Canons secure
institutions as institutions secure canons” (Introduction 25;
Spivak “Making" 784). Yet Palumbo-Lin never mentions the
larger aim and project of Spivak’s essay: ”[W]e are
attempting not merely to enlarge the canon with a

countercanon but to dethrone canonical method" (“Making" 790,
emphasis in original);12 Dethroning, akin to Unger's

“intimation of a different world," is altogether different

from the project that Palumbo-Liu sets forth, and he follows

the same party line as San Juan and Lowe by speaking of

”resistance":
[Y]et it aims the take of a critical
multiculturalism to be alert both to the ways that
multiculturalist criticism can fall in line with
hegemonic assumptions and, indeed, serve to
reinforce them, and to ways that a truly
multicultural criticism might theorize points of
opposition and resistance. (Introduction 15,
emphasis in original).

If, as Brown points out, resistance stands against something

and not ”for" anything, then what may be happening here is a

 

12 Palumbo Liu cites Spivak after the following statement:

"[R]ather, canons must be thought of within specific institutional
practices inscribed within particular historical moments and as securing
specific positions of authority" (11).

39

power play of sorts: the ”right” to determine an ethnic
canon--regardless of its contingency or impermanence--resides
in a resistance to determination from without, but nothing
insures that this (resistant or counterhegemonic) power will
not replicate the very forces it seeks to counteract except
by relying on ethnic (studies) scholars being self-reflexive
enough to participate in the new order of canon contestation
and revision. Apart from relying on scholars' ”consciousness”
of their own positions, the only way of positing a different
world is by ”dethroning" canonical method in the first place;
the ethnic canon and critical multiculturalism cannot
transform the very relationships that create racial hierarchy
and exclusion in the first place.

Two years after the publication of The Ethnic Canon,
Palumbo-Liu published “Theory and the Subject of Asian
American Studies." Here, Palumbo-Liu reflects upon
”knowledge" and institutions of higher learning with an aim
of coming to a (re)evaluation of the field of Asian American
Studies:

I believe it is imperative to recognize our own
historical situation. We might wonder how we have
come to be able to articulate precisely these
issues--what institutional functions have taken
place, and are talking place, that allows for (even
encourages) the production of certain kinds of
knowledge? This is not to blindly cast suspicion on

all we do, nor innocently celebrate the effects of

40

postmodernity, rather I think we need to track the
effects of our theoretical mediations, specifically
as they intersect and interpenetrate specific
regimens which materialize our discourse
differently. (63, emphasis in original)
This statement clearly illustrates a taking into
consideration of the problematics of Asian American Studies,
but there is still no mention of where Asian Americanists can
or could be headed, save a realignment and consideration of
what exactly the field attempts to accomplish. In the same
issue of Amerasia, Kent Ono’s stance is similar to Palumbo-
Liu’s: ”I am not calling for 'new’ terms to take their place
[the terms 'Asian American' and ’Asian Americans'], but
rather for a reconfiguration of discursive relations that may
necessitate the evacuation of the need for such terms in the
first place” (Ono 76). But Ono holds out the possibility that
”Asian American" may need to be dismantled in light of his
comments on Lowe’s essentialism and (the impossibility of)
collectivitiesl3; in the end, though, we are left with a
broken and directionless future of further investigation
in a field where Ono seems to be one of the few calling for
radical reevaluation and reconsideration. In line with

”culture," cultural difference, hierarchical relations,

 

13 Ono takes Yen Le Espiritu to task for her writing on Asian
American panethnicity: “While she remains skeptical of an essential
conception of panethnicity, the very goal of panethnic alliances
underscores the need for continued essentialism” (Ono 71). See

Espiritu's Asian American Panethnicity: Bridges, Institutions, and
Identities. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992.

41

exclusions, and “strategic essentialisms,” San Juan, Lowe,
and Palumbo—Liu walk a hazy line of ”resistance" without a
baseline (self-)critique of why exactly they are engaged in
such projects and what those projects' logical ends and
limits are.

Bevond and Before ths Projectls)

Past the need to assert a cultural identity and beyond
the call for critical multiculturalism(s), a move towards
claiming racial status as racialized needs to be made--what
Rey Chow calls a “loosening of the positivity of the [ethnic,
racial, and/or nationalist] sign” (93). Put another way, Lowe
and Palumbo-Liu work within a context that takes the process
of racialization as the impetus to fashion cultural
identities and a notion of Asian American literature as
”idiom." Unfortunately, this strategy of difference
replicates exactly what it seeks to vanquish. If our intended
goal is to decouple freedom from the desire for secured or
fashioned identities, then we will need to heed wendy Brown’s
call to “generate futures together rather than navigate or
survive them” (Brown 4). Likewise, San Juan's call for the
dismantling of the world capitalist system in favor of local
production and a recuperation--however slight--of the
autochthonous glosses over the constructedness of class and
its descriptive function; the call for intellectuals to bring
the masses into line reworks a pedagogy of condescension and
violence for revolutionary ends. The problem of

relationships--relationality as such--is the problem of Asian

42

American Studies, and resistance as commonly defined cannot
cure all ills.

One of the central concerns facing Asian American
studies is the possibility of ”agency” in relation to power,
which Judith Butler speaks of at length:

Agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled.
One might say that the purposes of power are not
always the purposes of agency. To the extent that
the latter diverge from the former, agency is the
assumption of a purpose unintended by power, or
that could not have been derived logically or
historically, that operates in a relation of
contingency and reversal to the power that makes it
possible, to which it nevertheless belongs. This
is, as it were, the ambivalent scene of agency,
constrained by no teleological necessity. (Butler
15, emphasis in original)
Because Asian Americans are already and always racial
subjects, it serves no purpose to replicate such racial
status through ideas of ”culture” and ”community” that, even
though ostensibly based on "memory" and ”shared history","
necessitate the use of such a status as the ground for
orientation and condition of possibility. Butler's ”agency”
is not resistance not is it oppositionality but, rather, a
rare and unique scene where the subject created by power
exceeds the thresholds of that power—-albeit briefly--by

assuming a purpose not premised on power’s inherent

43

contradictions; Lowe's call for practicing identity and
community ”differently" is a move towards inclusion in the
”national narrative" in the sense that she advocates for a
non-essentialized view of Asian Americans while still relying
on essentialized notions of Asian American ”identity" that
never, in the future, disappear; this barely moves from the
seat of power. The same can be said for Palumbo-Liu's desire
for agency and self-determination in terms of establishing
(and revising) and ethnic canon.

What may break this circuit (and the circulation of the
same) in Asian American Studies is a reevaluation of
political goals and the simultaneous evacuation of any
positive (cultural) meaning for the terms ”Asian American"
where racialization becomes the suffering out of which
identity is based. Since identity is based on exclusion-—for
Asian Americans, exclusion from citizen-subject status and
the concomitant exclusion through cultural difference-~the
future(s) of Asian American studies cannot be based on such a
concept. Rather, the need for torquing conversations towards
the problems/promises of relationality may be at hand. In Tbs
Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the problem of
revolution and resistance:

The idea of revolution has perhaps still not been
understood, inasmuch as it is the idea of a new
foundation or that of a reversal of sovereignty. Of
course, we need gestures of foundation and

reversal. But their reason lies elsewhere: it is in

44

the incessantly present moment at which existence-
in-common resists every transcendence that tries to
absorb it, but in an All or in an Individual (in a
Subject in general). (x1)
Existence-in-common goes beyond moments of opposition,
resistance, and wars of position. The terrain of the social
in Asian American Studies, at least in terms of San Juan,
Lowe, and Palumbo-Liu, hesitates at the very moment of being-
in-relation in order to recoup a being founded in domination.
While such political projects are valuable, what's lost is a
chance--fleeting or not--that such modes of “agency" will not
repeat what has come before; “identity” lies in the grasp of
power and commodification and yet this grasp fashions the
grounds for resistance to be pursued. we must imagine an
alternative trajectory, one where ”resistance will belong
decidedly to another world entirely" and where ”community"
will not consist of "beings producing their own essence as
their work, and furthermore producing precisely this essence
as community" (Nancy xli, 2, emphasis in original). This does
not evacuate the grounds of critiques that are concerned with
racial, gender, class, and sexual oppression, but, rather,
this strategy offers up another context to situate our claims
in, one that relies not on exclusions--racial, cultural,
etc.--but takes such interpellations and refuses to utilize
them for positive identification. As Samira Kawash puts it:
Without absolute assurance of the right or the

just, we are faced with the continual, and

45

necessarily political, demand of responsibility not
just for one time or for one decision but at each
instant, in each relation. This means more
political engagement, not less, more challenging,
more questioning, more struggling to expose and
counter the violence disguised and justified in the
name of self-evidence, nature, justice, or common
sense. (Kawash 218, emphasis added)
At each instant, Asian American Studies must confront the
conceptual framework that undergirds its project; indeed, we
must attend to those historical, theoretical, and conceptual
moments that prevent, as Ono puts it, the ”evacuation of the
need" for the term ”Asian American" in the first place.

What follows is a study of how a series of concepts
(marginality, citizenship, and subjection) have been
developed over time. In complementary fashion, I will also
focus on how Asian Americanists have deployed these concepts
in the interests of future freedom and equality. In the first
chapter, I demonstrate how the concept of marginality emerges
out of the Chicago School of Sociology's stated desires for
both racial assimilation and biological amalgamation. These
concepts remain intact within Asian American Studies,
perpetuating the racialist foundations of Asian American
inclusion imagined by the Chicago School. In terms of the
“citizen," I examine the problem of sovereignty as it relates
to the racial state in the second chapter. By examining the

racial foundations of American law, I reinterpret Japanese

46

American internment as an articulation of the racial
exception which resides at the core of the U.S. legal system;
as a result, Asian American Studies must develop a theory of
its relation to the state that addresses the limitations of
mere "inclusion" and ”full" citizenship. Finally, I address
how concerns surrounding subjection invariably result in a
conception of the subject who “needs" inclusion; this results
in a reconsolidation of a racial identity which questions
nothing concerning Asian American identity's reinvestment in
the racialisms developed by the Chicago School. Rather than
arguing, in a circular fashion, that we are back where we
began in our thinking of Asian America, this dissertation
aims to provide a critique which can untether the thinking of
Asian American Studies from the yoke of racial determination.
This re-orientation of the field will escape the racial
”peril" comfortably lodged at its very heart; only then will
we be able to undo the subjection of identity--proceeding

toward freedom past the limit of conditional inclusion.

47

Chapter 1: Marginality Revisited
The contrast between what you are and what you
would like to be is the basis of the sense of
inferiority.
—Robert Park1
All of our so-called racial problems grow out of a
situation in which assimilation and amalgamation do
not take place at all, or take place very slowly.
—Robert Park2
The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not
form a number. The collectivity in which I say

" ou" or ”we" is not a lural of the ”I.”
y 0
-Emmanuel Lev1nas3

Credited with "confront[ing] the power of vested
interests," the work produced by the sociology department at
the University of Chicago from the late 1890s to the early
1950s is often seen as a preamble to or the beginning of a
sociology capable of a ”permanent program of research" that
was concerned with the ”development of a theory explaining
social relations" (Smith 8, Matthews 2). Indeed, the “Chicago
school" was the ”first successful American program of
collective sociological research" which took advantage of
”foundation grants" and external funding to sustain
investigations into, among other things, urban demography,
youth culture, and race relations on the U.S. Pacific Coast

(Bulmer xv). Chicago sociology introduced and/or integrated a

 

1 Park, Robert Ezra. Collection, [Box 2, Folder 4], Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
2 Park, Robert Ezra. ”Human Migration and the Marginal Man."

American Journal of Sociology. 33.2 (May 1931): 95—110. Rpt. in Race and
Culture. 1928. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950. 352.

3 Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. 39.

48

wide range of qualitative research techniques into the study
of society: from urban cartography to participant-observer
research to oral histories and interviews. These techniques
set the Chicago school apart from ”other sociological work at
the time” because they reflected a ”processual" understanding
of society: ”examining organization and disorganization,
conflict and accommodation, social movements and cultural
change . . . [and] imagin[ing] society in terms of groups and
interaction" (Abbott 6). The responsibility of building the
school's reputation rested on a number of professors and
graduate students, including William I. Thomas, Ernest W.
Burgess, Albion Small, Rose Hum Lee, and Robert Ezra Park;
yet the continuity implicit in the term "school" glosses over
the fact that there were three schools within the Chicago

school (depending on the time period): from 1890s to the end
of WOrld War I, the 1920-1930s, and 1936-1951 (Smdth 3).4 Part

of this constructed continuity is due to Albion Small’s
creation and editorship of the American Journal of Sociology,
which was housed and printed at the university; with this
journal, the Chicago school secured its place as one of the
preeminent (and formidable) sociological research
institutions. But is was the school's intense (and

consistent) focus on ethnic and racial issues over time that

 

4 In this chapter, I will focus on the second “school" of Chicago

sociology that (roughly) existed from 1920 to the 19305. Besides having
Robert Park as its central figure, this school produced a sociology
that, supposedly, escaped the earlier school's biological racialisms and
avoided the problems of the later school's investments in quantitative
research by focusing on the social relationships between racial groups.

49

secured the place of the Chicago school in the annals of
American sociological thought.

Over the course of this chapter, I will argue that
Park’s (and his students’) investment in biological
racialisms undermine his solutions to racial conflict and
demonstrate how these solutions aggressively (re)produce a
biologically white American society. At stake in this study
is the future of Asian American Studies: the conceptual
network laid down by Park and his followers remains the most
fundamental set of concepts utilized by Asian American
Studies--despite the resistance to or qualified acceptance of
such concepts--in its attempts to understand Asian Americans
and their identities across the social sciences and
humanities. To this day, the Chicago school’s influence and
cache in sociological and humanities research looms large.
For example, sociologist Timothy Fong credits Robert Park,
the most committed researcher on race relations at the
university, with developing the ”preeminent theory" of
“immigrant adaptation to life in the United States" (157).
Likewise, Henry Yu contends that the ”intellectual
construction" of the ”Oriental problem," which was a major
concern for Park and the Chicago school, "provided the
vocabulary and the concepts for scholarly discussion about
Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans between 1920 and
1960" (”’Oriental'" 191). Indeed, Yu claims that the
”consciousness of American intellectuals of Chinese descent

was profoundly shaped by the theories and writings of a

50

handful of social scientists from the University of Chicago"
(191). Robert Park’s influence on these Chinese American
intellectuals, who were the “only scholars studying Asian
communities in America at that time," and his publications on
race relations ”allowed [for] greater optimism about the
possibility of improvement in group relations" in America
(”’Oriental’" 96, Matthews 158).

And yet the promise of Park’s contribution to Chicago
sociology is not, as some scholars claim, that he ”kept
asking questions" instead of “produc[ing] clear answers and
explanations regarding the development of American society"
(Smith 132). Along with Ernest W. Burgess, Park published the
(in)famous Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921)--
otherwise known as ”The Green Bible"--which codified and
explained the Chicago school’s take on topics ranging from
racial conflict to ethnic assimilation to migration; clocking
in at 1,040 pages, the Introduction offers students an
exhaustive collection of sociological materials with chapter
introductions that develop and explain Park’s and Burgess’
concepts; this work alone, along with the essays discussed
below, demonstrates Park’s strong investment in producing a
sociology that could effect social change by textually
grounding the discipline and offering a foundational set of
concepts and readings in the context of an introductory
college reader. In this chapter, I argue that Park's theories
of race relations and marginality offer up "clear"

alternatives to racial oppression and not just more

51

”questions” to produce more research; these alternatives,
like assimilation and amalgamation, are slanted towards
maintaining the privilege that constitutes racial hierarchy
and reproducing ”white" society through an elimination of
supposed biological inferiors. In all, the Chicago school was
an intellectual powerhouse that (re)produced intellectuals to
spread the (sociological) gospel (Abbot 1). Taken in this
light, the Chicago school and, more importantly, the work of
Robert Park, was concerned with establishing a “progressive
outlook” that "strengthened scholars in their expectation
that ethnic differences and conflicts would ultimately be
resolved in a general amalgamation” (Persons 37).
Marginal Sociology

In his 1926 essay ”Behind Our Masks," Robert Ezra Park
claims that ”The faces we know have no secrets for us" (252).
Noting that ”we" feel ”secure and at home" with those faces
that express easily interpretable sentiment, Park attempts to
explain the discomfort white Americans experience when
confronted by the ”Oriental’s" ”racial uniform" (252).
Strangely, Park locates the ”secret," which Georg Simmel
claims is an “aggressive defensive" that characterizes ”every
human relation," in the literal faces of Asians (”Secrecy"
330). As such, the Asian face constitutes a secret that is
both a natural and a biological bar: inclusion and the
“secur[ity]" of social knowledge can only emerge if a
biological change takes place to reconfigure the Oriental

face/body into a more familiar countenance. This, however, is

52

a philosophical distraction. Simmel cogently contends that
the secret, which is one of ”man’s greatest achievements,"
creates a ”second world alongside the manifest world," and
the ”latter is decisively influenced by the former" (330). If
secrets do indeed determine the workings of the social world,
then Park places the onus of racial difference--which
produces secrets--squarely on Asian shoulders. The ”special
value of the secret" allows those that possess it a ”position
of exception” (332); this ”exception," though, does not make
Asians or Asian Americans exceptional for Park. Rather, we
should view Park’s work with the utmost suspicion since the
actual exception rests in the sociologist’s ability to mask
the desire for racial amalgamation and coercion by claiming,
on the surface, that social assimilation is inevitable (and
desired). Truly, whiteness is the exception that proves the
racial rule.

Park’s desire to ”contain" the racial other’s face is
also, according to Levinas, an attempt to counter the face’s
”refusal to be contained" and “comprehended” according to a
racial ordering (Levinas 194). Essential to note is that for
Levinas, “ethics" can only emerge with the appearance of the
Other who is also the ”Stranger" that ”disturbs the being at
home with oneself" (39). Because being ”at home" for Park’s
whites occurs only when whites are with other whites, the
logical end of notions of amalgamation is the eradication of
ethics: everywhere "we" go, ”we" are all ”we" see; there is

no obligation to treat the racial other in any other way than

53

coercion. In this sense, the white subject--the ”I” in this
formulation--is absolved of social, legal, and political
responsibility in terms of racial exclusion; the “w " that
Chicago sociology demands (and fantasizes about) is a plural
term, a society of racial sameness that always polices its
borders to bring (or force) minorities into the racial fold.
Park’s theories advance a re—arrangement of racial politics
that can never escape the grasp of exclusion, yet, by force
of will, we are lead to believe that we can.

Strangely, America’s ”non-ethnic" whites remain unnamed
and undertheorized in Park’s writings on race. Noting later
in his career that ”race relations and all that they imply
are generally, and on the whole, the products of migration
and conquest," Park tends to forget that those responsible
for ”conquest,” in the largest sense, also produce the
conditions necessary for oppression ("Nature" 104). we could
say that the undertheorized ”Anglo-Saxons" in Park’s works
serve as the ultimate arbiters of race relations, and that
their ”desire to survive” and ”not see the Native Sons of the
Pacific replaced by Asiatics" demands submission to racial
hierarchy despite Park’s invitations to think “through" Asian
American subordination (”Our" 140).

In this chapter, I will explore the works of Park and
his student E.V. Stonequist in order to explore the
contradictory racial logics that they produce; their works
set the terms and conditions for social inclusion while

advocating for racial ”mixing" and demanding allegiance to

54

white supremacy. After this, we will grapple with
contemporary Asian Americanist theoretical responses to
Park’s works as well as attempts to re-mobilize Chicago
sociology in ”positive" or productive ways. Finally, I will
analyze Asian American responses to the sociological
definition of and the solutions provided for Asian American
racial oppression that emerges out of the Chicago school. By
looking at Fae Myenne Ng’s Eggs, Younghill Kang’s East Goes
West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee, and the sociological
work of Paul Siu (who was Park’s student), I hope to show
that the end of the highly-qualified sociological inclusion
explored in this chapter begins at the moment where the
”secret" nature of white supremacy is exposed and interrupted
by meditations on the future of Asian American in spite of
and/or apart from social, legal, and economic mechanisms of
exclusion.
Interests

Despite vocal claims of outright racism, contemporary
Asian Americanists re-read the theories of Chicago sociology
for varying reasons. For example, David Palumbo-Lin
emphasizes Park’s heavy investment in the “abstract," which
prevents him from integrating a "critique of the actual
material histories of American racism" (87); this ”abstracted
and bracketed" treatment of race, for Palumbo-Liu, allows
Park to fantasize about the ”Asian race" without a full sense
of social and political realities (87). Paul Takagi dismisses

Park as only concerned with the perpetuation of the ”Anglo

55

race” in order to dismiss current (19705) Asian Americanist
quantitative sociology as complicit with this aim due to its
investment in ”ahistorical" “cultural determinants" that are
used in studies of assimilation (154, 149). Gary Okihiro
attempts to produce African American/Asian American social
and political alliances (by claiming a biological kinship and
racial mixing) in order to confront Park’s theories of and
desire for ”social control" of distinct racial groups (134).
Given that Park haunts all of these Asian Americanists’
analyses, it is essential to reassess the particular goals
and aims of Park; while it is easy enough to dismiss and/or
qualify Park’s corpus if we only read a few of his selected
essays, it is even more difficult to tease out how these
futures envisioned for Asian America in contemporary works
rely on and, frankly, are constituted by the racialist
thinking of Park. This theoretical reliance never moves far
from a ”disowning," and in order to integrate a greater
understanding of Park’s sociological program, we have to
entertain the possibility of jettisoning all sociological
logics—-which are all implicitly racial logics--in developing
alternative futures for Asian American Studies. At each
moment, Asian Americanist responses to Chicago sociology rely
upon racialization in order to develop solutions to
racialization. This self-same circuit, as I will show in my
analysis of Park and my further exploration into Asian
Americanist responses, becomes self-defeating,

reconsolidating the racialisms of 19203 and 19308 sociology

56

in what purports to be promising alternatives to racial
determinism.

In 1928, Robert Park claimed that ”so—called" racial
problems concerning Asian Americans emerge from a social
context where assimilation and amalgamation either never take
place or do so at a "slow" pace (”Human" 352). Six years
earlier, in his and Ernest Burgess’ Introduction to the
Science of Sociology, Park claims that sociology ”seeks to
arrive at natural laws and generalizations in regard to human
nature, irrespective of time and of place" where natural laws
pertain to ”any statement which describes the behavior of a
class of objects or the character of a class of acts" (11).
Fundamentally, these two statements threaten to cancel each
other out; racial problems, tied to specific historical
moments and social contexts--where some government or some
racial group regulates the pace of assimilation and
amalgamation--do not necessarily follow ”natural laws” in the

sense that such laws, being applicable across a totalized
temporal spectrum, are universalized5. We can develop two

conclusions from this conceptual tension. First, that natural

laws presuppose--without admitting it--a ”worldview" that

 

5 Cox contends that there always exists an element of volition in

race prejudice and, by extension, racial “problems” since prejudice is
the “social-attitudinal concomitant of the racial-exploitative practice
of a ruling class in a capitalistic society. The substance of race
prejudice is the exploitation of the militarily weaker race" (476). This
social-attitudinal concomitant emerges from rationalizations--at every
moment and in different, particular places--tied to issues of economic,
legal, and social advantage; while they follow a certain historical
(racial and capitalist) logic, they also exist in specific historical
circumstances.

57

anticipates an end; in other words, the goal of eradicating
racial problems--which Palumbo-Liu locates in Park’s works--
must be solved through ”unnatural" methods to counter the
”deep-seated" and ”instinctive" ”racial antipathies" that
people possess (Introduction 623). Second, amalgamation and
assimilation are the unnatural methods that will ”correct”
racism and social, economic, and political segregation. At
its heart, Park’s theories of racial equality seek to
”control competitive [and reproductive] processes" in order
to produce a society where racial stratification is
perpetuated by the desire to incorporate, biologically and
socially, racial others (Schwendinger 386). While some argue
that Park’s and Burgess’ desire, in their Introduction, is to
create a ”formal perspective which ignored the enduring moral
and political realities engendered by class relations in the
United States,” I argue that Park's brand of sociology, in
light of epistemological inconsistencies and legal
regulations, could never escape the bounds of exclusion
despite the concerted effort by Park to find a way out of
exclusion (401, emphasis in original). As such, it is not a
question of Park ”ignoring" any political or moral realities
inasmuch as it is that Park cannot extricate himself from a
sociology envisioned as a ”conservation" project that seeks
to incorporate social groups into a wider, nebulous white
majority.

If we look at Park’s essays in chronological order, it

becomes apparent that he attempted to create a limited model

58

of social inclusion that could deal with racialist
determination. For instance, he writes in 1926 that ”most of
the racial traits that determine race relations are
superficial" (“Behind" 251, emphasis in original). While
noting that where the perception of ”racial differences are
great, the individual is often quite unseen," the
"individual" still possess some ”racial traits” that affect
and determine race relations (246); most traits are
”superficial," but which traits count? As early as 1913, Park
invests in a notion of ”fundamental racial characteristics"
and ”temperaments" that makes the project of assimilation
difficult for racial minorities (”Racial Assimilation" 205).
One problem is that ”homogeneity” is the quality that
”mobilizes the individual man" because it removes ”social
taboo" and ”permits the individual to move into strange
groups" (205). The ”secondary groups" in society--those that
are racial/ethnic minorities-—prevent this homogeneity from
being fully realized, thereby weakening the State, which
depends on assimilation for its ”nutrition" (209); the
differences that create subordination prevent the smooth
functioning of the status quo, and these differences aren’t
superficial but, rather, essential for Park to eradicate in
an attempt to usher in the ”corporate character" of an
envisioned, future society where assimilation has already
taken place (207). Park cannot develop a strategy that would
end racial oppression by other means. He develops a theory of

“bi-racial" organizations where Blacks and whites live in

59

separate but equal spheres of work. These organizations
”preserve race distinction, but change their content” in such
a way as to provide for a formal equality within a
cooperative, segregated world (”The Bases" 243).

This change in the ”content" of race relations, though,
is a ruse. Racial groups inherit their ”temperaments,” which
are "transmitted biologically" (”Education" 280); these
"racial qualities" determine what racial groups “will be
interested in,” what “they will assimilate," and, “to state
it pedagogically, [what] they will learn" (282). As early as
1918, Park argued that miscegenation would provide for a
”breaking up or [sic] the complex of the biologically
inherited qualities which constitute the temperament of the
race” (283). Whereas miscegenation is highly guarded against
in race-based societies such as the U.S., Chicago sociology
looked at intermarriage and miscegenation as promising
processes that would end the bi-racial, bi-partite
organization of society. By settling and eradicating race
conflict through race-mingling in order to produce a smooth
functioning corporate society, Park, in 1926, envisioned an
end-point for his ”race relations cycle." This cycle,
”apparently progressive and irreversible," consisted of
”contacts, competition, accommodation and eventual
assimilation" (”Our" 150). Accommodation is a context where
”mutually respective relations of superordination and
subordination” existed, while assimilation promised an

eradication of behavioral, structural/governmental, and

60

biological differences between groups (Schwendinger 396).
Assimilation, in its fateful relationship with amalgamation,
was a ”practical" goal rather than a ”sort of state men
should desire" or envision because, ”human nature being what
it is," society could only hope to “survive in the world in
which it found itself" (Smith 114).6 For Park (in 1943), only
a ”revolution in race relations" and ”race ideologies" could
“fundamentally [change] the mind of the American people" in
order to produce equality, but since the revolution ”has not
yet arrived"--as if revolutions appear without warning--the
appropriate course turned out to be racial incorporation
through miscegenation (”Race Ideologies” 315).7

Yet incorporation becomes not the ”end" of race and

 

6 Near the end of his career in 1937, Park hedged his bets on the

race relations cycle, admitting that the cycle “once initiated,
inevitably continues until it terminates in some predestined racial
configuration, and one consistent with an established social order of
which it is a part" (“Race Relations" 195). Noting that there are three
different ”predestined” outcomes (a caste system, ”complete
assimilation," and the creation of a ”permanent racial minority within
the limits of the nation state"), Park seems to have felt a need to tone
down his stance towards assimilation and amalgamation, noting the
possible impossibilities contained within the cycle’s system (194).

7 Stanford M. Lyman argues that the equating of ”assimilation with

[racial] fusion” is a mistake because “pluralism" was a ”core value" in
American society while fusion was not (133). In effect, Lyman is
attempting to salvage the race relations cycle and Park’s corpus by
claiming that it should serve as a “model” instead of a ”theory" (130);
in this formulation, the ”questions of verification or falsification [of
the cycle] no longer are relevant” (133). Sociology, then, does not have
to answer to ”society" in this formulation, and the "case studies" that
are produced out of this revised "model" status only serve to gauge how
the model--as ”ideal”--is true (or how data deviates from the ideal).
Furthermore, Lyman ignores Park’s statements about pluralism in relation
to his work. Park asserts that he does not ”accept" the idea of cultural
pluralism and instead, he maintains his desire to see society embody a
“harmonious whole" where “ideas and beliefs" (most especially about race
and assimilation) become one (“Culture" 31).

61

racial thinking, but a process whereby racialized groups come
into the majoritarian fold via assimilation and amalgamation.
Cox argues:
To be assimilated is to live easily and
unobtrusively in the society. One must be at home,
so to speak, with the dominant social organization.
So long as a group is identified or remembered as
alien, it will be forced to have a divided
allegiance. (547)
This "alien" status was continually reproduced by Park.
First, Park could never fully settle on a strict definition
of what a racial "group" was. In what seems to be an outline
for a sociology course that Park taught at the University of
Chicago, he writes: ”The group is a xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
(Collection 2,5). The twenty x’s--which cover up an attempt
at definition--are followed by a terse explanation of how
”nations” come into being: “A nation is a nation because it
is recognized as such and because of this recognition has
certain . . . rights and responsibilities" (2,5). If we spin
this kind of logic out, a ”group" can only become a group via
recognition by the dominant social organization; also, the
”rights and responsibilities" of groups determine the place
of the group within the social order. Given Asian Americans’
”racial uniform," the group comes into being through their
embodiment and the concomitant racialization by the majority.
And the dissolution of the group, for Park, could never come

about through a brand of color-blindness because he declares

62

that assimilation is ”second-generation stuff" (Collection
17,3). If the first-generation can never assimilate, what we
are facing is a question of the general disappearance of the
racial uniform to create ”faces" that hold no (racial)
”secrets" for ”us.” The end of racial ”antipathies" is always
lodged on the horizon, at a (untraversable) distance; unless,
of course, Asian Americans are subsumed so that a new race
(of whites) is created without a trace of the Oriental to be
found.

In his definition of ”amalgamation" for the Encyclopsdia
of the Social Sciences, E.B. Reuter, who was Park’s colleague
at the University of Chicago, claims that there are ”three
major stages" that make up the ”biological union of
previously distinct racial groups" (16). After miscegenation
occurs and a “mixed-blood” population is in place, this group
must go through ”isolation and selective adaptation” in order
to create a ”distinctive racial strain" (16). Yet the
strained logic of amalgamation proves that amalgamation is
never merely ”natural" and must be targeted as an explicit
goal through (physical and reproductive) ”isolation." As a
result, amalgamation is a "cause and effect to social
assimilation" because it increases the ”number and intimacy
of social contacts" and promotes the ”fusion of social
heritages and the diffusion and blending of cultures" (17).
The realistic trajectory of the amalgamative process, given
the historical and legal circumstances, is that the “new"

racial strain to be produced would, in actuality, be racially

63

"white"--if it is produced at all. In light of the two major
pieces of legislation that impinge upon Asian America’s
(heterosexual) reproduction (the 1922 Cable Act and the
Immigration Act of 1924), it is evident that an impossible
and unattainable “whiteness” becomes the sole aspiration for
the ”Orientals" in America’s midst.

This channeling of reproduction into whiteness is
evident in the details of the laws during Park’s years of
teaching and writing. The Cable Act, which was repealed in
1936, stipulated that a ”woman citizen of the United States"
shall ”cease to be a citizen" if she marries an alien
ineligible to citizenship (Cable). Sucheng Chan points out
that this made it a “real liability for American-born women
of Asian ancestry to marry immigrant men" (Chan 106). Asian
American women could, under the legal requirements, only
maintain their citizenship if they married citizens; this
conditional citizenship, then, attempts to prevent the
reproduction of Asian Americans through the control of future
Asian-only heterosexual coupling. At the same time, the
Immigration Act of 1924 narrowed the definition of admissible
(but still ineligible to citizenship) Asian American women to

those who were married to Asian American male professors,
students, or religious ministerss; the wives of merchants, who

received ”more favorable treatment than any other group of

Chinese women" in past versions of the Chinese Exclusion Act

 

8 Also, the quota for immigrants from Asian countries was firmly

established at one hundred per year in the Act. This can be contrasted
with the quota for German immigrants, which was set at 51,227.

64

and its iterations, were now inadmissable (Chan 106). These
restrictions, then, create a situation for both Asian
American men and women that, for the most part, prevents any
”concentration" of Asians in America; funneled into a
restricted reproductive space, Asian American men and women,
if they were to reproduce at all and not “disappear," would

most likely have "hybridized" (in a "white” way), biracial
children.9 And given the severe penalties for white women

marrying Asian men, both the Cable Act and the Immigration

Act of 1924 guaranteed a virtual halt to the creation of any
”distinctive racial strain” in that manner.10

In “Race Relations and Certain Frontiers,” Park claims
that amalgamation will create a ”relatively homogenous racial
stock which with time tends to assume the character of a new
race and a new people, with traditions and institutions
peculiarly their own" (133). And yet in the same year, 1934,
Park wrote ”The Negro and His Plantation Heritage" in which

he writes that ”marginal peoples"--those who are racially on

 

9 Chan notes that an amendment to the Immigration Act of 1924 was

passed which allowed ”Chinese women who had married U.S. citizens before
1924 to come into the country" (Chan 106). Asian American women were
basically directed to marry white U.S. citizens by the law creating a
context of allowing only ”interracial" couples-—Asian American women
with white men, mostly--to legally exist in the U.S.

10 It also bears mentioning that Filipinos, because of the

Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, suffered a greater blow in terms of
immigration and citizenship status. The quota for immigration in
Tydings-McDuffie was set at fifty Filipinos per year. Likewise,
Filipinos, who were considered ”nationals" of the U.S. and were not
citizens, had their status changed to “aliens" in section 8.1 of the act
(Tydings); exclusion was permissible because Tydings-McDuffie set the
stage for the eventual independence of the Philippines, requiring a
change in status.

65

the margins of society--are ”peoples in transit between
simpler and primitive and more sophisticated and complex
cultures" (69). This transition to civilization does not
proceed, ”with time," in any particularly easy manner;
indeed, “Institutions are borrowed or imposed upon peoples to
whose traditions, instincts, and actual needs they are quite
foreign, or have not yet fully assimilated” (69). The
conflict between the ”new" race that possesses their own
institutions and the “marginal" peoples who must either
borrow or have "institutions" imposed upon them is strange:
addressing the biological aspect of race in order to create a
”new people" in no way neutralizes the need for the
”civilized," through benevolent coercion, to organize this
newly formed group. In his writings on African Americans,
Park consistently claims that slavery created a context where
”assimilation [of “alien races"] followed rapidly and as a
matter of course" (”Racial Assimilation" 69). So, despite
arguments that assimilation consists of the ”process on
interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups
acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other
persons or groups" and that this acquisition leads to the
creation of a ”common cultural life," Park’s theories of
assimilation still rely upon a context of coercion and
inequality (IntrOduction 735); racial others must submit to
the dominant social order in order for assimilation to
proceed. The ”growth" that Park attributes to assimilation is

nothing more than a submission, especially when he argues, ”A

66

common language is indispensable for the most intimate
association of the members of the group; its absence is an
insurmountable barrier to assimilation" (737). Difference, if
it cannot be ”easily" solved (via language acquisition), must
be managed through hierarchy and amalgamation. Obviously,
then, amalgamation can only proceed through the dominant
majority, and the “whitening" of society is the logical end
point to counter a social world where racial alterity and
foreignness threaten the promise of ”unity" and
”homogeneity."
Strangers

In ”Symbiosis and Socialization," Park argues that the
process of "socialization" will end with assimilation, ”which
involves the more or less complete incorporation of the
individual into the existing moral order" (262). During the
same year (1939), he also argued that the “precise nature of
race relations" is ”that they are the relations of strangers"
who ”have not been sufficiently knit together by
intermarriage and interbreeding to constitute a single ethnic
community, with all that it implies" (”The Nature" 114). The
”interpenetration" and ”fusion" of assimilation, then,
appears at the moment where strangers and strange-ness
disappear via biological, moral, and “ethnic” incorporation.
Cox claims that being a stranger is impossible in communities
”where a negative attitude has been indirectly nurtured” and
racial minorities are ”singled out for differential treatment

on the basis of prepared racial sentiments" (Cox 354). And by

67

a sleight of hand maneuver, Park reconfigures the “strange”
in order to advance a rational, practical conception of
social/racial organization: that which is “different" must be
incorporated and eradicated in order for race to disappear.
Apart from this notion of amalgamation, Park frequently
cites Simmel’s conception of the ”stranger" in his works, but
Park’s usage of Simmel’s concept is, frankly, a
misunderstanding. Simmel envisions an ideal world of
”sociability” in which the stranger, indirectly, counteracts
social exclusion by his/her mere presence; the ”stranger" is
not a status that needs to be destroyed in order to ”knit
together" the races. For example, Simmel claims that
“sociability"—-the quality of being-”social"--resolves the
solitude of the individual through ”togetherness, a union
with others" (”The Sociology" 255). This union, however, has
no ”ulterior end” and ”no content" but is, rather, an
association not ”determined by content" (255, 256). In this
way, Simmel attempts to come to an understanding of a social
world that comes before ”society" and sociological knowledge.
Without the coercion and incorporation that is explicit in
Park's theories, Simmel’s sociability produces the ”only
[world] . . . in which a democracy of equals is possible
without friction” (257). And even though this is an
”artificial world” made up of people who have ”renounced" the
”material accent" of life, Simmel attempts to imagine a
society where the “verification of a truth"--in this sense a

”racial" truth--is never the driving purpose (257, 259,

68

emphasis in original). To this end, Park’s theories exhibit
the ”freedom of bondage" or the freedom that can only be
envisioned through bondage: a society where verification,
calculation, and exclusion remain even after the
incorporation of difference into homogeneity (260). How else
to ensure and regulate homogeneity if not through a continual
calculation of (retrograde) difference? If Park’s theories of
race and society rely on such terms as knowability,
amalgamation, and sameness, then the contrast between his
work and Simmel’s couldn’t be greater. And this is the lost
opportunity that continually haunts Park’s work: Park creates
a set of instructions for how to maintain and rebuttress
white supremacy through his ability to calculate one’s race
and, in turn, his desire to create a society that
incorporates racial others.

What’s “lost" in all of this concern over the creation
of a society through sociology is that we can use the
”stranger” to expose the bankruptcy of racialist thinking.
Simmel contends that, before political, economic, and, by
extension, racial determination, ”Man, in his totality, is a
dynamic complex of ideas, forces, and possibilities . . . as
an economic and political man, as a famdly member, and as the
representative of an occupation he is, as it were, an
elaboration constructed ad hoc" (”Sociability" 46). It is
only through the establishment of an identity that the ”ad
hoc" or temporary nature of all being is cemented and frozen;

possibility becomes certainty, and exclusion becomes

69

possible. And yet the stranger is and isn’t a member of the
group. He/she exists ”near” the group when the group ”feel[s]
between him and ourselves common features" of a national,
social, or occupational nature, while the stranger is ”far"
from the group because he/she reveals that the ”effectiveness
of the common features becomes diluted in proportion to the
size of the group composed of members who are similar in this
sense” (405, 406). ”Groups” can only exist through
difference, and when that difference is enforced/chosen,
there must be a system that enforces difference lest the
group becomes ”diluted" and ineffective. In this sense, the
stranger’s ”liberation" from ”fixation" is also the promise
of being undetermined and, by extension, surviving
oppression. Since Park invests in a “complete moral order"
and in the idea of ”incorporation," we can clearly see
assimilation is a policing of the borders of the ”group,” and
that which produces any group--even an ”inclusive" one--

continually produces strangers in order to constitute

itself.11 If the stranger can only exist in relation to a

 

11 In “L’intrus,” Nancy claims that ”strangers," in order to

maintain such a status, always possess a quality of intrusion, and it is
not “ethically admissible" to “exclude all intrusion in the coming of
the stranger, the foreign” (1). Park’s use of Simmel’s stranger is at
attempt to eradicate the stranger; the white majority’s “identity" is
”equivalent to immunity" (33). This immunity, or protection from the
possibility of a ideological revolution--that which Park deems necessary
for future equality--prevents society from ”becoming" anything apart
from being white supremacist, as Nancy points out:
The empty identity of an ”I" can no longer fall back into
its simple adequation (”I"=“I”), once it speaks: “I am
suffering" implies that there are two “I," each one foreign
to the other, strangers yet touching. It is the same with ”I
am coming.” . . . [I]n the case of “I am suffering," one I
rejects the other, while in “I am coming," one I exceeds the

70

world/society of “groups," the ”artificial" or ideal world of
full equality can only exist through a renunciation of the
group itself. Since Park attempts to eliminate strangeness
through regulation (amalgamation and intermarriage), he
becomes what Nancy calls ”the most terrifying and troubling
technician" because the (white) group will always exist
within a social ordering, apart from the social by denying
its part in producing racial hierarchies (”L'Intrus" 13).
Marginality

In the preface to his 1937 book The Marginal Man: A
Stud in Personalit and Culture Conflict, E.V. Stonequist
thanks his friends for their contributions to his
understanding of “marginal men,” a concept that, in a simple
way, can describe Asians in America as ”caught" between two
cultures and unable to reconcile the two (viii). Yet there's
a fibrillation when Stonequist thanks them as ”’marginal
men’" while enclosing the term in scare quotes. Park claims
that the marginal man is a "personality type" in his
introduction to Stonequist’s work, yet what to make of
Stonequist’s friends who both embody and escape the
impossible “typing” of sociology and sociological knowledge
(Introduction xiv)? Ernest W. Burgess, in ”Sociological
Research Methods," claims that Park’s use of the ”ideal type"

in his research was actually developed, in part, by Simmel,

 

other. (11)
Park gambles on making the many into “one," yet the ”one" is a violent
incorporation that presupposes whites’ self-mastery and their identity
as a group that is "capable of the origin and the end" (13). The unity
of a ”complete moral order" cannot admit the division and discord that
provides the constitutive outside of such an order.

71

and that it “provides a bridge from the study of individual
cases to the construction of an attitude and other
personality tests and scales" (478). For Simmel, however, the
stranger serves as a ”type" to the extent that it
demonstrates the limit of sociological thinking: the
stranger, in this context, can only exist in and through
oppression. The ”ideal" in ideal type analyses, then, can
only provide “quantitative measurement of the degree to which
ideal constructs . . . characterize a person or a group"
(478). The group for Stonequist (and Park) exists because
racialization becomes the self—evident basis for identity,
and the "marginal man" becomes an ideal whereby to judge how
raced individuals either fail or succeed in living up to the
sociological expectations and desires of assimilation and
amalgamation. The marginal man, though, is negative and
positive: negative because he/she is (according to Park) an
"effect of imperialism" and positive because ”marginality" is
a stop along the path to a ”new racial stock” (Park,
Introduction xviii, Stonequist 220).

Park, again in his introduction, allows for an
individual’s "conception of himself" to shape his/her
”personality," but the temperaments and instincts that
assimilation eradicates still constitute the subject, along
with their ”endocrine balance" (xvii); as such, the question
of assimilation will always be answered through amalgamation.
The marginal man’s personality, according to Stonequist,

relies on questions of psychological “adjustment,” and he

72

will invariably find himself not “well adjusted to himself
and his social world” (Stonequist 1). Mirroring Park’s notion
that the first-generation immigrant is inassimilable,
Stonequist defines the ”Oriental Marginal Man" as a second-
generation Asian American who is a “problem" because
“Culturally he is an American; racially he is of the Orient"
(105). There is "no easy way out of this dilemma,"
apparently, and only through the ”rates of interracial
marriage" can we determine, in a negative fashion, the
”degree to which particular groups are marginal” (105).
Stonequist’s analysis, however, attempts to play down the
role of amalgamation through coercion by making “individual
adjustment," which is a form of ”psychological integration"
into the majority, a stop-gap solution to racial oppression:
those who become psychologically integrated will “become
pioneers and creative agents in that new social order which
seems to evolve as narrower group loyalties give way to
larger human values" (2—8, 209).

These “larger human values" can only appear when the
“marginal personality" disappears, and this disappearance
will take place the moment that the ”conflict of cultures"
ceases (Stonequist 214). Stonequist contends “the world
requires races" at present (137). Marginality equates racial
origin with cultural conflicts, especially in terms of how
second-generation Asian Americans--those who can be
assimdlated--are more “culturally American" than anything

else—-and this ”Americanness" is a desirable trait (105).

73

While the marginal personality can be found in ”pure bloods"
as well as “mixed bloods" within racial minorities, the “new
social order" that is to come-~which will put an end to the
psychological disturbance of marginality--must always be
involved in a determination of what kind of ”blood" will
eventually produce a ”new racial stock” that ends the race
relations cycle (220). The new racial stock that ends
"relationship[s] of inequality" and allows overall
assimilation to take place--as opposed to individual
assimilations which are not solutions but psychological
adjustments--is actually white(ned) (121). Society, if it is
to progress, must eliminate what Park calls ”antagonistic
cultures" so that, as Stonequist argues, "biological origin"
no longer “places" people “between" races (Introduction xv,
Stonequist 10). And given that biological origin also
determines personality and that the first generation of
immigrants (non-white in this case) is inassimilable, we can
locate the trajectory of this amalgamation that will
eliminate ”betweenness": a “whitened" new race. So, despite
Stonequist’s claim that the race that is to come, with ”time
and acquaintance," will be ”new," this newness is only
determined by a calculation, again, of how soon the racial
uniform that produces racialization--and marginality--will be
removed from racial circulation.

Marginality, then, is a suspect categorization that can
only emerge in relation to domination: the margins’ racial,

cultural, and even political identity is determined by the

74

mainstream’s figuring of racial difference. This is the
logical extension of Okihiro’s claim (which will be discussed
in the next section) that the margin is the mainstream:
identities based on notions of blood-relationships must
always root themselves in racialisms in order to be
effective. If the promise of ”freedom” within American
democracy is to be realized, then Asian Americanist responses
to the sociological legacy of the Chicago School must divest
themselves not only of the romanticization of racial
identities (and coalitions) but also of the desire to embody
the (liberatory) margin.
Qualifications

Recent Asian Americanist evaluations of Park’s work
attempt to make do with limited resources; for example, the
most trenchant and uncompromising critique of Park’s work,
”The Myth of ’Assimilation in American Life’" by Paul Takagi
eventually dismisses Chicago sociology as useless based on an
evaluation of three essays by Park. Beyond these quantitative
concerns, each evaluation attempts to salvage something of
Asian American "identity"; as argued in the introduction,
these attempts perpetually reiterate the racialist thinking
of those works they critique. Before moving into a detailed
analysis of Park’s works, it is essential to confront how
Asian Americanist works use Park as motivation for their own
envisioned futures. For example, Takagi contends that Park is
and was an ”apologist for racial conflicts and race

prejudices" (152). Cogently pointing out Park’s investment in

75

notions of “instinctive" race ”antipathies," he goes on to
argue that Park’s ”real” mission was to guarantee the
"survival of the Anglo race" (154). The ”clash of [racial]
interests" for Park could only be solved through
”cooperation," and Takagi notes that this form of
accommodation ultimately reproduces racial subordination in a
“sinister" mode (”Race Prejudice" 226, Takagi 153, 154). What
Takagi overlooks, however, is the sentimental strain in
Park’s works; the ”cooperation” that Park mentions appears at
the moment where he laments the passing of the “plantation"
and, as a result, the ”intimate" bonds that develop out of

bondage: “Each race being in its place, no obstacle to racial
cooperation exists" (“Race Prejudice" 226).:12 This investment

in interpersonal contact and relationships is what allows
Park to develop his theories of supremacy maintenance;
because Takagi bypasses this, he can only suggest that the
”science” in ”social science" be removed ”to reveal in its
bald form the racist ideologies that are frequently contained
within it" (156). In turn, he suggests that ”alternative
theory" be developed that can ”’check out my thoughts and
experiences’," which is the same criteria Park uses to claim

that plantation slavery was, in effect, preferable to the

 

12 For other instances where Park approvingly describes the kind,

grateful obedience of slaves to their masters (and where such racial
antipathies “disappear” despite their being ”instinctive," please see
the following essays: ”Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups: with
Particular Reference to the Negro." Publicstion of the American
Sociologicsl Socisgy, 8 (1913): 66-83. Rpt. in Race and Culture.
Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. 204-22.; ”The Bases of Race Prejudice." Egg
Annals. 140 (Nov. 1928): 11-20. Rpt. in Race and Culture. 230—43.

76

racial prejudices borne out of emancipation: personal
experience and sympathy create intimacy, cooperation, and
progress (156).

Whereas Takagi stresses the emotive, Gary Okihiro, in
his Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American Historv and
Culture, attempts to discern the "place" of Asian Americans
within the U.S. racial structure while trying to mobilize
African American and Asian American social/political
alliances. Claiming that the white "master class" has
produced Asian Americans as ”near-blacks" and ”near-whites"--
the latter explicitly refers to Park’s concept of
”marginality" in the text--Okihiro goes on to argue that
"yellow is a shade of black, and black, a shade of yellow”
(34). While managing to build a hypothetical black-yellow
alliance through the recognition of shared oppression (albeit
in different historical contexts), he feels a need to justify
the alliance through a kind of historical/cosmic ”kinship"
that has always been present between Africans and Asians
(34). Okihiro wants to free ”our storytellers who have been
whispering amid the din of western civilization and Anglo-
conformity,” and he is up to the narrative task as well,
reminding us of the ”Negritos" in ”South and Southeast Asian"
who were ”gatherers and hunters and slash-and-burn
cultivators" (34); these Negritos were possibly ”absorbed or
expelled by the Veddoids" and ”remnants survive today as the
Semang of the Malay Peninsula” (34). Also, the same essay

cited by Takagi, "Race Prejudice and Japanese-American

77

relations," is cited later in Margins and Mainstreams;
Okihiro points out that for Park, ”Interracial amuty . . .
depended upon ’the extension of the machinery of cooperation
and social control,’ which included racial castes or even
slavery, where each knows ’its place’ and accepts its status"
(134-5). While Okihiro’s reading is correct, his logic of
kinship reduplicates the biological foundations of the
American ”caste" system and slavery; put another way, the
desire to establish a ”historical" race-mixing in Asia for
political efficacy still invests in racial heredity: we are
all "kin" because there was African-Asian miscegenation in
the past. This, unfortunately, gives new meaning to one of
his final claims: ”[T]he margin has been the true defender of
American democracy, equality, and liberty. From that vantage,
we can see the margin as the mainstream" (175). The margins
are the true heroes in this narrative, yet the origins of
alliances among the marginals must be, at root, inspired and
verified by and through a deep historical/biological record.
The distance between Park’s instinctive ”antipathies" and
Okihiro’s amalgamation—turned-politics is slight, and though
his ultimate purpose is to provide hope for the future of
“American democracy," Okihiro must motivate his analysis
through biological--not social or political--similarities.

In the only book—length study on Park, the Chicago
school, and the Asian American sociology graduates from the
University of Chicago, Henry Yu attempts to “retrace how

Orientals came to be valued for being exotic and

78

representative of a faraway place that was defined as being
un-American, and how this helped to define what was American"
(vii). In Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact; and
Exoticism in Modern America, Yu is mainly concerned with how
Asian Americans came to study with Park and how their ”paths
came to cross, and how by crossing paths they came to an
understanding of each other and themselves” (3). Beyond this
historical and psychological study, Yu never completely
confronts Park’s racial theories; in one instance, he claims
that Park believed that ”race . . . was in the mind, a matter
of consciousness. . . . [I]f we just stopped thinking about
race, it would go away” (11). This misconception—-countered
even with the brief citations about instinctive antipathies
above--shapes Yu’s overall project, which is to avoid calling
the ”white sociologists" "bad men": "Without these men (there
were few women in positions of power), none of the Asian
American intellectuals in this book would have had the chance
to enter academia" (10). Because social theory ”becomes[s]
true in the way in which any group of words and ideas can
achieve truth, which is true to a group of people," we are
doomed to remain in a relativist world where the veracity of
social theory--not sociology, strictly—-depends upon how
”groups" wield their (intellectual) powers in order to
inculcate, regulate, and determine regimes of truth (12); Yu
institutes a relationship of hegemony, seemingly to proffer
an alternative vision of knowledge production. In doing so,

he eventually argues that we develop a “universal standard

79

that evaluates forms of knowledge . . . through a
democratically defined dialogue that takes into account the
mutual nature of ignorance and knowledge" (197). It is
unclear what this ”mutual nature” is, but Yu’s strategy
resembles backpedaling; the Chicago sociologists’ investment
in a "common humanity that would overcome all such [racial]
differences" mirrors Yu’s desire to see the “very humanity of
the categorizers" because proving that “categories" are
"always fictive is a banal exercise in the obvious" (198,
184). If all is self-evident in this way, then Yu fails to
see how Chicago sociology produces an epistemological
structuring of the world and that this structuring, despite

claims that it is apolitical, responds to and revises social,
political, and racial thought.13

In Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial
Frontier, David Palumbo-Liu contends that we are in a holding
pattern, and the sociological vision of “assimilation,” or
complete social inclusion, has yet to be realized. Palumbo-
Liu’s critique is compelling for a number of reasons, not
least of which is Palumbo-Liu’s respect for ”utopian

vision[s]" of Asian America that seek to end the use of race

 

13 And this is perhaps why Yu’s claim that "We all need maps, in a

sense, and we are all mapmakers" is an inadequate metaphor (Yu 186);
maps, in this way, reveal the ”intellectual constructions of other
people" so that we can ”walk a mile in their shoes” (186). Yet if any
and all maps contain the ”methods of control and domination," these maps
are not just about surveying: every map also contains a pre-set
itinerary (186). From the very beginning, Yu’s analysis has determined
the path we are to follow; as such, his "counterhegemonic" reading of
the Chicago school merely seeks to supplant hegemonic dismissals of
Park--like that of Takagi--with a more ”reasoned," less “banal" control.

80

as a ”negative and destructive element of identification”
(393, emphasis added). Near the end of Asian/American’s
introduction, he writes that ”[N]ow, more than ever, the
Asian/American predication may be completed, somewhere on the
horizon" (13). But instead of taking up the possibility of
resolving the term, he suggests a more ”helpful" strategy for
scholarly work: ”Another, perhaps more worthwhile task might
be to ascertain at each historical moment the nature of that
[Asian American] subjectivity . . . and what it might teach
us about our own historical situation" (13). Palumbo-Liu
provides us with a postponement of sorts; the call for the
study of ”historical moments” can only lead to the resolution
indirectly.
Since he holds no faith in seeing what is “on the
horizon"--indeed, he clearly implies that this is an
impossibility--Palumbo—Liu leans back on American sociology
in order to give motivation to his goal of contributing to
the completion the Asian/American predication:
I sense we are still awaiting that disappearance
that early twentieth-century American sociologists
deemed necessary for ”real" assimilation--the
disappearance of race. The degree to which race
remains a powerful and negative signifier is the
degree to which the modern project is left
incomplete. (393, emphasis in original)

The question of the ”modern project’s" end--in a sense, the

end of ”race"--is mentioned throughout Asian/American. but it

81

is unclear whether this "end" to race is a "complete” end to
the term or a reiteration of it in a ”positive and weak" mode
of identification. This indecision (or impasse), in turn, can
be understood as the postponement of a decision about what
Asian America is and what it will be.

But near the end of the book, Palumbo-Liu offers a
strange moment of resolution: we are encouraged to think of
”ethnic choice" and agency in order to complete the "modern
project." He calls for a "more complex understanding of Asian
America" in order to ”recognize the agency of Asian Americans
in fashioning their own existences and how that refashioning
has impact on Asian America” (390); the ”pragmatics of
agency" will lead to the “deconstruction" of the ”identifying
topos" of Asian American in order to resolve the
contradictions of Asian America (390, 392, emphasis in
original). Yet this agency/independence that emerges from a
more intricate understanding guarantees nothing in
particular; a complete end to the modern project is never
called for but, rather, Palumbo-Liu supports an augmented
ending where race continues to signify something, albeit not
something ”powerful and negative."

This augmented form of race appears in discussions
concerning Robert Park. While cogently noting that, for Park,
miscegenation plays a large role in ending racial
antagonisms, Palumbo-Liu claims that in Park’s work, “racial
difference is determined not by mental nature, but by a

physical sign" and that Asian Americans are relegated to the

82

margins of society until phenotypic changes take place (86,
emphasis in original). This claim-—and the claim that race
has a positive and weak content/valence in the augmented
form--is misleading; Palumbo-Lin discusses only three of

Park’s essays and one of his textbooks while developing his
arguments;14 As a result, Palumbo-Lin omits Park’s notions of

racial ”temperaments" and instinctual prejudice in his
analysis. To complicate matters, George W. Stocking, Jr.
contends that Park’s work--and the work of the whole Chicago
School--is indebted to neo-Lamarckian thought, which stresses
a "behavioral theory of biological evolution" in which
behaviors and changes in the body are hereditary, transmitted
from parents to child (Stocking 238, 243). The impact of
Lamarckian thinking should prevent us from viewing Park’s
works as either ”hopeful" or politically progressive,
especially in terms of his racial theories. If
biological/behavioral heredity comprises the new positive and
weak use of race and racial identity for Palumbo-Lin, then a
major concern emerges: how does this remove us from the
circuit of racial logic(s)? Further, Palumbo-Liu asserts that
Park ”completely bypasses the socioeconomic apparatuses that

perpetuate and manage racism" so much that he develops a

 

14 These are: “Human Migration and the Marginal Man." American
Journsl of Sociology. 33.2 (May 1931): 95-110. Rpt. in Race and Culture.
345-56; ”Race Prejudice and Japanese-American Relations." (Formerly
Introduction.) The Japanese Invasion. By Steiner, J.F. Chicago: A.C.
McClung & Co., 1917. vii-xvii. Rpt. in Racessnd Culturs. 223-29; “The
Mentality of Racial Hybrids." Americsn Journal of Sociology. 36 (Jan
1931): 534-51. Rpt. in Race and Culture. 377-92; and Introduction to the

Science of Sociology. 3rd Ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969. (original
1921).

83

”fatalistically” inflected theory of assimilation that can
only guarantee that assimilation will ”happen," eventually
(86). The business of Chicago sociology is management: of
social groups, of threats to the State, and of racialized
bodies in a capitalist context. Perhaps the only way Park
sidesteps the socioeconomic structures of oppression is in
the way he offers up theories to maintain these structures;
this, in effect, is the trajectory of Park’s work.
Asian American Responsss

Perhaps the most interesting Asian American attempt to
respond to Park and the Chicago School came from one of its
students: Paul Siu. In 1953, Siu presented his dissertation
”The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation" to the
University of Chicago sociology department, though he had
done the majority of his research in the 19303 (Yu 133). One
year earlier, he published ”The Sojourner," an article that
can be considered a smaller, yet more focused, attempt at
explaining the difference between the sojourner ”type" and
the marginal man. Siu’s work has been lauded as ”the richest
and most detailed portrait of Chinese American that Chicago
sociologists would ever produce” and as the product of a
”true" organic intellectual (in the Gramscian sense): “[Siu]
was personally close to, and deeply empathized with, those he

studied. . . . He spoke for the class of Chinese laundry

workers” (Yu 134, Tchen xxxiii).315 With analysis, however, we

 

15 Likewise, sociologists like Philip Q. Yang have attempted to

rescue the “sojourner" concept from “reasoning [and] . . . qualitative
descriptions based on a few cases" in order to test the “validity" of

84

can view these comments as romanticizations of Siu’s work;
Siu neither provides us with a “collective memory long
silenced in American history" nor does participant
observation (Siu’s technique) necessarily serve as a

technique that will create a "positive" identification for
Chinese Americans (Tchen xxxv, xxxi).316 Siu’s works, while

denying the universal nature of the marginal man type for
second-generation and ”biracial” Asian Americans, prove to be
lost opportunities. Even though he attempts to disprove the
marginal man concept by denying its psychological ”torture,"
his aim of documenting how social and legal exclusion created
a ”personality type” not only relies upon the logic of the
“ideal type” (like Stonequist), but it also utilizes
supposedly self-evident racialisms in order to manufacture
the ”sojourner" type.

In ”The Sojourner,” Siu claims that the sojourner

 

the concept with qualitative evidence (236). Yang’s aim is to develop a
stronger understanding of “transnationalism” as a ”new form of
sojourning in the new era of globalization" (254, emphasis in original).
For the purposes of this chapter, quantification in order to prove
validity is not a concern; “proving" the validity of a concept in this
way merely attempts to assess the use-value of a term without
questioning the fundamental logical problems of a “concept."

16 Siu’s participant observer technique is often overlooked by his

critics. Or, rather, it is accepted out of hand as bringing ”us" closer
to how Chinese Americans lived and survived in the past. By stressing
Siu’s background in social work and his status as ”the best field
researcher" of those sociology students “who studied the Chinese in
America," one thing is overlooked: how Siu uses deception to gather his
evidence (Yu 137). Siu eavesdrops, refuses to tell his informants that
they are being interviewed, often quotes conversations verbatim when he
only records them hours or days after the fact, and reads personal
letters without consent. In the interests of establishing the “value" of
Siu’s work, these ethical transgressions are either excused or elided in
the name of verisimilitude. The effect is astounding considering that
one of the projects of Chicago sociology--to develop “natural laws" that
govern race relations and equality--is to present a version of
(inevitable) verisimilitude that will always reaffirm racial hierarchy.

85

”clings to the culture of his own ethnic group in contrast to
the bicultural complex of the marginal man” (34). One
fundamental characteristic of the sojourner type is that his
behavior is almost entirely volitional; that ”cling[ing]" to
one’s culture and "willingness" to assimilate become the
preliminary criteria necessary to create the sojourner
attests to this. He claims that the sojourner is a “non-
racial” term that ”may be applied to a whole range of foreign
residents in any country to the extent that they maintain
sojourner attitudes" (34). Yet in The Chinese Laundr an, Siu
implicitly affirms a ”student of sociology’s” claim that
because ”intermarriage is very rare," the ”Chinaman is not
[’given the chance to assimilate], being of Mongoloid stock"
(10). As a result, the sojourner’s attitude to not assimilate
is partially predicated upon his (enforced and regulated)
inability to intermarry. The non-racial, universalist
aspirations of the sojourner concept are also undercut by
Siu’s investment in ”unassimilation"; when he cites a
"private document" that ”seem to be nearly a perfect cycle of
the sojourner’s career," he argues that ”Mr. C," the
speaker/writer, “joins his countrymen in isolation in the
racial colony" (”Sojourner" 39, 41). Mr. C, however, claims
that “’We [Chinese] are just outsiders. Outsiders,
particularly of the nonwhite race, have not much of a chance.
Some Americans are very nice to you, but deep in their hearts
you are still, you know, different from their own’" (41).

This awareness of the racial exclusion that produces the

86

racial colony in Mr. C’s response is a lead that Siu does not
follow. As a result, the language of "joining," coupled with
terms or assertions like ”clinging" and ”feeling content [in
isolation and segregation]" expose Siu’s deep ambivalence
concerning causes and effects; in other words, by making the
claim that the ”mind is not so much the cause as it is the
result of activities,” Siu risks undercutting his volitional
theory of unassimilation by stressing the mind-lessness of
action while simultaneously excusing exclusion (Chinese 294).
Self-exclusion, on the part of the Chinese laundrymen,
is described as a ”clinging” multiple times in Siu’s larger
work, and this clinging refers to the "cultural heritage" of
the laundrymen’s homeland (Chinese 2). It is difficult to pin
down what Siu means by "cultural heritage," but it is defined
at different points as language, food, topics of
conversation, and the use of an abacus (”Sojourner" 38,
Chinese 65). Given the problem of social exclusion, Siu’s
claim that for the laundrymen ”to be able to speak English is
something extra rather than necessary" is misleading (Chinese
138); the degree to which clinging is enforced through
segregation is never discussed in Siu’s texts, and his
characterization of the world outside of the ”racial colony"
as a ”broad cosmopolitan community" is shocking (272). Much
like Park and Stonequist, behavior takes center stage, and
even though Siu does not replicate the overtly racialist
claims of inherited instincts or temperaments, he also never

directly confronts the structure(s) of white supremacy that

87

create and maintain economic disparities, enforced “alien”
status, and social segregation. If, for contemporary Asian
Americanists, Siu’s work represents the ”right" kind of
“empathy" for Chinese Americans as well as the ”richest"
depiction or documentary of life in the racial ghetto, then
what we are facing is an uncritical, laudatory academic
stance towards "lost" Asian American works; this project of
”reclaiming" can only accomplish a kind of group—building
logic that, despite shared historical suffering, exalts the
racialized status of the writer (and his subjects) in order
to mobilize a "strong, clear voice" without question. As a
result, Asian American Studies moves backward in time to
launch a reclamation project with little critical evaluation
of those works that may recapitulate the conditions that
produce racialization.

While "time" takes on a negative definition for the
laundrymen--the time to return ”home" never comes--time takes
center-stage in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making
of an Oriental Yankee. Described as a Korean American ”search
for the fictional [imaginative] America" that employs a
“universal, transcendent temporality" to create a ”common,
worldwide literary culture," Kang’s work explores the forward
march of ”progress” through time as opposed to the ”timing"
of assimilation (and amalgamation) that is, supposedly, to
come (E. Kim 37, Palumbo-Liu 117). Patricia Chu argues that
the narrator, concerned with “wandering, exile, and

homelessness," desires ”recognition from his adopted country,

88

both as an author and as a unique and ’priceless’ text" (Chu
31, 35). I contend that beyond the literary aspirations of
Chungpa Han, the protagonist attempts to find a ”time" apart
from biological and spatial determination: a time that, in
order to achieve equality, must ”never" pass (into an
ordering) (Kang 3). Implicit in my argument is that all
”temporal discourse” is involved in producing a “knowledge of
the Other" that also implies ”difference as distance" (Fabian
1, 16, emphasis in original). Han is conscious of time’s
double production of racial knowledge and the simultaneous
spatial segregation and distancing that coappears with such
knowledge and, as a result, Kang attempts to envision an
alternative future for (Asian) America apart from racial
determination, assimilation, and amalgamation; eventually,
all alternatives are undermined by white protectionism of the
nation-state.

Kang dedicates the first six pages of East Meets west to
a consideration of time. Claiming that “Time never passes,"
Chungpa Han imagines the universe as an ”undying bird" that
”forever lives, forever breathes, forever, with its two wings
fluttering, flies” (3). The universe-as-bird has no specific
trajectory, and as long as "we" ”have a clock to calculate
[time] for us," “we are illusioned": “It is not time that
passes, but ourselves" (3). The measurement of time, then, is
wed to a sense of time passing towards something; and this is
the impression Han gives as he comes to New York City, which

embodies ”those hard, cold, magic words--opportunity,

89

enterprise, prosperity, success" that denote the transcendent
project of the “machine-age" which is embodied in every
articulation of "America” (4). The ”promise” of tim --
exemplified by the city which is a ”shadow of white" and
"remorselessly new"--cannot be extricated from what Palumbo-
Liu deems the ”logic of modern capital," which ”insists on
the production of waste--the creation of luxury is parasitic
on the creation of expandability" (Kang 6, Palumbo-Liu 120).
we soon discover that the "waste" that time produces is the
racialized body, left to be segregated from the whiteness of
progress.

Han claims that it is his ”destiny to see the
disjointing of a world" (Kang 4). And this is precisely what
happens when the social is organized in a segregated manner:
the ”flexibility" of human embodiment is defeated through the
(hyper)extension of white privilege. Perhaps the most
pertinent example of this is Han’s stilted amorous
relationship with Trip, a white co-ed whom Han attempts to
woo. Apart from the common conception of white female bodies
serving as a ”potential trophy for Asian American males in
the race to assimilate," Chu contends that the white woman
”represents the American cultural establishment with which
the Asian American literary author must negotiate in order to
establish both his literary authority and his Asian American
subjectivity” (Chu 28). And Han attempts to interest Trip in
his life story, asking her to write his biography and, by

extension, helping in the masculinist (co)production of a

90

subjectivity that will serve as a ”trip" into the American
mainstream and the "all-earth-embracing age” that Trip, as a
white woman, represents (336).

Yet Han’s desire for Trip is not predicated upon a
desire to “assimilate" a la Chicago Sociology; he only wants
to get Trip's ”mind working with” his own (Kang 393). Trip,
however, will have none of it, and after this initial
conversation about Han’s life, both have dinner in Chinatown.
When Han leaves Trip on the street to go purchase some
“Chinese wine,” Trip is approached by a plain-service
policeman who has ”to protect American girls in Chinatown”
(Kang 344, 345). Trip, as a result of this confrontation,
becomes excited, claiming that this experience of white
protectionism (by the policeman) embodies ”Just what you
always expect from Chinatown, and never get" (345). With this
confirmation, Trip validates the felt strangeness of
Chinatown as the dangerous, ”sinister" ghetto--the only thing
that makes Chinatown ”interesting" (345). While Trip
“associates [Han] with Chinato "-—spatially locating
(racial) danger apart from the ”American"--Han’s desire is to
establish a relation with Trip that isn’t grounded in the
forced dis-location of the Asian American but, rather, in the
shared location of the ”mind" (Chu 34). And Trip’s eventual
dismissal of Han as a lover confirms that the ”waste" of
America is representable as a ghetto residing in the “white
shadow" of the city. Interracial affiliations for Trip, then,

can only exist through a strict logic of

91

segregation/separation.r7

While Stonequist argues that marginality produces an
(ant)agonistic confrontation between East and West in the
mind of the cultural/racial hybrid, Kang contends that it is
only through the arresting of time (and the prevention of
racial equality) that “our" ”only plea" of human commonality
can be dismissed (Kang 5); as such, Kang’s New York City can
only serve as a "vast mechanical incubator" for him, keeping
him alive until his ”rebirth and happier reincarnation" (6,
401). Even though Elaine Kim argues that Han eventually
accedes and accepts that life under racial hierarchy is the
only life available right now, the ending of East Goes west
argues otherwise. In a recurring dream, Han envisions
climbing up a ”lofty tree" in America and seeing, across the
”leafy ocean of verdure" and ”wide water," his childhood
friends from Korea, Yunkoo and Chak-doo-shay (400). While
struggling to reach the bridge that connects America to
Korea, Han finds that "money and keys, contracts and business
letters" begin to fall out of his pockets (400). In the past,
he’s dreamt of returning to Korea with Trip ”in a car," now

Han has perpetually lost all of these symbols of (upward)

 

17 This is also the logic of the three other Korean male-white

female relationships in East Goes West: Kim and Helen, George Jum and
his white ”dancer" girlfriend, and Richard Chai’s eventual engagement to
a fellow medical student. Kim eventually commits suicide because Helen
dies after her family disapproves of the relationship. Richard’s success
is predicated upon his discipline and patience in waiting to be
“admitted" into a relationship by his white partner. Finally, George Jum
moves to Hawaii and plans to marry a “Korean girl, one American-born"
(Kang 399); George claims that in Hawaii, one can "spend" time “eating,
loving and sleeping," all the while knowing that, in America, failure is
impossible because racial hierarchy will not allow success (399).

92

mobility (400). But Han continues to search, and he finds
himself running down into a "cryptlike cellar" ”under the
pavements of a vast city" (401). Soon, Han finds that he,
along with ”some frightened-looking Negroes” is stuck in the
cellar, and the cellar is being attacked by “red-faced” white
men brandishing “flaring torches” (401). Eventually, Han
wakes up like "the phenix out of a burst of flames" (401).
Stephen Knadler argues that Han (and Kang) attempts to create
a more “particularized affiliation with the heterogeneous

groups that constitute and, at the same time, dis-able the
fiction of a ’naturalized’ white US citizenry" (Knadler 37).18

And in this scene, Han can only escape race’s disciplinary
powers not by thinking of the "next" life/incarnation, but by
attempting to imagine how society may be reborn out of the
internal combustion of the racial state. Strongly dismissing
any programmatic plans to either “whiten” society or produce
assimilation through intermarriage, Kang presents us with a
vision of America that is in perpetual process while
simultaneously arguing that the ”phenix"/bird of the
universe--a rebirth or response to a previous social
order(ing)--must have no particular trajectory but should
fly, perpetually, without a reinvestment in “progress" and
its racialized ”waste" by-products. By eliminating this
”time" of forward movement, we can, perhaps, acknowledge that

the illusion of time passing covers over the only thing that

 

18 Since Jouvert is an on-line publication without page numbers, I
have substituted the paragraph number of the quotation in this citation.

93

binds us together: ”we" pass away, always and forever.
While Kang documents Korean American life in the 19305
in order to suggest reconfiguration, Fae Myenne Ng, in her
novel Eggs, certifies that the legal and sociological
production of Asian America--especially Chinese Americans
dealing, in the 19905, with the legacies of exclusion and
marginality--has created a perpetual and urgent need for
certification (of social and racial location): through birth
certificates, historical narratives of exclusion, and the
like. Tracing the history of the Leong family in San
Francisco Chinatown as they deal with the suicide of a

daughter, Ona, Ng organizes her novel via a stop-start,
almost backwards chronology;19 While some critics argue that

this movement is either solely backwards or interrupted, the
main contention surrounding Hg s,is that it attempts to both
prove that ”causality as a means of investigation is
disorganized" and that by disrupting the ”logic of cause and
effect," ”there is no originary or volitional subject but
only a subject—effect, materialized via performativity,
within hegemonic discourses" (Lowe 122, T. Kim 53, emphasis
in original). But these conclusions ignore a crucial
characteristic of the novel: it ends in the present with
Leila, the narrator, leaving Chinatown and moving to San

Francisco’s Mission District. In the end, I argue that Ng

 

19 For example, the first three chapters all move backwards in

time, while the fourth chapter moves forward from the end of chapter
three, only to reinitiate the backwards chronology until the end, which
is in the present tense.

94

advances an argument dismissing any investment in abject,
racialized Asian American identity through the character of
Ona. Rather than produce a reinvestment in and
recertification of the Asian American ghetto that provides
the foundation of the story, Ng offers up another critical
argument: Asian American subjects (and their certification
through historical knowledges) must eventually ”disappear" in
order for liberation—-albeit ”personal"--and freedom can be
achieved. In this way, the second generation’s physical
presence in America--which offered so much promise for
assimilation in Chicago Sociology—-confronts a sociology of
"group” behavior; Ng’s second-generation characters confirm,
applaud, resist, and eventually commit suicide over the
”marginality” of racialization and authentication of their
citizen-status. In the end, it is the figure of Ona that
offers up a tenable beginning to a solution to the problems
that arise out of the concepts of assimilation, amalgamation,
and marginality: as the ”in-between" second child of three
sisters, she embodies the ”marginal man,” but she also
attempts to escape the sociological investment in
racial/group legacies (and inheritances) by ”count[ing]" and
counting on "the living" (Ng 51, 88).

The character of Leon exposes the centrality of
documentation and, by extension, the verification of
legitimacy, that undergirds immigration and Asian American
subjectivity. As a paper son, Leon keeps all documents of his

”forged" citizenship in order to secure his place in

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America.20 Included in this documentation are all of the

rejection letters he has received, marking lost
”opportunities" and racial suffering (Ng 58); all of this
evidence proves, for him, that ”time mattered": ”Leon had
paid. Leon had earned his rights. American dollars. American
time. These letters marked his time and they marked his
endurance. Leon was a paper son" (58). This personal and
historical record of ”illegitimacy" verifies for Leon a
subjectivity predicated upon exclusion. we also learn that
Leon "enjoys making old things work” and that he is a “junk
inventor" that hoards mostly disposable items (takeout
containers, aluminum tins, Styrofoam cups, etc.) (5). By
manufacturing ”very weird stuff” like "Cookie-tin clocks" and
”clock lamps," Leon attempts to reconcile unlike objects—-
creating hybrid entities--in order to make more ”functional”
items that serve multiple purposes (5). These items, like
Leon, are disposable and their worth questioned by Leila and
other family members. Ultimately, Leon founders and can never
find success, leading him to declare America a "lie of a
country" that makes ”big promises" while “breaking every one"
(103). Leon, then, is caught in a doubled, double lie: the
duplicity of an America created through exclusion mirrors the
passing of time/rejection that comes for the paper son who

circumvents the institution of citizenship through

 

20 Paper sons were those men who entered America by claiming to be

born in the U.S. to Chinese parents after the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake destroyed ”almost all of the municipal records" in the city
(Takaki, Strangers 234, 235).

96

unauthentic documents. Leon eventually declares that there
are ”More dead than living" and his quest for Grandpa Leong’s
bones-—those which he promised to send back to China but
never did—-reveal that Leon, and paper sons in general, are
arrested/frozen in a legacy and lineage: the materials of the
past--bones, found objects, rejection letters--override and
dominate present-day concerns (71). In all, the character of
Leon is used as a foil for the three sisters in the novel,
serving as a representation of an Asian America wed to
questions of legitimacy that can only be answered by “new"
inventions consisting of old products.

The three sisters in the novel, however, question these
grounds of legitimacy--an aspect of Ng’s work that is often
overlooked. Leila, Nina, and Ona all have separate views
towards lineage, and each advances their own take on the
future of Asian America. For instance, Leila is the first
child and step-daughter to Leon; all of the other sisters are
Leon’s and Mah’s children. Leila is forthright in her
exhaustion with Leon’s tinkering and stasis as well as the
family “guilt" that all suffer after Ona’s suicide. Claiming
that Ona's "choice" was to die, Leila--who clearly separates
life before and after the event as "Before and After Ona
Jumped"--wants a ”new life" (Ng 15). Her ”out" is her
relationship with Mason Louie, another Chinatown resident who
”didn’t speak the same dialect, but he was one of us" (19).
Inclusion through shared racialization aside, Leila loves

Mason because, unlike Leon, he is able to continue with his

97

life despite the social stigma of race: "He’s generous and he
can let something go. Sure, I went for Mason for his looks,
his long, lean build and his car. But he’s got plenty of
other qualities: he has a job and he finishes whatever he
starts" (19). Despite Leila’s desire, through her
relationship with Mason (and through sex), for a “ritual to
forget" and a "ritual that forgave"--a ”finishing up” and
neat completion and resolution to the agony of Chinatown life
and Ona’s death--she continually attempts to yoke her
memories and experiences of Chinatown back into her new life,
which begins in the Mission District with Mason. Her
confession that her job as a liaison between the Chinatown
elementary school and the (overworked) parents feels like
“missionary work” is telling: full integration into American
society for Asian Americans will come with ”look[ing] back"

and ”remember[ing]," but also with a physical removal from
the racialized space of Chinatown (16, 192).21 The ”mission”

of countering racism is, put bluntly, to escape while

maintaining an emotive tie to the people and memories of

 

21 David Eng argues that the paper sons’ “absent presence"--a

presence without “real” documentary legitimacy--”create[s] unexpected
paths of affiliation and kinship for their progeny, like Leila, to
remember, ’to remember them all’" (Eng 67). The problem of physical
distancing--which for Leila is a decision to sever all physical ties
with ghetto-ized Asian America despite her realization that the “us"
involves both old-timers and the ”new” generation--should bring this
”remembering" into question: if the purpose of remembering is to justify
a movement away, then where is one moving to in order to live without
remembering? Put another way, why does Leila justify the decision to
distance herself unless she wants to "finish" what she’s ”started" in
terms of creating a new, but ultimately reiterative, subjectivity
through her ”missionary work” and position outside of a racialized
constituency?

98

Asian America.22

The ”old" and the historical is summarily rejected by
the most distant and youngest sister, Nina, and her desire
for a distancing from Chinatown is much stronger than
Leila’s. Indeed, Nina eerily embodies the fully assimilated
marginal man, at least in terms of "behavior"; she strives to
”assimilate" by moving to New York, becoming a stewardess,
and escaping her family. Leila, though, thinks that Nina
suffers from a ”deep down loneliness” that comes with the
rejection of family and the rejection of her Asian American
roots (113). Nina refuses any form of ethnic identity,
claiming that, for example, she has ”’no use’" for chopsticks
”at home" (27). Likewise, she employs a logic of separate
worlds; her mother and Leon represent another ”world” because
"They don’t want to come into our worlds” (33). It may be
more helpful to think of Nina as attempting to escape the
exclusive bounds of “family," which exists “only because
somebody has a story, and knowing the story connects us to a

history" (36). Certainly, Nina is reactionary; after Ona’s

 

22 It is difficult not to view Leila with suspicion in terms of

her strategy for dealing with the social exclusion that comes from being
Asian American in Chinatown. Her claim that “The heart never travels"
and the fact that Ng’s award—winning, mainstream novel closely resemble
Park's and Burgess' notion of assimilation--where “Assimilation is a
process on interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups
acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or
groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated
with them in a common cultural life"--is untrustworthy (Park and Burgess
735). The “sharing" of Bone-~the telling of ethnic stories to a general
public--is complicated by Leila’s desire for a conditional escape;
sharing creates, in this context, an economy of affect that is central
to the notion of assimilation and, by extension, this sharing
contributes to the ”common cultural life."

99

suicide, she gradually withdraws and forgets her old
Chinatown life. And even though she was castigated as a
teenager for “only” dating ”white guys," Nina falls in love
with Zhang, a man from China who speaks Spanish and who is
”different" from the usual Chinatown suspects (28). Leila
claims that ”Nina had a whole map of China in her head; I had
Chinatown, the Mission, the Tenderloin," and this may be the
crucial evidence for comprehending Nina’s strategy of
distancing: her version of ethnic identity can only be
confirmed through ”versatility" (28). While Leila attempts to
create a new life and "finish" her move from Chinatown, Nina
invests in the "international" aspect of Asian America that
values difference while maintaining biological kinship. This,
then, is a conditional rejection of racialization and
Chinatown life, for the racia1(ized) ties that bind oppressed
groups can be loosened through intra-ethnic "difference" and
novelty.

Finally, Ona’s short life mobilizes Ng’s narrative.
Regardless of claims that Ona’s suicide and (almost)
backwards narrative structure removes the reader from a chain
of causality, I argue that Ona’s jump from the thirteenth
floor of one of the buildings in the ”Nam" housing project is
more complicated and, by extension, can reveal a quashed
strategy of dealing with legal exclusion, the demand for
certification, and the racially interpellative demands of
Chinatown (and Asian America). Ona, since she was a child,

was dressed by Mah in white, the traditional color of

100

mourning/death (136). But Ona is also characterized by Leila
as the ”forward-looking one" that was "always excited about
the next day, the tomorrow" (88). Forced to embody mourning
while always thinking that there are “more living than dead,"
Ona inhabits the contradictory position that Ng, by
extension, will argue Asian American Studies holds in
relation to the recuperation of a ”historicized," abject
racial identity: attempting to understand historical and
racial determination while daring to think about the future
(88). Also, Ona counts. She counts down/off (the day’s until
Leon returns from his seafaring trips), counts to record (the
number of times her ”pet rooster" crowed during his life),
and counts the “living” in an act of verification: the living
outnumber the dead by their mere presence, which is always
defined by an arrested, racially excluded (social and legal)
death within American society (88). Regardless of this
determination, the future or ”tomorrow" exerts a pressure on
Ona--to the point where she kills herself. Strangely, Leila
mentions that ”In our dialect . . . [thirteen] was a good
number. Thirteen sounds like ’to live’" (123). ”Living" for
Ona was a process of verifying one’s existence, anticipating
an end (to estrangement/distance), and also of confirming
that the present and future far exceed Asian Americans’
social and legal determination in the past and present. As a
response to Nina, Leon, and Leila’s strategies for dealing
with racism, Ona’s purpose--if there is a lesson to be

learned from all of this--seems to complement the Nancian

101

project of thinking about ”revolution": for revolution to
appear, existence-in-common must not be ”absorb[ed]” by
transcendence (Inoperative x1). Leon’s hybrid machinery,
Nina's distancing and eventual (racial) acceptance, Leila’s
affect-based strategy of ”remembering": all of these merely
”deal" with the punishing powers of ”race" in personal,
pragmatic ways. Ona’s demonstration of the death—in-life of
exclusion serves to bring the Leong family together in
suffering, but it also (almost) rends them apart. Regardless,
Ona’s suicide can also generate critique: the disruption of
the ”logic of cause and effect" opens up a space where life
serves no programmatic or sociological purpose (T. Kim 44).
Indeed, sociology and Nancy's ”humanity" have “never been
ready for questions of end" apart from the ends organized by
racialist thinking: ”humanity’s un-preparation for death is
but death itself: its blow and injustice" (”L'intrus” 7).
There is no identity or life except in relation (existence-
in-common), and the coercion of white supremacy and claims of
ethnic identity and autonomy organize these relations through
their own styles of (counter)hegemonic coercion. As a result,

”marginality" can only think survival, never ”revolution."

102

Chapter 2: Exception(al)/Internment

Maybe it will be for some future historian to say
that America was tested and found wanting.
--William Minoru Hohri1

This chapter takes seriously the call by legal and
ethnic studies scholars to ”reinterpret" Japanese American
internment and reparations. In light of legal developments
post—9/11 (especially the passage of the USA PATRIOT ACT),
the constant problem of national security’s relation to the
U.S. government’s “compelling interests" seems more pressing
than ever. By revisiting the vexed relationship between
national security and Japanese America-~under the guise of
the Kerematsu and Hirabayashi Supreme Court decisions--my
analysis points out the central problem that continues to
plague both Asian America and non-white America as a whole to
this day: the perpetuation of two-tiered citizenship in order
to consolidate white majority rule. Mari Matsuda implores
Asian Americanists to use internment ”as a lens to take the
denial of human rights directed against Japanese Americans as
a starting point for understanding the bigger picture of
repression in America" (16). As will be discussed below in
relation to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and
Internment of Civilians and the Japanese American Citizens

League, the official narratives of Japanese American

 

1 From Hohri, William Minoru. Repairing Amsrips: An Account of ths
Movsment for Japanese-Amerigsn Redress. Pullman, WA: Washington State
UP, 1988. 76.

103

internment and reparations focus, ordinarily, on the
”retrieval of the facts of internment and condemnation of the
Constitutional wrong" (16); at the end of the day, we are
often left with a narrative of racial transcendence and
justice “served" through the reparations garnered in the
19805. There are ”rewards for acquiescence," Chris K. Iijima
points out, and the highly compromised restitution process--
with political jostling, as any Congressional debate will
have-—was governed by governmental self-interest (408). With
this in mind, Asian American Studies also faces these
concerns, especially in terms of the standards and goals set
for effecting and realizing legal, political, and social
change; highly invested, as we have seen, in reiterative
notions of agency and resistance, the field must reckon with
the limitations of critique solely focused on the
recuperation or realization of rights and the citizen's
entitlements. Beyond a mere acceptance of reformism, this
chapter will analyze the promises of Asian American legal
studies and literary studies in order to examine how Asian
America is reproduced—-always in subjection--through legal
channels and in academic scholarship. By analyzing the
fundamental concepts of resistance and equality in relation
to internment, I argue that current Asian Americanist studies
stop short of a larger critique of governmental sovereignty
and the racial state; because of this, the transformative
possibilities inherent for ethnic studies, as a whole, are

compromised.

104

Implicit in the following discussion of internment and
reparations is that the U.S. has maintained a racial polity--
indeed, a ”white-supremacist polity"--through legal norms and
exceptions (Mills, Blackness 123, emphasis in original).
Alexander T. Aleinikoff argues that one way this racial
polity reproduces itself is through the doctrine of plenary
power, whereby ”virtually unreviewable congressional power”
exists to regulate, among other things, ”Indian tribes, the
territories, and immigration" (vii). These congressional
privileges to legislate with limited accountability have
existed, as Aleinikoff contends, since the late nineteenth
century-—roughly the beginning of official Chinese exclusion-
-and ”Congress [has] had plenary power to construct the
American state and its membership largely immune from
judicial review" (11). In terms of Asian American concerns,
Aleinikoff only refers to immigration as it relates to
plenary power. But because plenary power and issues of
national sovereignty not only allow for ”control of borders”
but “also implied [the] power to construct an ’American
people’ through the adoption of membership rules," decisions
about internment also rest on the concept of unreviewable
congressional and executive authority (12-13); this can be
seen in the Supreme Court’s internment cases and the quest
for reparations, both of which will be discussed below.
Important for my discussion is non-difference between terms
”alien” and "(racial) citizen" in the context of Japanese

American internment; despite, for example, Fred Korematsu’s

105

belief that the U.S. government wouldn’t “go as far" as to
intern the nisei ”citizens" but only the issei "aliens" (who
were ineligible for citizenship), Asian America exists in a
perilous place in relation to decisions concerning the racial
group(ing) (Of Civil). What internment teaches us is that the
U.S. government reserves the right to ultimately question and
hold suspect Asian America's claims of membership in the
polity regardless of citizenship status-~making Asian
Americans, virtually and literally, perpetual outsiders under
the law. Ironically, as we will see, Japanese Americans
during WOrld War II could only be included in America’s

partitioned social structure through forced military removal
and internment.2

The legislative power--and the executive power, which
emerges alongside it--to not be reviewed authorizes the
suspension of "color-blind" law, or laws that deal with
”individuals" despite continued racial domination; this
suspension, inherent within the practice of American law, has
led legal scholars such as Neil Gotanda to argue that ”color
blind constitutionalism . . . fosters white racial
domination" because ”particular manifestations of racial

subordination . . . [are] understood as an attitude" as

 

2 Mills refers to this phenomena as the creation of a “partitioned
social ontology" in relation to his formulation of the “racial
contract,” or the racial foundations that undergird social contractarian
thought (Mills, Racial 16). This social ontology directly leads to a
partitioned, or multi-tiered, political ontology that is maintained
through admissions requirements for the white polity: ”full cognitive
standing in the polity, the official epistemic community" depends upon
the ability to “misinterpret the world," which will be “validated by
white epistemic authority” (18, emphasis in original).

106

opposed to a structural or institutional problem (“Critique"
2, 45). Indeed, the institutional power to pass law without
review is characteristic of what Carl Schmitt deems the
”exception," and sovereignty ”decides the exception" (5).
Without formal mechanisms to review legislation, such
legislation is included in U.S. law by its very exemption
from legal standards; the ability to decide on the exception
and the unmitigated power to determine the legal order
without accountability reveals an extra-legal realms—an
outside of the systems-contained within the legal order. The
exception should be ”understood to refer to a general concept
in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct
applied to any emergency decree or state of siege," according
to Schmitt, and, likewise, the emergence of racial suspicion
(and the concomitant finding of racial guilt) leading up to

internment should be viewed as a general rule of U.S. law
(5).3 Schmitt’s formulation of the sovereign exception is

helpful for analyzing internment, especially in terms of
comprehending that the exception, while a ”case of extreme
peril," “cannot be circumscribed factually and made to
conform to a preformed law" (6). At minimum, the concept of

the sovereign exception reveals that the state is always

 

3 This ”general rule" may be viewed in light of the multiple and
various exclusionary laws and restrictions placed upon racial
minorities. In terms of Asian Americans, one could examine immigration
restrictions, deportation requirements, alien land laws, unlawful
business practice requirements, marriage bars, legalized employment
discrimination, evacuation and detention, etc. in order to “see" the
“rule” of both racial suspicion and racial exclusion inherent in the
U.S. legal system.

107

implicitly a racial state, and laws, at any particular moment
and for any particular reason as it relates to ”security" or
military necessity, may be suspended since certain
legislative and executive powers exceed the boundaries of
”preformed" law while still remaining ”within the framework
of the juristic" (13); this is possible because even though
the ”state remains,” the “law recedes” (12). Likewise,
sovereignty (and the ability to make/enforce the exception)
”embodies the entire body of authority necessary to bring the
state into existence . . . [as a] condition of possibility"
(Vincent 24). Though internment was an exceptional event,
notably in terms of its unprecedented scale and scope in
twentieth-century America, it was also of the exception,
produced at the moment when racial anxieties triggered a more
serious exclusion that moved beyond the legal apparatuses and
codes that guaranteed the marginalization of Asian Americans.
Internment, then, is the moment when the exception--in terms
of an “offense" to liberty and equality--becomes a ”rival
norm" and the racialist state/sovereign invokes the
exception-a1 nature of U.S. law (Mills, Blackness 132).

This view of the sovereign exceptionalism can be
contrasted with, for example, Michael Omi’s and Howard
Winant’s vision of the ”racial state." The differences
between the two visions are stark when one considers the
political and epistemic limitations a sociological
formulation provides for analyses of internment; the

sociological state and its institutions participate in racial

108

conflicts--and are even structured by race-—yet it is
imagined that the state and its institutions exist prior to
any consideration of race. Omi and Winant contend that "State
institutions acquire their racial orientations from the
processes of conflict with and accommodation to racially
based movements" (78). In this process of acquiring a racial
orientation, the state transitions and becomes ”inherently
racial” and “racially structured . . . [and] intervened" (82,
emphasis in original). Unlike Mills’ theorization of the
racial state, Omi’s and Winant’s characterization of the
state—-only becoming ”inherently" racial after “acquiring” an
”orientation" in response to racial resistance--reveals the
central problem for any study which approaches the state as
either mediator or guarantor of liberty: the state becomes
the ”preeminent site of racial conflict" (82). Rather than
view the state as structured by racial concerns at its very
foundations, it is viewed by Omi and Winant as a deracinated
place where racial interventions by oppressed groups create
and spur on the development of a racial philosophy. As a
”site," we could take for granted that internment was just
another manifestation of racial chauvinism which went against
the grain of a more truly American exceptionalism. This would
foreground war as the ”duress” or atypical moment when the
nation must, against its “better" judgement, suspend
constitutional rights (16). Instead, Mari Matsuda contends
that internment was "business as usual in a country where

racism and capitalism have always proved the unbeatable pair

109

in a doubles match against individual rights and equality"
(16). Omi and Winant’s vision, a vision that inflects the
majority of pro-Japanese American writings on internment, can
only provide an opportunity for ”moral condemnation" and not
a chance to understand “how racially conditioned governmental
actions take place" (Gotanda, "Other" 1192).

Because the (re)creation of a racially inflected polity
is and has been at stake in American jurisprudence, then we
face with a situation where legal rulings are ”moments in
which the decision between just and unjust" is determined and
“insured by a rule" (Derrida, "Force” 16). The rule, as
Derrida points out, can never square itself with ”justice”
due to its commitment to legitimating the rule (of white
supremacy) (16). Building off of Derrida’s formulation, the
legal decisions surrounding internment were founded not on
the ”authority" of laws--laws that can only ground themselves
on their authority/force to exist as laws/rules--but within
the context of authority that demands acquiescence--through
force-~of the racial polity during a time of duress (12). In
the most general sense, I argue that the Hirabayashi and
Kerematsu decisions allow us to formulate not only the
extraconstitutional state of exception that resides at the
heart of American government, but also the link between
military and state, which reveals how the nation-state is
founded upon a perpetual warring against racial minorities--
be it via mere force, through the law, or a combination of

the two. Much like the Chicago School’s goals of biological

110

amalgamation and assimilation that promised Asian America’s
vanishing, the state’s goal of maintaining white privilege
during wartime is premised, finally, upon the disappearance
of Japanese America; the critiques that lament the ”failure"
of due process during internment skirt this point while
inadvertently believing that life under color-blind law--
another articulation of racial subordination--is better than
”no life” at all. In this instance, they are the same thing.
The purpose of this chapter is two-fold: to reassess the
nature of explanatory legal narratives of internment and the
reparations process and to rethink the range of Japanese
American literature as it relates to literary production
across the twentieth century (and not solely "before" or
”after” internment). Currently, both areas of academic
analysis elide an understanding of Japanese America as a
”product" of America’s racial rule, opting instead to explore
the ”place" of Japanese America within the nation. My
analysis demonstrates that strong alternatives to this
continuing “production" of Japanese America must be deployed
to avoid the reintegration and co-opting of intellectual
projects by a ”faith" in the inevitability of inclusion. The
”obligation" of producing justice, of understanding that
justice resides within the “very dimension of events
irreducibly to come," will allow Asian American Studies, in
the most general sense, to commit to projects with the
recognition that ”each advance in politicization obliges one

to reconsider, and so reinterpret the very foundations of law

111

as they have previously been calculated or delimited”
(Derrida, “Force" 27, 28). Rather than envision the end-point
of legal reform--in the full legal standing of the (racial)
subject, for example-—Asian American Studies must commit
itself to a fundamental questioning of the foundation of
racial law without reserve. This process of legal
reinterpretation, then, will be able to develop a sustained
project and orientation of undoing--instead of rectifying--
legal exclusions. Because a racial order undergirds the legal
system in the form of exceptional, unreviewable political
power, we must be vigilant in the questioning (and suspicion)
of our own intellectual calculations that confront this
sovereign power. With this, the satisfaction of any
(re)consolidation of Asian American citizenship, identity, or
even privilege under the law will dissipate, allowing Asian
American Studies to “advance" without satisfaction--but with
a endless obligation to work for a justice ”to come."

Absent(ing) Hindsight

In assessing the motivations for internment, The

 

Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
compares internment to discriminating against people based on

the color of their shirts in order to demonstrate that the

governmental policy was an ”arbitrary intrusion" (ix).4 In

 

4 The Commission was established, at least in partial response to,
a redress bill submitted by Representative Mike Lowery, a Washington
democrat who suggested that $25,000 be paid out to the victims (or
heirs) of internment. (Another important event was Gerald Ford’s ”An
American Apology," which proclaimed that evacuation was wrong and
“officially" rescinded Executive Order 9066, which authorized the
evacuation.) The Japanese American Citizen’s League, with the assistance

112

another vein, Jerry Kang contends that from our vantage
point, post 9/11, we can see that the whole problem boils
down to a simple equation: ”wartime coupled with racism.and
intolerance creates particular types of mistakes" (197).
Between the Commission’s move to establish the capriciousness
of human actors and Kang’s invocation of mere racism as
generative of certain, preventable mistakes during a state of
war, we witness two interpretive strategies that rely upon a
volitional understanding of the racial state: either there’s
a random targeting or there are special ”types” of problems
that emerge out of racism, especially during a war. Huong vu
offers up a qualification of the debate: the government

should focus on the "true threats to national security" like

 

of Senators Daniel Inouye and Sparks Matsunaga and Representatives Norm
Mineta and Robert Matsui, introduced bills in the Senate and House to
establish the commission, which would study not only if redress were
possible, but if there was any specific injury resulting from internment
that could ground any claim for reparations. After Lowery introduced his
bill on November 28, 1979, the Senate approved the “JACL” plan on May 22
of the following year, with the House following suit on July 21--
effectively killing Lowery’s bill.

The commission was made up of seven members: former Supreme Court
Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, former Eisenhower cabinet member Arthur S.
Fleming, Senator Edward W. Brooke (the only African American on the
committee, who also happened to be Republican), Senator Hugh B.
Mitchell, federal judge William M. Marutani (the only Japanese
American), Representative Daniel E. Lundgren, and Joan z. Bernstein (the
chair of the commission). There were twenty days of hearings in nine
cities, and over 750 witness testified. The commission’s report,
Personal Justice Denied, was released in December 1982, and argues that
there was no military necessity that demanded Japanese American
internment. In June 1983, the commission issued their recommendations
for remedies, which included an apology from Congress and the President,
compensation payments of $20,000 to each surviving internee, the
restoration of status and entitlements for Japanese Americans, pardons
for those arrested during wartime, and Congressional funding of a
foundation to educate the American public about internment. When Ronald
Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the government provided
for all of these provisions. (Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and
Minoru Yasui all had their convictions vacated in coram nobis suits.)

113

”antigovernment groups" in order to avoid the use of
“national security" as ”an excuse to discriminate" (693). The
particularly bad behavior of the American government through
misplaced judgement, formal (and racial)
equations/equivocations, and recommendations for a more
”just" war: these theories of what caused or aided the
government’s ability to intern Japanese Americans all avoid
acknowledging the deep history of racial targeting and
discrimination experienced by Asian America. Even greater,
these kinds of analyses profess a strong, abiding faith in
the legal system to insure racial equality. Coupled with a
reading of the Hirabayashi and Kerematsu decisions, however,
it can be seen that these interpretive strategies also
dovetail with the logics of racial assimilation and racial
war within the Supreme Court decisions themselves; the
refusal to analyze beyond the government’s racial
performativity and articulations seizes Asian Americanist
critique at the moment before theorizing the state’s
compicity with the state of racial war.

Racial/racist articulations appear in both Chief Justice
Stone’s unanimous opinion in Hirabayashi V. U.S. and Justice
Black’s majority opinion in Kbrematsu v. U.S.; both are
broadly apologist, arguing that the military decision to
place only Japanese Americans under a curfew restrictions and
evacuating the population, respectively, was justified due to
the absence of substantive ”assimilation" on the part of

Japanese Americans. In Hirabayashi, we learn that the

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“social, economic and political conditions” or exclusions in
place since the end of the nineteenth century ”have
intensified their [Japanese Americans’] solidarity and have
in large measure prevented their assimilation as an integral
part of the white population" (320 U.S. 81, 96). Mirroring
the language of Robert E. Park and the Chicago School, Stone
baldly notes the end point of assimilation: minority
populations must make themselves useful to white society and
bear the responsibility for integrating themselves despite
the social, economic, and political contexts which produce
segregation; Japanese Americans matter such that the manner
of exclusion either replicates racial animosity or produces a
population that strives to include itself in white
supremacist society. Because there has been ”little social
intercourse” between Japanese Americans and the “white
population, the latter's ”attachments to Japan and its
institutions" might possibly have been strengthened (98). If
”friendship"--a racial friendship in submission-—is the salve
for racism, the opinion argues that public opinion, or
”public notoriety,” allows one to judge the fitness of

"residents having ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy"

(101).5 This discussion of racial affiliations is dismissed by

 

5 In his All the Lsys but One: Civil Libsrtiss,in Wsrtims, Chief
Justice William Rehnquist weighs in on the matter of assimilation:
“Residents became fearful of ethnic Japanese among them. Japanese
immigrants . . . had not been assimilated into the rest of the
population" (188). Yoking together white fear and non-assimilation,
Rehnquist supports the military’s desire to evacuate and intern Japanese
Americans due to the effects of white supremacy. While Rehnquist
attempts to distinguish between the status of the issei and the nisei
“citizens," it is evident that both are compressed into one group for

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Justice Black in his Kerematsu opinion, mainly because
”cast[ing] this case into outlines of racial prejudice,
without reference to the real military dangers which were
presented merely confuses the issue (323 U.S. 214, 223,
emphasis added). The ”pressing public necessity" that demands
racial restrictions, for Black, triggers the government’s
"rigid scrutiny" of racial restrictions (216); because some
racial restrictions are constitutional, we can see what both
Hirabayashi and Kerematsu are attempting to theorize: racial
minorities embody the underbelly of white America, thereby
demanding an extraconstitutional measure in order to insure
the national security--or secure the borders of whiteness--
and protect not only the nation, but the nation that can only
be white.

The constitutional extraconstitutionality of racial
targeting and imprisonment is complemented by the Court’s
judgements concerning the constitutionality of military
judgements of (racial) necessity, which some commentators
have referred to as ”judicial abdication" and ”blind
acquiescence" (tenBroek, et. al. 220, Bannai and Minamd 756).
Yet given the problem of sovereignty and the exception, the

lack of concern shown in Hirabayashi or Kerematsu in terms of

 

the sake of more racial/legal theorizing: “German emigration had gone on
since colonial days. People of German and Italian ancestry were far more
spread out in the population in general than were the Issei" (210,
emphasis added). Time and dispersal are key conditions for determining
the ”suspect-ness" of a given racial population, and yet it’s not
entirely evident how the time-lag between “colonial days" and the end of
the nineteenth century (or even the late twentieth century, when
Rehnquist is writing) insures an assimilation whereby racist ”fear"
dissipates to a level where an ethnic group can be ”assimilated."

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resolving the problem of military necessity outside of the
context of martial law demonstrates the gravity of the cases'
challenges to the racial state; in other words, the decisions
attempt to justify a kind of racial/martial law without a
declaration of martial law. In Hirabayashi, Chief Justice
Stone stresses the ”circumstances, the time and place” of
military decisions so as to remove the judiciary (and any
other non-military constituency) from the obligation of
judging such decisions’s legality (320 U.S. 81, 91);
furthermore, it is argued that the judiciary cannot review
military decisions because it can no longer access “that
hour" of the decision because the military possesses no
”hindsight" with which to judge the appropriateness of their
actions (106, 107). The nation, then, can’t ”afford" to
question or review military decisions because, in the first
place, the military acts without thinking, without the
critical ability to assess issues of legality because
hindsight/reasoning is absent in enforcement (107). And Stone
is partially correct: the racial exception to the
Constitution, authorized by Executive Orders 9066, delegates
the power to determine who is an enemy alien to the military,
and the power to make the exception resides in Roosevelt’s
ability to execute such an order; the military, despite
making the racialist decision, is merely following through
with the enforcement of the racial rule of law, which is
never involved in questions of justice.

The unthinking nature of the military and the

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”abdication" of judicial review in Hirabayashi are developed
to a greater extent in Kerematsu, where Justices Black and
Frankfurter further theorize the nature of ”hindsight."
First, Black asserts that his majority opinion will only
"pass upon the order which petitioner [Korematsu] violated
[the evacuation order]" because to rule on the
constitutionality of internment would ”decide momentous
questions not contained within the framework of the pleadings
or the evidence in this case" (323 U.S. 214 at 222); the
momentous nature of racial law’s foundation, obviously, is
off the table for Black. He claims that the ”calm perspective
of hindsight" which the Court actually possesses—-in fact,
everyone already has hindsight in this situation--should
prevent the Court from ”say[ing] that at the time these
actions were unjustified" (224). What’s remarkable in this
turn of phrase is that Black wholly dismisses hindsight, or
historical evaluation, through a warning of ”presentism"
pushed to its very limit: if hindsight can never be right
when attempting to judge historical events, then the
“historical" as we know it must be abolished in the eyes of
the law; history, effectively, is history, and the ”context
of war," which Frankfurter mentions, proves to serve as an
exceptional moment which, by its very existence, can do
nothing but deny interpretive access in the future (224).
Racialisms are mildly reviewable based on the whims of the
Court, but any racial targeting that protects the boundaries

of the white polity are rubber stamped and approved; the

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racial state has history on its side. Justice Murphy, in his
dissent, maintains that "all residents of this nation, are
kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land," yet
they constitute the ”new and distinct civilization of the
United States" (242). Murphy’s dissent offers us a qualified
way out of the racial state, where color-blindness demands a
recognition of America’s “new" civilization. Yet perhaps
Justice Jackson’s argument in his dissent is more helpful:
”quilt is personal and not inheritable," especially if a
person belongs to a ”race from.which there is no way to
resign" (323 U.S. 214 at 243). The ability to re-sign, or
recalibrate the meanings of race in service to “justice,”
then, will end up being the key concern (or problem) of plans
for restitution and reparations--or life in general after
Hirabayashi and Korematsu. Key to all of the worries about
the after-effects of these two cases is that "the ghost of
Korematsu might be resurrected at any time, possibly in a
less outrageous increment, given a sufficient threat by a
specific racial group" since the cases have never been
overturned (Braber 469).

Error and Rscompspss_

Scholars who attempt to come to terms with the events
during and after World War II often locate the evacuation and
internment along a continuum of historical exclusions that
have targeted Asian and Japanese Americans. But while
attempting to demonstrate the normalcy of racial targeting

since at least the nineteenth century, critics also make use

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of a narrative of aberration(s): the internment was caused by
the racist actions of individual actors and not necessarily
by a system of law or any other factors. In the documentary
Of Civil Wrongs and Rights, Rita Takahashi maintains that
Pearl Harbor and the events that immediately followed the
attack gave the "perfect opportunity of getting rid of people
of Japanese ancestry” (Of Civil); in close proximity to
Takahashi’s comment, Peter Irons deems the Hirabayashi and
Korematsu cases as moments where ”every branch of government
failed," especially in terms of withholding evidence during
oral arguments before the Supreme Court (Of Civil). And in
what is perhaps the earliest legal article on internment,
Eugene Rostow claims internment was ”calculated to produce
both individual injustice and deep-seated social
maladjustments of a cumulative and sinister kind" which were
mere reiterations of ”familiar west Coast attitudes” (Rostow
489, 496). This general strategy of placing the special
aberration within the more ”broad historical causes" of ”race
prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political
leadership" places the decision on the exception on the
shoulders of individual (or corporate actors) who have since
fallen from the good graces of color-blind governance
(Commission 459). Effectively, this moral condemnation
reasserts white privilege in relief: marking those (white)
historical actors who failed at extending equal protection to
non-whites.

In this section, I will discuss the question of

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reparations for internment, especially in relation to the
narratives of aberration and lapsed moral characters;
likewise, I will examine Fred Korematsu’s coram nobis case
and the Hohri lawsuit against the United States government.
Here, the main purpose is to both expose the limits of legal
discourse as it relates to racial justice and formulate
alternative ways to mobilize Asian American Studies in the
service of liberation. Essentially, the twenty thousand
dollars and the apology issued to Japanese Americans and
authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1988 was surely
”symbolic,” as Natsu Taylor Saito points out, yet what allows
scholars and critics to judge reparations as ”something that
counts" or a “going out of one’s way . . . to apologize"
(Saito 2; Waldron 7)? The ”ways" or paths taken by the
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
(CWRIC) and others reveals a concerted effort to glide atop
the racial state through narratives of misdirection. As a
result, the question (and fact) of reparations (and the
challenges to the mainstream reparations movement) allows us
to comprehend how American law can only accommodate its own
wrongdoing to the point that it senses a disruption—-a
”balancing” that would insure, legally and economically,
racial equality--which threatens the enforced immunity of the
sovereign.

Published in 1982 by the Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), Personal

Justice Denied serves as the U.S. government’s official

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evaluation of the events surrounding evacuation and
internment. While astonishing in the sense that it formally
acknowledges the government’s and military’s racial targeting
of Japanese Americans, the text also maneuvers its analysis
so that internment becomes a racist articulation of a bygone
era--effectively evacuating any critique of institutional
structures that aid and abet the racial ends of the state. In
the section entitled ”The Conditions Which Permitted the
Detention," the CWRIC claims that there was no military
necessity for internment, and General John J. DeWitt’s Elflél
Report, a document detailing both the justifications for and
logistics of internment, heads a chain of texts and events in
which government figures fail to point out or question
DeWitt’s racist motivations. While the military necessity leg
of both the Hirabayashi and Korematsu decisions were based on
DeWitt’s Final Report, Personal Justice Denied attempts to
divorce the larger problem of racial subordination from
internment, blaming a whole host of characters for a number
of reasons: prosecutors ignoring FBI and Naval intelligence
that rebutted DeWitt’s concern with potential espionage,
Congress’ silence, Franklin Roosevelt’s failure to “pursue
cabinet-level discussions" concerning his executive orders,
etc. (Commission 8-9). In this particular case, "hindsight"
has become a legitimate strategy for understanding historical
events, but in a narrowly tailored sense: the "event" is only
made up of decisions, and those decisions (along with their

effects)--premised on ”race prejudice"--form the proper

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grounds for developing suitable suggestions for reparations.
Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the CWRIC’s
report is the nonchalant nature in which it announces the
death of the Kerematsu and Hirabayshi decisions. The ”rigid
scrutiny" standard established in Kerematsu has proven
helpful, according to the Commission; the decision is
"isolated in law" and remains the only case where an
invidious racial discrimination was approved by the Supreme
Court (239). Likewise, the cases have ”never been followed"
by other courts (239). The Commission contends that Kerematsu
has been ”overruled in the court of history," and in the same
breath mentions that it is a ”curiosity, not a precedent"
(238, 239). Reggie Oh and Frank Wu note that Kbrematsu has
been cited ”as an authority more than fifty times" from 1945
to 1995: ”Typically, the reference was literally a single
sentence, so that it stood as legal authority barren of
substantive analysis" (170). If, as the Commission contends,
each part of Kerematsu ”has been discredited or abandoned,"
it is extremely curious how the case has been considered
authoritative enough to be used without analysis or comment.

Kerematsu remains ”controlling case law" and an ”integral

anomaly in constitutional law" (167, 173).6 The Commission

 

5 See also Scott Michaelsen’s and Scott Shershow’s “Practical
Politics and the ’Coming Community’: The Cases of Affirmative Action and
Welfare." The authors suggest that the appearance of Korematsu and
Hirabayashi in affirmative action cases, most notably in Regents of the
University of California v. Bakke (438 U.S. 265 (1978), develops a
coherent political strategy that rests on the logic of these internment
cases: ”Affirmative action can only proceed so long as it does not
disturb white privilege, while at the same time the Constitutional
protection of raceless citizenship extends also only to the point where

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claims that the Duncan v. Kahanamoku decision overruled
KOrematsu, making it ”adamantly clear that the principles and
practices of American government are permeated by the belief

that loyal citizens in loyal territory are to be governed by
civil rather than military authority" (238).7 Since Duncan

refers to the imposition of martial law in Hawai’i during
World War II--along with the suspension of habeas corpus and
the establishment of military tribunals-—the fit of this
statement isn’t quite right; what the Commission refuses to
see is that because martial law was never declared within the
United States, Kerematsu and Hirabayashi represent moments
where the racial state can impose martial law without
declaring it. Alternately: at any moment and in any (racial)
decision, the ”martial" resides within civil society and not
apart from it. This constant threat of racial war is
precisely the promise and continuing effect of the Kbrematsu
and Hirabayashi decisions. The Commission, in leading up to
their recommendations for restitution, maintain that ”history
cannot be undone" because there cannot be ”an accounting
which would balance or erase the events of the war" since
this would be ”beyond anyone’s power” (469). The ”symbolism,"
then, of reparations is grounded on the prevention of an
”accounting” which would realize any form of racial balancing
or justice; the optimism surrounding the supposed diminishing
influence/returns from the Kerematsu and Hirabayashi

decisions, then, is the most the government can do. As such,

 

white privilege senses its disturbance" (16, emphasis in original).
7 327 U.S. 304 (1946).

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congressional, executive, and especially judicial powers will
never undo their histories--like overturning the Supreme

Court’s decisions, for example--but only acknowledge them and
promise to behave better.8

The expectation of this kind of "solution"--the answer
where the government only obliquely answers to minority
demands--seems to have governed the general strategy of
pursuing reparations through Congress. While the National
Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR) supported the
”overturning of the legal basis that justified the evacuation
of the camps," the coalition also joined with the Japanese
American Citizen’s League (JACL) and Japanese American
legislators in supporting the Commission’s formation instead
of “merely" introducing a bill for reparations (Maki, et.al.
90); overturning Kerematsu and Hirabayashi were jettisoned
from the planning for reparations. This strategy was,

according to Harry H.L. Kitano and Mitchell Maki,

 

8 In "Superseding Historical Injustice," Jeremy Waldron
essentially comes to the same conclusions. In terms of philosophical
ethics, any "history of injustice" needs to be “studied and condemned,
remembered and lamented” (4). Reparations, then, are ways to ”apologize"
in order to provide a ”clear public recognition" of the injustice (7).
The problem of actual reparations--the figuring of recompense--becomes
the problem for Waldron when he asks, is it “possible to rectify
particular injustices without comprehensive redistribution" (13)?
Answering in the negative, he argues that this would be ”costly and
disruptive" because we "can only affect people’s lives in the future"
(16, 7). Any accounting must take account of the white privilege built
atop injustice and suffering, mostly in terms of property. Because
people may have ”organized their lives around" such privileges,
disturbing them would prove, according to Waldron, to be yet another
injustice (16). The ”future,” as a result, can only accommodate the
maintenance of racial hierarchy, creating a trickle—down form of justice
that reinscribes an original injustice in order to prevent the
liquidation of historical advantage.

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”essentially a ’hedged bet’ for the legislators,” who proved
to be the linchpin in the quest for reparations (86).
Kitano’s and Maki’s ”proper alignment model," explained in
the book Achisving the Im ssible Dream, was developed in
response to Representative Norm Mineta’s comment that for
redress to pass, the "planets" would need to move into their
proper alignment (17). The plan, which attempts to explain
the ”specific streams of influence [that] need to be properly
aligned for certain types of federal laws to be passed,” does
more than just demystify the political process for groups
interested in pursuing reparations, it also--despite the best
wishes of Kitano and Maki--reveals the difficulty of
obtaining recompense for (racial) damages (17). Despite all
the anxieties about how to obtain redress—-or perhaps because
of it--the JACL and Mike Masaoka, their main representative
at the hearings and former league president, maintained what
some have called a ”superpatriot" stance (Eric Yamamoto,
450). Testifying that Japanese Americans, particularly those
who served in the U.S. Army, demonstrated a willingness to
not perpetuate the ”very mannerisms and thoughts which mark
us apart,” Masaoka and the JACL exhibit an astute
understanding of race politics: because we will always have a
”racial uniform," the only option is to stress how Japanese

Americans supported America despite the internment (Maki, et.

al. 94).9 According to Chris K. Iijima, the Commission’s

 

9 This quote from Masaoka comes from the days of internment. I use
it only to show the consistency in the JACL’s stance toward internment.
Maki, Kitano, and Berthold mention how, during 1980 hearings to

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arguments for reparations proved that the ”kind of patriotism
that does not resist injustice gets rewarded” (395).
The evidence used to produce the CWRIC’s report formed

the groundwork for the coram nobis cases filed by Fred
Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui in 1983.310 All

of the coram nobis cases rested on the finding contained in
Personal Justice Denied that the Supreme Court, in their
original deliberations, were deceived by a deliberate
withholding of evidence--evidence which would possibly prove
that there was no military necessity for the evacuation and
internment. General DeWitt’s original and revised editions of
Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the west Coast 194;
are the key documents in this finding, and the Supreme Court
only saw the following passage from the revised edition,
which follows a description of Japanese Americans as a
”tightly-knit racial group":

While it was believed that some were loyal, it was

known that many were not. To complicate the

 

determine the possibility of reparations, Masaoka professed his faith in
America and the commission to develop the ”best remedy" that was “not
just in the interest of the evacuees, but in the national interest of
the United States" (94).

10 Coram nobis refers to a writ or error in which the ”court can
correct errors in criminal convictions where other remedies are not
available” (584 F. Supp 1406, 1411); in order to petition for a writ of
coram nobis, a person must have served their full criminal sentence and
prove that “other relief is wanting" (584 F. Supp 1406, 1411). Minoru
Yasui’s case (320 U.S. 117 (1943)) was decided by the Supreme Court on
the same day as Hirabayashi. In the District Court’s consideration of
Yasui, the curfew order was declared unconstitutional when applied to
American citizens. The Supreme Court cited its own decision in
Hirabayashi to determine that citizenship status, as it applied to
Japanese Americans, did not matter; instead, the curfew order’s
constitutionality was the narrow ground on which the Court rested its
judgement.

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situation no ready means existed for determining
the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of
safety. It was necessary to face the reality--a
positive determination could not have been made.
(Department 9)
In Hirabayashi, the Court contends that they could not
“reject as unfounded the judgement of the military
authorities and of Congress that there were disloyal members
of that population whose number and strength could not be
precisely and quickly ascertained" (320 U.S. 81, 99). As a
result, the timing of military necessity--the pressing
obligations of time during war--can escape judicial review.
The original version of the report, which DeWitt was
persuaded to revise, read:
It was impossible to establish the identity of the
loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety.
It was not that there was insufficient time in
which to make such a determination; it was simply a
matter of facing the realities that a positive
determination could not be made, that an exact

separation of the "sheep from the goats" was

unfeasible (Bannai and Minami 777).11

 

11 Peter Iron’s Justice at War documents this “persuasion." Edward
Ennis of the Justice Department and John J. McCloy, the Assistant
Secretary of War, worried that DeWitt’s original report, according to
Irons, ”smacked of racism" (208). Compounding the problem, Ennis tracked
down the author of ”The Japanese in America, the Problem and the
Solution," which appeared in the October 1942 issue of Harpers Magazine.
The author, Lt. Commander Kenneth D. Ringle of the Office of Naval
Intelligence, contended that the “Japanese problem" was taken out of its
proper context, and loyalty should be determined on the “basis of the

128

DeWitt’s claim that race makes any determination of loyalty
”impossible,” then, exposes the racial motivations behind
internment; time, for DeWitt, was never a concern. The coram
nobis lawyers used this (suppression of) evidence as the
basis for their suits.

Because the CWRIC’s report exposed the problematic
nature of the government’s and military’s arguments for
military necessity, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel granted Fred
Korematsu’s writ of coram nobis since the Supreme Court ”had
before it a selective record" (584 F. Supp. 1406, 1419).
Patel’s decision is perhaps the most interesting of all the
coram nobis rulings, mainly because she cautiously notes the
uncertainty of whether a ”different decision" would have
emerged given a full, honest presentation of the evidence;
the failure of the government in fulfilling their ”ethical
obligations" is cause enough vacate Korematsu’s conviction
(1419). Since a writ of coram nobis can only ”correct errors
of fact," Patel also warns that the Kbrematsu decision
”stands as the law of this case and for whatever precedential
value it may still have" even though it now has “very limited
application" (1420). Given Kerematsu’s standing as
controlling case law, however, Patel’s broad agreement with
the CWRIC’s contentions about the case lapses into the same

logic as the Commission’s report: petty, personal racisms can

 

individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis" (qtd.
in Irons 203, emphasis in original). Ennis declared that if the Supreme
Court were not made aware of the ”Ringle Report," the action "might
approximate the suppression of evidence" (qtd. in Irons, 204). As a
result, Dewitt’s report was revised to stress the time constraints the
military faced.

129

lead to grave injustices in the name of the federal
government. Her opinion ends with a call to all ”legislative,
executive, and judicial” branches be prepared, ”in times of
international hostility," to “exercise their authority to
protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that
are so easily aroused" (1420). The strict separation between
institutions and ”petty fears and prejudices" assumes that,
given the ”correct" evidence, the judiciary would always
counter those who are unthinking and generally undemocratic.
At the root of the problem, however, is that the certain
improbability of overturning the internment cases--given
their use value for subsequent courts, especially in terms of
racial policy--is submerged in Patel’s decision, leaving
Korematsu with, basically, the only option available under
color-blind law: arguing for the ”citizen" that has been
wronged. And Donald K. Tamaki’s contention that Korematsu’s
coram nobis case was the ”trial that Japanese Americans had,”
sadly, rings hollow: the individual case stands no chance in
the face of precedent and racial practice (Of Civil).

The NCJAR’s twenty-seven billion dollar class—action
lawsuit against the U.S. government was the only viable
alternative to the congressionally sanctioned reparations
recommended by the CWRIC, but the admissible grounds for

suing the U.S. was limited to one cause of action: the

”Takings Clause" of the Fifth Amendment.”iIn the lawsuit, the

 

12 The “Takings Clause" of the Fifth Amendment consists of the
following: “nor shall private property be taken for public use without
just compensation.”

130

NCJAR lists twenty two causes of action, which served as the
"distillate of the dozens of allegations" resulting from
evacuation and internment (Hohri 200). Ranging from
violations of the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable arrest,
search, and seizure) to the Eighth Amendment (cruel and
unusual punishment) to the Fourteenth Amendment (due
process), the NCJAR’s suit was decided to be admissible only
on the grounds of the Takings Clause because of the ”alleged
damage to appellants’ real and personal property" (251 U.S.

App. D.C. 145, 242); for all other causes, sovereign immunity
prevented the U.S. from being sued.13 In terms of sovereign

immunity, individuals only have standing to bring a complaint
against the U.S. when the "state permit[s] avenues of redress
to operate . . . [but the] state [must grant] to the
individual prior permission or the right of access to these
procedures" (Horowitz 12). This “prior permission" is
contained within the Federal Tort Claims Act, passed in 1946,
but only in regards to the actions of ”officers or employees
of the United States, members of the National Guard while
engaged in training or duty. . . and persons acting on behalf

of a federal agency in an official capacity” (28 U.S.C. 2671

 

13 Sovereign immunity, or the right of the sovereign to be free of
legal challenge, may be waived if a suit meets the requirements of the
Tucker Act (28 U.S.C. 1491), the Little Tucker Act (28 U.S.C. 1346), or
the Federal Torts Claims Act (28 U.S.C. 2671-2680). Because the focus of
this chapter is on the effects of the law in relation to the racial
state’s maintenance by the sovereign/white polity, I will not discuss
the issue of torts; rather, the issue of remedy for governmental
transgression is central to my analysis--with a focus on the
government’s (lack of) ability to make restitution to racially targeted
groups.

131

(1)). The effect of clearly delimiting parties to a suit (as
opposed to suing the state in fact and name)-—individuals and
representatives-—magnifies a central problem that emerges
with sovereign immunity: there is no judicial recourse
available to question the state’s policies—-only the recourse
of claiming injury based upon a government representative’s
actions.

Though the Tucker Act and the Little Tucker Act both
allow for civil actions ”not exceeding $10,000 in amount,
founded either upon the Constitution or any Act of Congress,”
the Federal Tort Claims Act makes clear that the United
States "shall be entitled to assert any defense based upon
judicial or legislative immunity" (28 U.S.C. 1246 (a) (2), 28
U.S.C. 2674). The judicial and legislative branches may claim
immunity from prosecution as they see fit, and their
”products" (decisions, public laws, etc.), when utilized by
an employee or representative of the state, may be
unquestionable if the government chooses to make it so. Given
the limitations placed upon the NCJAR’s lawsuit and the
Supreme Court’s denial of the NCJAR’s final writ of
certiorari, it is clear that the passage of time has not
revised the most fundamental theoretical understanding of
sovereign immunity from Oliver wendell Holmes’ opinion in
Kawananakoa v. Polyblank: ”A sovereign is exempt from suit,
not because of any formal conception or obsolete theory, but
on the logical and practical ground that there can be no

legal right against the authority that makes the law on which

132

the right depends" (105 U.S. 349, 353)..14 The pertinent lesson

of the NCJAR’s lawsuit, perhaps, is that sovereignty is self-
generating, producing its own right to rule based upon its
ability to both establish the law and serve as the authority
that insures the functioning of the law. Possibly opting for
the CWRIC’s suggested avenue of reparations instead of ruling
on the NCJAR's class action lawsuit (as Leslie Hatamiya
argues), the Supreme Court was also a signatory to the
ultimate (and most harrowing) result of government-sponsored
reparations: the requirement that reparations would only be
paid out to living persons prevented Japanese American

reparations ”from becoming precedent for other groups with
long-standing histories of oppression" (Maki, et. al. 240).15

The ultimate goal of the NCJAR's lawsuit--re-signing the
Constitution, or changing the meaning of the law as it
relates to Japanese Americans--was handed its ultimate defeat
by questioning the foundations of the racial state, yet legal
scholars have attempted to develop alternative strategies in
order to realize justice in the future. Curiously, Japanese
Americans were left with one option in the NCJAR case: using

the property system as a way to levy a claim of personal and

 

14 The history of the NCJAR’s lawsuit is marked by judicial
concerns over appropriate jurisdiction and “tolling" or extending the
statute of limitations. Deliberations mainly took place in the United
States District Court for the District of Columbia and the United States
Court of Appeals for the Second Federal Circuit. The final appeal (and
denial of certiorari) is the following: Hohri, et. al. v. U.S. (488 U.S.
925 (1988)).

15 Hatamiya reads the Supreme Court’s denial of Hohri’s write of
certiorari as ”implying that Congress had resolved the matter" (177).

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class injustice against the immunity of the sovereign. As
Cheryl I. Harris lucidly argues, “property," amid the ”deep
historical roots of systematic white supremacy," ”has given
rise to definitions of group identity predicated on the
racial subordination of the ’other’" (1785). Since property
as such never escapes social inequities--indeed it serves as
the foundation of whiteness-—strategies for legally
challenging the state that are not predicated upon
rebuttressing white supremacy via individual ownership
arguments must be developed.

Asian American critical race studies scholars have
attempted to develop alternative legal strategies, yet most
plans fall short of fully confronting white supremacy. Eric
Yamamoto argues that the only reason reparations were
eventually paid out was because Japanese Americans ”were able
to fit their claims tightly within . . . the individual
rights paradigm," which made the eventual payment a
”finality” (E. Yamamoto 490). Yamamoto locates a special
obligation that Japanese Americans have towards other
minorities: ”now and tomorrow press for racial, immigrant,
gender, class and sexual orientation justice in the United
States" (501). This would effectively lead to a ”dual
strategy" for reparations in which the ”bite-sized legal
claims" would be complemented by another strategy that
”recognizes the distortions of narrow legal framing" so that
”law and court process--regardless of formal legal outcome--

[would generate] . . . ’cultural performances’ . . . for

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providing outsiders an institutional public forum" (492).
This strategy of using cultural performances to address ”root
problems of misuse of power" will heal ”social wounds" and
the ”breach in the polity” that has given rise to the "social
disease" of racism and discrimination (522). The dynamic of
redressing historical wrongs committed by a group assumes a
simple cause and effect relationship, where specific actions
create racial problems in the present. Given the given-ness
of the racial polity, the American polity has already been
”breached" by a larger social and institutional structuring;
as a result, addressing the ”misuse of power" never fully
approaches the problem of how power is vested over time,
thereby limiting a possible justice that would either
redistribute such a power or, more explicitly, eradicate the
white privilege that is encoded in American law.

Natsu Taylor Saito, akin to Yamamoto, acknowledges that
Japanese American ”legal scholars and activists have a
responsibility to ensure that the redress provided furthers
the struggle for equality and justice in this country” (2).
Saito notes the current post-9/11 targeting of Arab Americans
by the U.S. government in order to give urgency to her
ultimate suggestion: ”institutionalize the changes implicit
in the granting of reparations” (28). The only description of
these possible changes comes when Saito refers back to Eugene
V. Rostow’s “The Japanese American Cases--A Disaster" where
he maintains that there are three forms of reparations: the

federal government must ”protect the civil rights of Japanese

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Americans against organized and unorganized hooliganism,"
”generous financial" indemnities must be paid for “heavy
property losses," and the ”basic issues" must be re-presented
to the Supreme Court “in an effort to obtain a reversal of
these war-time cases" (Saito 28, Rostow 534). It is unclear
how the second proposition, unless formalized by law and
legal measure, would help to solve the problems of racial
targeting except as a deterrent; and the first suggestion
lacks clear definition, sapping Saito’s and Rostow’s
critiques of their analytical power. Certainly, the
overturning of the Hirabayashi, Kerematsu, and Yasui Supreme
Court decisions would help to remove the foundation of racial
suspicion at the basis of the federal government’s treatment
of minorities, but Saito offers no vision of what comes
beyond these possible reversals.

If we are to realize the other side of Gotanda’s call to
analyze how "racially governed conditions take place," it
surely must involve an ability to commit to "long-run,
cumulative context change" that attempts to avoid
"ideological co-optation"--the only option available to
Japanese Americans through reparations (Unger, Fslss_306).
Roberto Unger suggests that "experimentalism" is the "most
defensible part of American exceptionalism," yet--and this
particularly relates to problems of sovereign immunity--
American government has consistently barred the
"institutional structure of the country against effective

challenge" (What 29). As is evident in the Hirabayashi and

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KOrematsu decisions, the judiciary eventually barred all
challenges to military policy based on a Court-granted
plenary power; if the decisions were to be reversed, we would
still be left with the Kerematsu that appears as precedent in
decisions which, presently, narrow the opportunities and
resources available to minorities. To counter this problem,
Unger provocatively suggests "institutional reimagination and
reconstruction" whereby the "foundations of the world" can be
put on the "agenda" in order to "create the future society
within the present one" (figs; 33, Fslss 134, 449). Rather
than "righting a wrong" or "realizing" justice, legal studies
must attempt to move beyond a context where abuses of power
serve as the largest concern, which deflect attention from
the ways that law allows such abuses to come into being.
Knowing what this "experimentalism” might result in is
impossible, but its inclusion in a movement towards justice
would allow for "free decisions" and not decisions that are
merely the "programmable application or unfolding of a
calculable process" (Derrida, "Force" 24). Derrida continues
in this vein, calling for "reinstituting act[s] of
interpretation" for each singular "case," since justice is
"owed to the other, before any contract," and this ”owing"
would be capable of addressing the foundations of the racial
state-—which participates in a perpetual state of war against
minorities--so that future calculations of the law could
dismantle the law’s racialisms to realize equality (25). In

this way, reparations and apologies for internment would

137

escape the "service of a finality" that "aims to re-establish
a normality" or normal, color-blind relations (Derrida, pp
31-2). Forgiveness, in the future tense, would exist apart
from the "sovereign power" which presupposes it: apologies
and forgiveness would then be "without power"--the power to
broker and negotiate power’s immunities from prosecution
(Derrida, “On” 59).
Literarv Challengss

Despite the nagging problems Japanese America has faced
in terms of confronting the sovereign powers of the state,
critics often partition Japanese literature into two camps:
before and after internment. Before internment, it is argued,
the general mood was one of ”hope and optimism” for
integration and, possibly, citizenship status (Inada x).
Further, San-Ling Cynthia Wong contends that Japanese
American literature exhibits an ”at-homeness" in America that
is the ”product of a narrow window of confidence in Japanese
American history when full participation in American society
seemed within reach” (Reading 74). These types of analyses,
as a result, reify the literature in a manner similar to the
“aberration" school that reifies internment: werld War II
serves as the cataclysm that reveals the duplicity of
American law—-but not because of its foundation in racial
rule. In this section, I will examine two short stories and
one novel in an attempt to demonstrate a continuity of
thought across internment; Japanese American authors before,

during, and after internment puzzled over the mechanisms of

138

racial (and intraethnic) exclusion(s) and developed
alternative strategies for understanding the exception-a1
place of Japanese Americans in the racial polity. From Toshio
Mori’s concerns about the ”suffering" that constitutes
qualified social and political inclusion to Hisaye Yamamoto’s
portrayal of psychosis within an internment camp, the
”madness" that the racial state produces is seen as both a
condition of inclusion and a paralyzed social status. In the
end, I examine John Okada’s No-No Boy to demonstrate how the
renewable architecture of the state can be confronted between
its structures; Japanese American literature, in this vein,
argues for the ”growth" of America via the promise of as yet
imperceptible forms of organization that avoid the strict
structuring of inclusion through citizenship.

In his 1935 short story “The Chauvinist," Toshio Mori
presents us with a protagonist, Takanoshin Sakoda, who
decides to become deaf to effectively isolate himself from
his ”people" (23). In effect, the purpose of the short story
is to reveal how deafness becomes the “great calling" for
Japanese America, a calling that demands ”dignity,
humbleness, humor, and the limits of hwman traits" in order
to produce a ”harmony of human beings" (17). Sakoda, however,
still speaks, but it is only to himself; his silent speech is
described as a ”swirling river seeking an ocean outlet” (18).
The chauvinist’s voluntary removal from the social sphere
runs parallel to the narration of the story which shuttles

between third person and first; this strategy reveals that

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the “harmony” to come will consist of an ability to ”pity"
each other ”for the sake . . . [of] our roles" and not
because of our ”characters," or possessed identities that
exist in a state of removal from the social (22). These
“roles" as subservient actors prove to be the largest problem
facing segregated Japanese Americans, and the “character" of
present-day social relations exposes the glossed-over
position of racial exclusion. Sakoda refers to this social
positioning as a “new sufferage," a neologism that marks the
"suffering" that accompanies the franchise of middle—class
inclusion (18); it is in this sense-~the inclusion that can
only be premised on exclusion--that the new sufferage invests
in ”power (now) and beauty (in the future)” (18). The
deferral of ”harmony" now is accomplished through power
(grabbing).

This vying for power appears in the story through the
married Japanese American couples that comment on Sakoda’s
status as included outsider--present at the women’s functions
at his family’s home but removed from conversation and
interaction. The power to socially define the “character"--of
anyone--is indicative of a world that is "out of order" (Mori
19). Mrs. Tariki, a friend of Mrs. Sakoda, exhibits this
desire, declaring during a function that "It’s time to put
everyone in their place. It's about time someone definitely
define the activity of Takanoshin" (19). Alternately
described as ”lazy" and shameful, Takanoshin responds to this

desire from the ”outside" to locate and describe him by

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claiming that his ”ears are out of order" and that, actually,
the ”system of civilization," ”the people," and "the world”
are as well (19). This disorderliness, in terms of Sakoda’s
deafness, is one of choice, but the question of
”civilization" proves to be the larger problem since social
disorders rely upon social/racial enforcement. The ”choice"
of becoming deaf, for Sakoda, is not an abdication because he
still lives within and interacts with society, but on limited
terms; on the other hand, civilization creates racial and
gendered ”roles" which demand predictability and systematic
articulation. Not quite citizens enmeshed within the ”life"
of America, the intraethnic spite of Mrs. Tariki is
emblematic Sakoda’s desire to become deaf in order to
“survive the living" who curiously demand a regimentation of
social life (19).

But other modes of survival exist as well, and the
narrator imagines the husbands coming to pick their wives up,
talking about ”business and fishing and club activities"
(20); the tedious nature of the husbands’ conversations--
written as a quick shuttling between statements about
subjects like house painting and car maintenance, only to be
followed by curt responses--demonstrate the transactional
nature of aspiring middle-class relationships that Sakoda is
attempting to escape. These relations are ”dead," avoiding
the talk of “death (slow death)” and the “death in our life"
that is postponed by finding meaning in relationships through

an individual accounting of events and accomplishments (21).

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The death-in-life that the chauvinist points out is
indicative of the ”simplicity of each generation" that
assumes that ”sleep is a period between sunset and sunrise”
(21). Yet sleep is the ”time of man" characterized by
”helplessness" (21). And sleeping avoids the recognition of
our shared fate by producing the illusion of change over time
despite the sameness of exclusion being carried over from day
to day.

Opposed to this somnambulance, Sakoda expresses his
desire for conversation and the ability to “tell all the
people what I know and how little I know” (22). This would
allow him to escape present-day reality, which is only the
”nightmare of a dream reversed," and enter into a social
world where dreams serve as "reality in hope" (24). These
dreams of ”conversation"--where ”hope" can be communicated--
are also ”productions," but of a different quality: the
shared relation between our “selves" is, at present, produced
via social and legal restrictions, but hope allows one to
reenvision these relations on a different ground. In
contradistinction to the “government," the “church," and the
”friends" that ”care” about us, existence in common apart
from regulation--and ”definitely defin[ing]”—-becomes the
only hope for Japanese America (24). The intraethnic tension
that replicates greater social/racial exclusions is
productive of suffering that results from suffrage and
qualified inclusion. As such, an alternative reality, one

that resides ”in hope," provides Japanese America a way to

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question the foundations and ”nightmare” of pre-internment
exclusion.

In contrast to the ”chauvinist’s" strategy of refusing
to produce a more legitimate subjectivity within subjection
(to realize a different future), Hisaye Yamamoto’s
protagonist in 1950 short story “The Legend of Miss
Sasagawara" presents us with a failed attempt at accepting
the terms and conditions of exclusion. Alternately
interpreted as either a reflection of Japanese American
"cultural beliefs" that promote intra-group misogyny or as an
exploration of “domestic"lhome-bound repression amid cultural
and national stigmatization, Miss Sasagawara’s plight can
also illuminate the impossibilities of freedom within the
concentration camp that are produced apart from (and in
contradistinction to) U.S. citizenship (Yogi, “Legacies" 169;
Cheung 109). The ”nightmare" of being in an internment camp
is also the ”troublous, scented scene" and the ”madness" of
two—tiered citizenship (Yamamoto 33); and the “cleansing" of
Japanese American subjectivity, a la Masaoka, in order to
realize the full franchise of citizenship becomes an attempt
to cover over the “imperceptible blemishes" of a democratic
republic that can only emerge through military/militant
necessity (33).

The story begins as Kiku, the narrator, discusses the
arrival of and gossip surrounding Mari Sasagawara’s arrival
with her father, a recent widower, at an Arizona internment

camp; we learn that Kiku, and the whole camp, is preoccupied

143

with developing an understanding of Mari and her strange
behavior, but only apart from an analysis of how exclusion
forms and promulgates her abject and ”suspect" identity.
Elsie, Kiku’s best friend, reports that Mari is ”really
temperamental," but then undercuts her own authority by
claiming that ”I guess it’s because she was a ballet dancer
before she got stuck in camp, I hear people like that are
temperamental" (H. Yamamoto 20-21). Hearing about ”people
like that," Elsie enacts a logic analogous to internment:
that racial suspicion/gossip necessarily leads to
presumed/lived guilt. This inability to confront the racial
conditions that led to internment surfaces shortly after.
Kiku and Elsie are firmly focused on the future, as is
apparent in the following:
But we ended up as we always did, agreeing that our
mission in life, pushing twenty as we were, was to
first finish college somewhere when and if the war
ever ended and we were free again, and then to find
good jobs, and two nice, clean young men,
preferably handsome, preferably rich, who would
cherish us forever and a day. (21, emphasis added)
Both women relegate the uncertain future--if and when freedom
can be realized again--to a mere assumption of business as
usual, and locate the present tense effectively in the past;
put another way, the racial state will eventually disappear,
giving way to a normal, gendered life where marriage and

”cherish[ing]" (of the unracialized self) will emerge as the

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norm of Japanese American life. The thought of opportunity,
here, strongly implies full inclusion, and internment is just
a stop along the way towards a citizenship without
qualifications.

In contrast to this sleight of hand, the figure of Mari
Sasagawara serves as the locus of a doubled exclusion: not
only in terms of being a racial enemy of the state, but also
because she is separate from the ”communal” nature of camp
life that attempts to ”create some semblance of normalcy”
while interned (Cheung 115). We learn that Mari exhibits
what’s assumed to be anti-social behavior in camp; for
example, she throws water at Mr. Sasaki, who wants to help
her clean her living quarters in the barracks, and she
attempts to escape the camp hospital because of the “doctors
pawing her" (H. Yamamoto 21, 26). In terms of the former
event, Miss Sasagawara suspects Mr. Sasaki of being a "spy,"
sent to monitor the cleanliness of her stall. Coupled with
the hospital scene, it is evident that Mari is hostile to
those social and institutional actions that attempt to
”pretty up" or naturalize oppression (especially
”unquestionable [misogynist] authority" of the medical
profession) (Cheung 112)

This polishing of the not-quite citizen, however, is
partially realized, much to Mari's chagrin. After exhibiting
”questionable" behavior involving teenage boys, which will be
discussed below, Mari is sent to a sanitarium, only to return

to camp as a "friendly being" (28). Part of her reintegration

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into camp life is a ballet class which she teaches for the
camp’s younger girls. At the ”Block Christmas party," the
girls’ ballet performance proves to be ”all elbows and
knees," and Kiku claims that Mari’s teaching achievement “had
been undeniably small” (29). In the background, however, the
crowd hears a ”feeble rasp" of a ”Mozart minuet" from the
phonograph, revealing that “[s]omething was past its prime"
(29). What’s ”past it’s prim " turns out to be two-fold:
Mari’s supposed mobility before internment and the “dance" of
racial ”etiquette? which Japanese Americans must submit to.
Elsie learns that Mari is thirty-nine years old, that she’s
never been married, and that she "got to go all over the
country a couple of times, dancing in the ballet" (21). Pre-
internment, Mari’s performances allowed for travel, while at
camp, the only travel involved is the short trip between the
identification of Japanese Americans and the concomitant
incarceration due to the identification. This racial
”performance"--well-scripted--annuls Mari’s previous
“freedom,” for travel was the condition of a racialized
performance marked by the lyrics to the minuet that Kiku
remembers: ”When dames wore hoops and powdered hair,/And very
strict was e-ti-quette,/When men were brave and ladies
fair,/They danced the min—u—et. . . . " (29). The lyrics’
appeal to a bygone era, an era where dancing was predicated
on a racial and gendered order-ing in order for the dance to
occur (for Mari), bear repeating because an analogous

situation still exists; Mari’s questionable behavior reflects

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an existence determined by a foregrounded, perpetual marriage
to the nation-state that demands internment’s restricted
existence within the camp. Her frustration at the ”pawing”
hands of social and legal exclusion reveals what Schmitt
argues is the sovereign’s main role: ”determining
definitively what constitutes public order and security, in
determining then they are disturbed, and so on" (Schmitt 9).
The “friendly being" demanded by those in camp--and enforced
by occasional trips to the sanatarium--is ordered into being
both by the camp’s inhabitants and the sovereign; the ”public
order" of the outside is perpetuated internally--within the
ethnic group, inside the barbed wire--and such an order
demands acquiescence.

The danger of Miss Sasagawara's behavior stems from her
interest in the teenage boys within the camp. After her
initial trip to the sanitarium, Kiku learns from Elsie that
Miss Sasagawara has ”gone away again" because the camp
inhabitants are puzzled by her apparent infatuation with
younger men. While wearing a ”beatific expression" and
bending her head ”to one side," Mari stares at a group of
young men engaged in ”joking and loud laughter" (H. Yamamoto
31). Mrs. Sasaki quickly admonishes Mari for staring at the
group because she’s ”’old enough to be their mother!’" and
Mari, ”with all her strength," strikes the walls of Mrs.
Sasaki’s adjacent stall with ”something heavy like a hammer"
(31). At another point, Mari is caught staring at Joe

Yoshinaga while he sleeps; ”long hair all undone and flowing

147

about her," Kiku tells us that ”all she was doing was sitting
there watching him” (31). Afterwards, Mrs. Yoshinaga speaks
with the Reverend Sasagawara, who promises to speak with
Mari. The cryptic nature of these events leads Kiku, now in
college in Philadelphia, to speculate that Mari ”had no doubt
looked upon Joe Yoshinaga as the image of the lost lover or
the lost son” (32). Immediately, Kiku catches herself,
claiming that this explanation makes her ”uneasy" because of
its ”glibness," and she begins to ”wonder seriously about
Miss Sasagawara” (32). From this, Kiku suspects that Mari’s
behavior is tied to the mistreatment she faces while living
with her father, a Buddhist minister who was ”deaf and blind
to the human passions rising" within the “selfsame room" that
he shared with Mari (32). Yet because this information comes
from one of Mari’s published poems, the autobiographical
interpretation is difficult to sustain, if not because the

home life of Mari and Rev. Sasagawara is never discussed in
the story.16

By combining a reading of Mari’s desire to look at the
young men and a teasing out of her poem’s analogy, I argue
that Yamamoto develops a larger critique of camp life. Mari

is, literally, paralyzed, placed into an internment camp

 

15 Cheung also assumes that Reverend Sasagawara demonstrates
”insensitivity to his daughter," but that we should “modify our
judgement" of him because it “parallels the government’s callousness
toward its own citizens (who make up two-thirds of the internees)"
(Cheung 119). But this parallel is “not clear-cut," and Cheung
effectively drops this possibly productive analogy that is crucial in
interpreting a story with so many loose ends and missing narrative
pieces.

148

where even those similarly racialized exclude her from
everyday activities. At the same time, the two “looking"
moments expose a fascination with laughing and sleeping, or
moments where behavior is least determined by the
circumstances meant to restrict it, what Agamben refers to as
”pure biological life without any.mediation" (41, emphasis in
original). Given Miss Sasagawara’s rejection of the un-civil
nature of the disciplinary institutions within the camp--from
the Sasaki family’s admonitions to the doctors’ “pawing" to
the rumors floating around to the institution of marriage--we
can assume that the ”gaiety" of camp life and the
normalization of social hierarchies ground both her desire to
observe this “unmediated” life as well as her distaste for
camp members’ attempts at embodying authority within the camp
itself. This much can be seen in her poem, where a man ”whose
lifelong aim had been to achieve Nirvana, that saintly state
of moral purity and universal wisdom" finally feels free
enough to do so after his wife dies (H. Yamamoto 32). With
all “unworthy desire and consequently all evil” extinguished,
the man commits himself to the ”highest” actions possible--
always in isolation (32-3). Mari continues her poem,
wondering how someone ”called to companion such a man" yet
did not want to ”achieve this sublime condition" would deal
with the man's ”deaf[ness] and blind[ness]" to the other
(33). She concludes that the ”man’s devotion" would be a
”monstrous sort [’of madness’]" and that such an experience

would be fuel for the companion's future nightmares. The man,

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much like the fellow camp inhabitants and the U.S. government
at large, attempts to assume certain forms of sovereignty
through the determination of an order, marking Miss
Sasagawara as the embodied zone of the exception within the
exception(al) camp. The doubled exclusion that Mari faces is
produced through ostracism--determined by a normalcy that
emerges from the normalization of social hierarchies within
the camp—-and the state’s "management of the biological life
of the nation" during a ”period of permanent [racial] crisis"
in order to protect the ”highest" form of democratic
governance apart from the camp (Agamben 43). The man’s desire
for purity disentangles itself from the relationship with the
Other, thereby refiguring those exclusions that form the very
core of internment in the first place, and white supremacy
becomes the pedagological program of camp life. We are left,
then, with a woman who becomes “suspicious,” and her future,
like the broken phonograph, can only be a ”feeble rasp” which
marks the "lethal machine" that is the nation (Agamben 43).

The fatal allure of the ”machine"/nation is explored by
John Okada in his 1957 novel No-No Boy. Whereas Miss
Sasagawara’s future is forever hemmed in by the machinations
of racial and intraethnic exclusion, Okada’s protagonist
Ichiro wanders through the Pacific Northwest and explores his
troubled--and possibly misplaced--faith in what America could
signify for Japanese Americans after internment. Ichiro is a
”no-no boy" who answered ”no" to both of the following

questions, which were part of the ”Loyalty Questionnaire"

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given to able-bodied Nisei males in the internment camps:
"Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United
States in combat duty wherever ordered?"; ”Will you swear
unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and
faithfully defend the United States from any or all attacks
of foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of

allegiance of obedience to the Japanese Emperor, to any other
foreign government, power, or organization?”17 While traces of

DeWitt’s formulation (races have previous, unalterable
allegiances to their nations regardless of immigration or
citizenship status) remain--especially in the second
question’s assumption of a previous allegiance to Japan that
must be forsworn--Ichiro’s crisis is produced by the conflict
between inclusion through the promise of ”America" and the
obedience demanded by racial stratification and bars to the
franchise of citizenship. For Okada, the nation is a grand
piece of architecture, but this architecture covers over its
actual purpose: to ”fight with [the others] . . . And kill
and hate and destroy but not enough, so that they must kill
and hate and destroy again and again and again" (Okada l6).
Self-preserving to a fault, America eventually becomes a
“faint and elusive insinuation of a promise" at the end of
Okada’s novel (251). I contend that Okada’s depiction of
Ichiro’s mental anguish serves to counter the ”aberration"

school of internment studies while formulating an alternative

 

17 Quoted from Weglyn, Michi. Years of Infsmv: Tbs Untold Story of
America’s Concentrstion Camps. New York: William Morrow, 1976.

151

to the logic of reparations as the justice of ”repair” by
introducing a sense of future indeterminacy--an open-
endedness akin to Unger's experimentalism-- and an invitation
to perpetually ”realize" America.

Studies of No—No Boy often ask thoughtful, yet second-
order questions about the novel that rarely address the
torturous nature of ”belonging" as it relates to the logic of
nationhood. For example, critics have approached No-No Bov as
a text that explores the possibility of an integrative
Japanese American identity in a post-WWII landscape, and

Jinqi Ling argues, correctly, that critics “overestimate the
success of Ichiro’s search for identity" (363).:18 This focus

on identity, while productive, ignores the fact that Ichiro
is the only character without an ”identity” while all other
characters possess the ”protective shell" of either an
identification with or in spite of the nation (Okada 47);
Ichiro’s confusion and search for the ”true" reasons he said
”no-no" drives the narrative along. Stan Yogi asserts that
the novel ”depicts Ichiro’s attempt to claim an identity as

an American as he analyzes why he answered ’no’ to the

 

18 Ling, however, looks to the publishing history of No—No Boy in
order to establish the “limited range of dissent” available to Okada in
his writing of the Ichiro character (363). This focus leads Ling to
conclude that Ichiro (and Okada) exhibit an "inability to fashion
alternative arguments in any but the dominant discourse" (367). The
drawback to this mode of argumentation is that Okada’s argumentative
options within the novel are preliminarily defined before analysis,
thereby leading interpretation into a mode of either ”confirming" or
”resisting" dominant discourse; rather than adopt this mildly fatalistic
rhetorical strategy, this section assumes that the novel can entertain
revolutionary goals as a possibility and not as an impossible, fleeting
thought. Ling’s work will be discussed at greater length in the next
chapter.

152

[loyalty] questions" ("You" 64). As I will point out, the
question of claiming ”American" status is certainly on the
table for Ichiro, but the more crucial question that needs to
be asked is whether such a claiming needs to take place for
Ichiro in order to survive and realize equality in the
future. On a related note, Gayle K. Fujita Sato investigates
the possibility of ”redemption [for Japanese Americans] in
terms of cultural difference and multiple loyalties" mainly
as a way to critique Ichiro's misogyny and spite for his
mother (257). Certainly, Ichiro blames his mother’s ”Japan-
loving" stance, but his venom appears alongside attempts to
comprehend how nationhood and citizenship have usurped

nativity and birth--and how his mother’s loyalties are a
response to racialization..19 Shifting the ground from concerns

over racial/cultural identity, I will explore the literal
constructions of nation—bound selves within the novel; in the
end, Ichiro’s ”quest" ends up being both in continuance and
without end amid the “faintness” of a future promise in which
all ”citizens" have an obligation to confront sovereignty

with justice.

 

19 Sato and Apollo Amoko both link up Ichiro’s quest for self-
identity and inclusion to the death and/or denial of his mother. For
example, Sato claims that Okada can only affirm "Japanese American"
identity ”through a character who rejects everything ’Japanese’"--
meaning Ichiro’s mother (239). What's at stake for Ichiro, as I will
demonstrate, is whether the questions surrounding the nativity of
immigrants and second generation inclusion mean anything when he’s
confronted by the "family" created through citizenship. When Amoko
presses for an understanding of the mother’s death as “structurally and
thematically necessary for the success of Ichiro’s will to American
nationhood," he bypasses how Ichiro’s ”will," in the end, is canceled
out by the constructions and architecture of the state-—effectively
neutralizing any attempt he can make at ”claiming" America (43).

153

The language of structure pervades No-No Bov, marking
both the strictures of the self and the imposing edifice of
an America that is capable of internment. When Ichiro meets
up with Eto, an old friend, upon his return to Seattle,
Ichiro feels the ”walls” that “crush" him.and his ”unspoken
words" (2); Eto, a veteran, spits on Ichiro after finding out
he was a no-no boy, and Ichiro’s inability to explain
precisely why he became a no-no boy--in the face of the
pressure to identify with the state while in a concentration
camp--becomes the prison that he attempts to escape over the
course of the novel. One possible explanation for the
crushing walls is that the traditional structure of the
family has eventually been replaced by the “emptiness" of
American citizenship; Ichiro speaks to his mother in the
following internal monologue:

Now that I know the truth when it is too late and
the half of me which was you is no longer there, I
am only half of me and the half that remains is
American by law because the government was wise and
strong enough to know why it was that I could not
fight for America and did not strip me of my
birthright. But it is not enough to be American
only in the eyes of the law and it is not enough to
be only half an American and know that it is an
empty half. I am not your son and I am not
Japanese, and I am not American. (16)

The “empty" half of Ichiro corresponds to the inheritance

154

from his mother, yet this half will forever be missing in
America. At the same time, the legitimate half consists of
the citizen produced by ”birthright"—-a citizen by birth and
accident who must remain second-class and is disciplined when
attempting to assert equal status. In turn, the half that is
American is also ”empty," marking the place of Ichiro as the
non-citizen, present and accounted for but still actively
enmeshed in racial hierarchy due to suspicion of disloyalty.
Jacqueline Stevens points out that the ”nation” is always a
”familial nation" that establishes "kinship rules for
particular political societies" (108); the ”juridical family
form” that Ichiro is excluded from ”regulates a naturalized
discourse of nationality, one that renders this form of being
to be inherited from one’s parents” (134). Ichiro’s mother’s
political investments--and the "fact" of being Japanese
American--automatically removes her from this chain of
inheritance, and Ichiro is left to inhabit a space without
family, without nation, but with a state-based racial
identity in a ”prison of forever" (Okada 40).

This isn’t to say that there aren’t options for Ichiro;
these options, however, all rely upon a building/construction
of a new America which remains exclusive, exceptionalist, and
unable to accommodate dissent and racial ”difference.” First,
there is the ”time" that will pass, killing off the older
Issei and reducing the philosophical differences between the
veteran Nisei and the no-no boys (Okada 52). But just when

Ichiro "mercifully stacked the blocks of home into the

155

 

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pattern of an America which would someday hold an
unquestioned place for him" in this formulation of time
passing, he rejects this simple solution and the ”castle" of
a future, harmonious America tumbles because of the “darkness
of his soul"--or the pessimism surrounding the creation of an
America without loyalties (Okada 52). Then, Ichiro visits his
old university to see Professor Brown, a former engineering
teacher. Ichiro imagines the “slide rule" from his
undergraduate days that would have both allowed him to
calculate the ”right decision" and rid himself of the
”bitterness" of having to prove his loyalty (53). The absent
”finely calculated white sword," able to produce and build
allegiance, doesn’t help Ichiro in his meeting with Dr.
Brown, who assumes Ichiro’s valor for serving in the U.S.
Army—-much to Ichiro’s embarrassment (53). Brown’s office
becomes a "revolving door" in a building that ”swallows” up
people, ”seeing without meeting, talking without hearing,
smiling without feeling" in a ”world of students and slide
rules" (57). More importantly, Brown’s office is ”cut off
from the rest of the world by the narrow stairs which one
would not think to climb” (57). "Brown is still Brown": the
unchanging promise of continuing to “build” America for
Ichiro is marked by limited access and the ”swallowing”
mechanism of patriotism (57). The ”narrowness" of the line to
be walked for a greater inclusion--answering ”yes-yes"--
consumes young Japanese Americans; the institutions able to

ask such questions reside up the ”stairs,” effectively

156

masking their sovereign power to regulate the emergence of,
in this case, intellectuals who may help build the nation.
Resistance is never calculated in the process of professing
loyalty, and the university’s ”garden in the forsaken land"
feels ”empty and quietly sad and hungry" (57). There is no
”building" of Japanese American ”identity" for Ichiro, no
possibility of constructing a ”correct" answer to the loyalty
questionnaire. Instead, the pedagological function of the
university--which stands in for the nation-—gives no tangible
answer for Ichiro.

Yet Ichiro finds hope in Portland when he interviews for
and is offered a position at an engineering firm; the renewed
promise of rebuilding his life spurs Ichiro on, only to be
lost in his prospective employer’s unvanquished faith in
America. Ichiro meets Mr. Carrick, who confesses that he
”used to have some very good Japanese friends" before
internment, an event which he describes as a ”big mistake"
(Okada 149, 150). Carrick then declares that despite this
”big black mark in the annals of American history," the
country can ”still be the best damn nation in the world"
(150). Immediately following this confession, Ichiro is
offered the position without having to interview, and he
notices that Carrick is trying to ”atone for the error of a
big country which hadn’t been quite big enough" (151).
Seemingly an acceptance without qualification, Ichiro
distrusts this white favoritism which is also racial pity.

Instead, he admits to himself that the job truly belongs to

157

 

”another Japanese who was equally as American as this man”
and eventually refuses it (151). Much like the snowplow he's
building (despite the professed lack of snow in Portland),
Carrick tries to clear a pathway that leads toward the
promise of an inclusive America but away from (and blind to)
the permanent exceptional status that Ichiro and Japanese
America must face.

Finally, Ichiro points out the heart of the problem:
something has spoiled America. He describes this ”miserable
little world" as the ”same big shiny apple with streaks of
rotten brown in it. Not rotten in the center where it counts,
but rotten in spots underneath the skin and a good, sharp
knife can still do a lot of good" (232). Even though he
qualifies this observation by arguing that his choice to
become a no-no boy was a “serious error," it is evident that
the rottenness of two-tiered citizenship has marred the
potential whole-ness of the United States despite his self—
effacement (232). Instead of near the surface problems
dealing with loyalty--the brown streaks--which he dismisses
in the scene with Carrick, Ichiro’s observation that the
center still holds ”goodness" could be read two ways: either
as a yearning for America's untainted wholeness before
internment or as a rebuke of the white legal privilege that
stains all articulations of America. Given the strong
suspicion and dismissal Ichiro exhibits throughout the novel,
I contend that Ichiro attempts to invoke the ”core” values of

America that reside within the larger structure; much like

158

Carlos Bulosan’s ”heart" that constitutes the potential of
America amid racial violence, Ichiro’s core reflects the
possibility that there will be ”a lot of goodness" which is

”not expected" in the untainted seeds which represent the
possibility of freedom (233).:20 This goodness, nevertheless,

is "only a thread, but how much it seems in a life where
there might have been nothing" (233). And this is where the
slight hint or ”insinuation of promise" resides: in a social
world that continues, incessantly, “to take shape in the mind
and in heart" (251). Ichiro comes to this conclusion while
”in the darkness of the alley of the community that was a
tiny bit of America," and his vantage point in the space
between and apart from ”loyal" Japanese Americans allows him
to view the shapelessness of a future America--when the
”hint" of a promise of equality is enough to sustain one’s
faith in a state of emergency without racial
exception(alism)s. In terms of race, the ”camp" of being
Japanese American is “born out of the state of exception and
martial law," where the conditions of possibility for
inclusion are incessantly qualified by what it ”included by
virtue of its very exclusion” (Agamben 38, 40). At this limit
of American law, Okada suggests that without a redefinition

of sovereignty, the exception that precludes any ”promise"

 

20 Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald interprets the final pages of No-No
spy as Ichiro “thinking of the goodness he had found in an imperfect
world" (26). Without a definition of ”goodness" or ”imperfect," it is
difficult to decipher McDonald’s larger argument concerning Ichiro’s
final “emancipation" from the questions of loyalty and putative
patriotism that plague him over the course of the novel.

159

will burrow its way into any and all social formations. In an
alley, between the ”camp" structures/buildings where one
either determines racial hierarchy by being ”outside" of it
in an unquestioned position of authority or attempts to
profess loyalty to the state in a ”new and stable spatial
arrangement" born out of the state of racial exception,
Ichiro finds the epistemological back door that can
effectively question sovereignty. While not providing
”solutions," what Japanese American literature can ”do" for
us is travel to the very seeds that generate the racial state
and propose, however obliquely, to cut off the growth(s) of

white supremacy which provide its very foundations.

160

Chapter 3: Producing Asian America
To resist means to seek to enter a world free of
what is being resisted. That world does not exist;
it is one’s act of resisting that brings it into
existence--one’s act of seeking to enter it, and of
entering it with others.

-—Steve Martinot1

He’d made a move when he should be upsetting the

chessboard.
-Maxine Hong Kingston2

Evelyn Hu-DeHart notes that despite the “fits and
starts" from the late 19605 onward, ethnic studies programs
are ”definitely here to stay” because they have been
”increasingly institutionalized" (Hu-DeHart 696). And though
she distances herself from the idea that institutional
“trade-offs” are inherently necessary for university-wide
”legitimacy," Hu-DeHart’s contention that Asian American
Studies (and ethnic studies) programs and departments ”were
insurgent programs with a subversive agenda from the outset"
belies a central tension present from the early rumblings of
the Asian American Studies movement: the oftentimes
antagonistic relationship between trenchant critiques of the
American racial order and the pedagogical function/mission of
the university (Hu-DeHart 700, 702; Wei 138). Likewise,
William Wei’s The Asian American Movement tells the story of

the growth of Asian American Studies while emphasizing the

 

1 Martinot, Steve. Introduction. The Problems of Resistance:
Studiss in AlternativsyPolitical Cultures. Ed. Steve Martinot and Joy
James. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001. 9.

2 Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monksy: His Fake Book. 1987.
New York: Vintage: 1990. 107.

161

 

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need for “clear lines of authority" within the
movement/departments so that ”academdc legitimacy" could be
realized (Wei 146, 147). Over the course of wei’s narrative,
we witness, among other things, the takeover of the
University of California-Berkeley’s Asian American Studies
program--a "coup" which many ”considered . . . illegal"--by a
group of academics seeking to ”regularize the decision-making
process" and ”educate" the university on why Asian American
studies was important for the school (147). Of course, this
coup also banished the ”insurgent" and ”subversive" elements
involved in the program’s administration (the wei Min She and
I WOr Kuen, two anti-imperialist organizations) because they
promoted an ”anarchic system in which decisions . . . were
made in meetings attended by fifty to a hundred people,”
making “administrative paralysis inevitable” (146). Which is
to say: Asian American Studies can only survive, in the
present, as an streamlined institutional structure which must
exclude the more antagonistic elements of action/thought
within the racialized community in order to ”improve their
[Asian American Studies programs’] chances of approval”
(147).

Certainly, the Berkeley situation is a small example of
how ”loss," created by management decisions which determine
who may and may not participate, constitutes the
institutionalization of Asian American Studies. In a related
vein, the Asian American subject is also characterized by a

racialized loss or lack: of citizenship rights, legal

162

 

 

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protections, economic opportunity, and the ”self." By looking
at the compromises demanded by the forces of
institutionalization with the losses which make up the
subject (via emplacement in a hierarchy), we can more readily
see how the limitations imposed by institutional “inclusion"
relate to the racial foundations of the state: Asian American
Studies is obligated (and relegated) to work within the very
racial system that produces inequality. At the same time,
Asian American Studies' projects of recovery and identity
rely upon this inequality in order to produce the subjects to
be studied. The primary purpose of this chapter is to examine
how Asian American Studies can most effectively inhabit this
space of negation and duplicity, and how it may possibly
develop the analytical means to challenge and dismantle the
conditions which produce subjection. Far from claiming a
self-generating "agency" in this battle, the reassessment of

current thought and methods in Asian American must take
center-stage3; with this in mind, we can ”question

foundations" in order to ”think a freedom" that can ”posit

and define" freedom rather than inhabiting a space where

 

3 As opposed to John M. Liu’s characterization of Asian American
Studies and Ethnic Studies as fields which aim to ”establish a more
equitable social order" by ”remold[ing] racial differences into an
affirmation of life rather than being a stamp of oppression," I will
analyze why Asian Americanist works tend to reclaim subjection to
generate equality (Liu 281). My aim is similar to Leslie Bow’s call to
examine and understand the “very structure of allegiance" (Bow 15);
Asian American Studies’ involvement in “merely romanticiz[ing]
individual agency" has, in part, determined the work of the discipline,
resulting in an integrationist stance which redeploys the structure of
racial domination despite the aim of "creating new social realities"
(Liu 282).

163

 

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racializations are loosened and concessions granted (Nancy,
Experispce 3). Other-wise, we remain within the realm of
subjection and subjecthood which is, as will be argued, a
closed and self-generating system.

As noted in the introduction, agency in its most
transformative posture enacts a purpose unintended and
unanticipated by power despite power’s ability to bring the
subject into being (Butler 15). Often, though, agency is
thought to be embodied in the ”pure sovereign subject" as Ann
Anlin Cheng points out. In The Melancholv of Race, Cheng
attempts to use the "model of melancholic incorporation" as
the ”seed for revising political thinking" within Asian
American Studies (xi); by pointing out that the ”vocabulary
of grievance (and its implied logics of comparability between
and compensation among racial groups), in part, ”sustains the
notion of ’one nation’," Cheng also exposes the difficulties
and dangers of both filing a racial grievance and demanding
recompense or reparations: the nation’s racial ”healing"
occurs at the moment when the ”solution" is found and
addressed, as was seen with Japanese American reparations
(6). Furthermore, this economy of racial solutions assumes
that the racialized subject appears or comes into being
twice: when something is done to remind the subject of
her/his subjection and when a grievance is articulated; prior
to the event which re-establishes racial subordination, we
are all formally equal and, after compensation, we will be

equal-—and the same--again. Of course, this process of

164

securing the racial organization of society by merely
assuming its aberrational nature--that it occurs infrequently
enough and only in documented events that can be rectified--
ignores the racial structuring of the social world. In this
chapter, I will address the endurance of “subjection" and its
complement, the “subject,” in relation to the contemporary
concerns of Asian American Studies in order to locate the
methodological and epistemological stopping-points that
further entrench and reiterate racial domination; these
appear over the course of deliberations concerning Asian
American psychology, historiography, South Asian American
challenges to Asian American canonical knowledges, and the
”queer" nature of the Asian American diaspora. Further, I
will examine various ways of thinking through subjection and,
over the course of the chapter, offer what I think are
fruitful ways to pursue Asian American Studies in terms of
future approaches--ways that guard against the seductive
impulses of counterhegemonic moments while developing
techniques that effectively challenge power.

One of these philosophical stopping-points occurs in
Cheng’s work when she attempts to rethink ”’agency’ in
relation to forms of racial grief” (15). Cheng defines the
melancholy that produces this grief in two ways. First,
”[d]ominant white identity in America operates
melancholically” because the racial other must be distanced
from ”official American ideals"(11); hence, the constitutive

racial exclusions which enable white (and American) identity

165

to emerge must also be denied in a “racist" or ”white
liberal" way so that the nation can ”’go on’"--and the
“ideal" of America can be realized (11). Alternately,
racialized identity is melancholic as well, resulting from
the “injury" and suffering of the ”loss" of equal social and
political status (14). From this, Cheng calls for a new
"vocabulary" to discuss Asian American subjection that goes
”beyond the immediate demands of advocacy" and gets to the
heart of the American racial problem: the ”future of social
transformation” lies in our ability to be ”open” to the
"passions” that the ”grief" of racial violence and exclusion
”bequeaths” (29). This can be accomplished by situating
”every subjective being as historical beings" within a
”context" that ”teaches us to be attentive to . . . the
hauntedness of history"--ostensibly, to ”reenvision a
politics attuned to the reality of grief in all its material
and immaterial evidence" (28, 29, emphasis in original).
Cheng’s formulation leaves Asian America in a mode of
recovery--recovering the emotive content of a wounded
identity-—whereby if we ”listen" we’ll be able to see how the
"living" are ”still speaking" about the melancholic origins
of their subjecthood (29). Perhaps at its furthest extent,
this strategy could claim mistreatment and explain how this
mistreatment came into being--through historical context--but
the future promise(s) of the formulation is murky,
particularly in terms imagining a possible end to subjection

and subjecthood. If melancholia is an ”entangled relationship

166

with loss" and a “legislation of grief," it is difficult to
see how a new form of regulation will assist in developing
liberatory politics and modes of thinking (8).

Melancholia imprisons the subject and the two
alternative modalities for dealing with loss (mourning and
mania) assume, respectively, a transcendent subjective power
to overcome loss or a perpetual entanglement with
melancholia; melancholia, evidently, is a closed system.
Judith Butler, in The Psychic Life of Power, explains how, in
melancholia, the subject “incorporates" the lost
person/thing/object being mourned in order to “preserve the
object as part of the ego and, hence, to avert the loss as a
complete 1055” (134, emphasis in original). Mourning,
according to Freud, ends with a coming to terms with the
loss, and recovery allows the subject to be ”free and
uninhibited again" (Freud 245); accepting Cheng’s premise
that racialized subjectivity is constituted by loss and,
therefore, unfree in its very articulation, mourning solely
involves a subjectivity which deludes itself, assuming an
ability to exceed the bounds of race without addressing the
conditions of oppression. Alternately, mania serves as a
”temporary suspension" of melancholy according to Butler, but
the ”tyrant" of the ”attachment to the lost object . . .
remains ensconced" in the psyche (191-2). Freud confirms
this, noting how “the manic subject plainly demonstrates his
liberation from the object which was the cause of his

suffering, by seeking like a ravenously hungry man for new

167

object-cathexes" (Freud 255). This newfound liberation of the
subject, while temporary, indicates that mania allows the
subject to ”throw off at a single blow some oppressive
compulsion, some false position which he has long had to keep
up" and show an "increased readiness for all kinds of action"
(254).

This ”action"--the self’s ability to throw off the yoke
of supposed ”loss"--is described by Freud as a ”nuisance"
since it will inevitably lead back to melancholia--whose
origins are, in part, a ”mental constellation of revolt”
(Freud 248). The intimate relationship between mania and
melancholia and the inevitability of the subject slipping
back into a melancholic state demonstrates how mania’s
“revolt" is quelled by overwhelming demands to demonstrate
”humility and submissiveness," which ”befit[s] such worthless
people" for Freud (248). The only possible way out of the
structure of melancholia/mania is a revolt that can be
sustained as a revolt (instead of a iterative celebratory
reaction) to undo the ”loss” of equality which creates Asian
American subjecthood. And this would fall in line with
Butler’s formulation of ”agency" as enabled but not
constrained by power or ”teleological necessity" (Butler 15).

The subject is an ”identificatory unity," Jean-Luc Nancy
maintains, which produces a ”subjecthood" where a ”one raises
its unicity to the power of unity” (Sspss_104, emphasis in
original). The unification of marginalized subjects on the

grounds of melancholic sameness, then, relies upon the

168

recognition of unity through a (suffering) identification;
while this may be effective in a strategic manner--mobilizing
a marginalized group, for example--Chen’s desire to ”hear"
the voices of grief only threatens a unity of suffering out
of which a ”revolt" may take place. Put another way, Chen’s
strategy calls for a new mode of describing, recording, and
annotating power's effects, leaving us with no new politics
which can address the central problem of the subject being a
”modality of power that turns on itself; the subject is the
effect of power in recoil" (Butler 6). Instead of relying on
the ”phatic function" of language and representation to
communicate disabling emotive conditions, Asian American
Studies must consider ”another politics rather than those of
a ’private’ therapy in the interior of an incurable ’public’

sickness of civilization" (Nancy, Sense 117). Truly,

 

delivering ”freedom” from the realm of individual or
community possession—-which is the temporary mania which will
end up slipping into melancholia ad infinitum-—means that
Asian America must ”hold fast to the coming of what is
coming" so as to avoid those organizational principles which
calcify and consolidate subjecthood in the face of a hostile
world (Experience 7; Sspss 109, emphasis in original).

As a result, this chapter analyzes those “ideological
forces" from within Asian American Studies that attempt to
“enable" the Asian American subject to escape subjection and
oppression (Chow, Protestant 32). In the end, concerns about

the ”voice" of agency for Asian Americans prove to be

169

arguments about how to voice Asian American concerns in an
academic forum; rather than fall prey to a strain of
multiculturalist thought which enables an agency-in—
difference by determining the value of different sub-ethnic

groups, Asian American Studies must become passionate about
its aims for justice.4 This justice, however, should not

settle for the constitution of a “boundary" of ethnic
identity which struggles for rights and the ability to
articulate political aims/passions (Nancy, Ingperativs 32);
because the residual effects of racialized subjection within
Asian American Studies serve to reinstate the bound(arie)s of
ethnic particularisms, the ”triumph" of the ”specular
recognition" of racial and cultural identities--which relies
upon an "origin of identity"--needs to be jettisoned (34,

33). In this way, the demands of and for inclusion will rest

 

4 The "indifference” of agency-in—difference is clearly
articulated by Charles Taylor’s formulation of multiculturalist
”consensus":

I would like to maintain that there is something valid in
this presumption, but that the presumption is by no means
unproblematic, and involves something like an act of faith.
As a presumption, the claim is that all human cultures that
have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch
of time have something important to say to all human beings.
(Taylor and Gutman 67).
Taylor’s “act of faith" is undergirded by a conditional inclusion; only
those “cultures" which have existed over time--rather than in and
through the time of exclusion-—will be able to be recognized as
legitimate entities in multiculturalist discussions. South Asian
American Studies, for example, grounds its political strategies in
differences which are racially/culturally embodied, (biologically)
determining the grounds of resistance; as such, the epistemological
tactics of the sub-field meant to realize inclusion are tailored to meet
Taylor’s requirements by stressing the sub-ethnic group’s lineage,
particularity, and history. Because of this, the aim of forming a power
bloc supersedes any goal to share power in an equal manner--stressing
the importance of the racialized group’s contributions rather than the
exclusion which gives life to racialized identity.

170

on the grounds of a community whose limit will be a passion
opposed to “mastery," or the securing of status and rank
within a perpetual racial order (34). The enterprise of the
field will inhabit the space of committed critique, where the
”loss" of freedom will serve to rethink all ordering(s).
This, indeed, will allow the discipline to extricate itself
from the thought of its loss--of worth, of identity, of
agency-~in order to think of the ”unworking of works" which
examine how inequality is fortified (39). My aim in this
chapter is to examine various contemporary strategies which
aim to resist racial domination by both calling into question
the concept of the ”subject" in different disciplines and
attempting to shift the subject of Asian American Studies to
more fertile ground. Assuming that the only effective
resistance is the one able to undo power in order to enter a
world free of the racialisms being resisted, the end point of
this chapter serves as an invitation to think with every
Other in mind and to think together for a common solution to
racial subjection. The manic revolt of the racialized
subject, then, can aspire to a restlessness of identity, a
discomfort that refuses to recoup subjective loss so that a
future freedom may be thought.

As a prelude to my discussion of South Asian American
responses to Asian American Studies and current Asian
Americanist theoretical works, I will briefly examine Asian
American psychological studies and political organizing. As a

form of praxis--dealing with ”real world" subjects in terms

171

of identity issues--psychology redefines Asian American
subjectivity in order to alleviate suffering; in the end,
however, these redefinitions turn out to be recombinations of

racialist discourses which can only respond to power by
citing it (and confirm its pervasiveness).5 In The Mental

Health of Asian Americans, Stanley Sue and James K Morishima
argue that there are three ”types" of Asian Americans:
traditionalists, marginals, and Asian Americans. The first
two types, marked by either strong or less severe ties to
”home culture," are challenged by the ”Asian American" type,
which is an ”integrative personality" (94, 95). Noting how
the "Asian American" type possesses “adaptive strategies,"
Sue and Morishima advocate for a “bicultural interaction
approach" to comprehend the racial subject since this
methodology doesn’t rely solely upon “cultural determinism”
to explain Asian American identity--which ”traditionalist"
and “marginal" types depend on for their formulation and
articulation (102); ”bicultural" assumes two things: that
there are strict divisions between cultural groups within a
society/structure and that the unnamed structure produces
racial traits in different groups. For the authors, there are
certainly ”true" (racial) group ”traits" and because the
"false" traits associated with stereotypes are ”not

accurate," we can see where Sue and Morishima are headed: the

 

5 This focus on psychology and political organizing is far from
comprehensive. As a result, the purpose of this section is to expose a
problematic by noting how these discussions--concerned primarily with
serving the “community" of Asian Americans via mental health care and
political representation--rely upon subjection rather than address it.

172

Asian American must signify something either divorced from or
exceeding the processes of "putative" racialization (116);
Asian Americans contain a racial group core before being
called into being as Asian American. Redeploying the
racialist basis of "marginality" discussed in the first
chapter, the authors only understand race as appearing after
"cultures" establish themselves and their traits are
discovered/recorded. This, at least in the case of Stanley
Sue, can be attributed to the desire to realize the
”ideology" of ”pluralism," which ”supports the rights of
groups of things to be different within a common set" (Sue,
Moore, Iscoe, and Nagata 23). Merely protecting against the
potential for genocide--groups of ”things" are inherently
different from other groups which means that the ”rights"
supported in the theory solely consist of the right to exist
”differently"—-Sue's ”view of mental health" only asks for
personal ”option[s]" or "choice” within a pluralistic society
(23). These options, which should be "consistent with their
[Asian Americans’] cultural backgrounds," are the most clear
demarcations of the subjection within psychological
subjecthood: with “choice," the biological inheritance of
Asian American-ness can be psychically negotiated without
purportedly risking the consequences of racial violence or
exclusion. ”Human beings," Nikolas Rose writes in his
analysis of the "psy-" disciplines:

must interpret their past, and dream their future,

as outcomes of personal choices made or choices

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still to make yet within a narrow range of
possibilities whose restrictions are hard to
discern because they form the horizon of what is
thinkable. (Rose 17)
Coupled together with Cheng’s dismissal of the “pure
sovereign subject," Rose allows us to see how the cobbled-
together nature of Asian American psychological subjectivity,
especially in terms of its reliance upon the ”protection" of
”pluralism," represents a deflection in theorizing the
subject. Psychology as such produces free individuals who,
when faced with the issue of ethnic/racial ”choice," must
follow what is consistent with their ”cultural background" in
order to ”enact their freedom appropriately" (29). If
anything, Sue’s work with other psychologists should remind
us that describing Asian American subjects constitutes a
limit of our present (social scientific) thinking; the
resulting descriptions already involve a narrowing of the
subject (and his/her aspirations) in order to theorize a more
equal existence within domination.

This social scientific knowledge carries over to
mainstream Asian American political organizing. Perhaps the
most influential Asian American political organization
besides the JACL at the moment, the Committee of 100 (C-lOO),
a Chinese American non-partisan political organization
established in 1990, offers “concerned Chinese Americans" the
resources necessary to ”promote the full participation of

Chinese Americans in all areas of American society"

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(”Domestic"). And the promise of the organization is clear:
political representation for a numerically smaller minority
must go to the centers of political power in order to
preserve the “health" of Asian America. Seeking to be the
”bridge between the cultures and systems of Asian and
America," this group of “leaders in their field" promises to
provide an “in-depth understanding of both cultures” in order
to "discuss with leaders in government, education, and the
business community" issues like civil rights, immigration,
and the “glass ceiling" (”History"; ”Domestic"). The
”bridge"/translator logic--Asian American racial subjects can
understand both their "homelands" and their “adopted"
country--of the group’s philosophy argues for the
“marginality” hypothesis (like Stonequist and Sue). As a
result, the C-100 mobilizes racial/ethnic identity to produce
inclusion and, indeed, to insinuate the racial other into the
political system via the promise of “insider" knowledge.
Given the ”invitation"-only access to organization membership
and the non-partisan stance the organization takes, it is
clear that the C-100 aims to provide exclusive access to
business and government insiders while serving as ethnic
entrepreneurs representing Chinese American interests
(”Structure”).

While this entrepreneurial stance isn’t much different
than, for example, the mission of a local Chamber of
Commerce, the C-100 also released a ”benchmark” study

entitled ”American Attitudes Toward Chinese Americans and

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Asian Americans: A Committee of 100 Survey" in 2001. The
survey attempts to gauge and ”change misperceptions” of Asian
Americans in contemporary American society (”American" 2).
Noting the ”surprising findings" of the survey--mainly that a
fourth of Americans ”hold ’strong negative attitudes’ towards
Chinese Americans"--the C-100’s aim is to eventually produce
a greater unity within America for a ”fuller integration" of
Chinese/Asian Americans ”into a more harmonious American
life” (2). Yet a strange moment occurs in the survey when the
C-100 attempts to argue how anti-Chinese American sentiments
are a ”subset of broader, anti-Asian prejudice" involving
multiple Asian ethnic groups, but that the effects of this
anti-Asian sentiment need “to be investigated separately"
(8). It is unintelligible how the establishment of primarily
white American attitudes toward, for example, Filipino
Americans will help to create a more ”harmonious" life apart
from exposing exclusionary/”wrong-headed" sentiments, but the
logic of the C-100 survey is starkly clear: in order to serve
as the ”bridge" between Asia and America, one must prove
one's unique difference and subjection to entrenched American
power. In other terms, the C-100 survey counters the “very
flattering portrait" of the model minority myth by
quantifying the level or racial suffering still experienced
by Asian America in order to bolster its position as the best
possible ”bridge” to Asian American representation (10).
While helpful in confirming for white America that anti-Asian

sentiment still exists, the elitist, members-only logic of

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the organization also authorizes the suspension of any
critique of racial structures within America in favor of
introducing a "misunderstood" identity in need of full
admission into society (and the business world).

Simply introducing the tension of an “identity"
constrained by outside forces, however, will not lead Asian
American Studies to another way of thinking about the
possibilities of the subject. Rey Chow argues for a cessation
of any further theories of ethnic or racial identity intended
to produce liberation since,

contemporary articulations of ethnicity . . . are
already firmly inscribed within the economic and
ideological workings of capitalism, replete with
their mechanisms of callings, opportunities, and
rewards. In this context, to be ethnic is to
protest--but perhaps less for actual emancipation
of any kind than for the benefits of worldwide
visibility, currency, and circulation. (Protsstant
48, emphasis in original)
To be ethnic is to work/protest for inclusion within a racial
structure-—based on the (market) value of one’s ethnic
identity. Chow continues, asserting that the time has come to
end any speculation about any ”ideological forces . . . that
would enable the individual representative of an ethnic
minority to move beyond” or think they could move beyond the
”macro sociological structures that have already mapped out”

our existences (32).

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"To Be a Solution": South Asian America

While mounting a serious challenge to the historically
exclusionary foundations of Asian American Studies’ focus on
East Asian ethnic groups, South Asian American academicians
also present their subject (the subjection of South Asian
Americans under an East/Southeast Asian American paradigm) on
the treacherous terrain of (hyphenated) American identity
formation, transnational migration, and other particularisms
like caste-loyalty and religious affiliation. In a broad
sense, there are two related lines of argumentation present
in these challenges: one with a particularist/pluralist
agenda and another which attempts force the realization of
the "heterogeneity" of Asian America so that South Asian
Americans will be included in the narrative via difference
construed on ”sub-ethnic" grounds; the “sub-ethnic,” assuming
a distance from traditional Asian Americanist concerns, also
involves more ”local" differences like an immigrant’s
state/province of origin. In his The Karma of Brown Folk,
Vijay Prashad offers up what may be the central
dynamic/problem facing both Asian American and South Asian
American Studies: the advancement of ”concrete identities"
which can participate in a liberatory project (ix). Prashad
suggests that ”imputed universalism[s]" must be rejected for
a greater understanding of how particular groups--class-
based, racial, or gender-based, for example--can challenge
oppression through various ”forms of unity" (x). Yet in

"harness[ing]" these identifications, it is unclear why

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Prashad’s ”hope of a future" consists of ”oppressed peoples .
. . explor[ing] their own cultural resources toward the
construction of a complex political will” (x). There is
certainly a variant of ”strategic essentialism” at work here,
but without an undoing of Asian American ”identity” as an
ultimate goal--a moment where the strategy envisions an end
to racialisms. Prashad’s vagueness also runs the risk of
maintaining a kernel of cultural/racial identity which relies
upon racialization; the resources available to a group, born
out of a racialized and postcolonial context, belong solely
to the group, and unity is generated through a weeding-out or

winnowing process which results in a political
”will"/strategy to counter the structures of subjection.6

On the other, related side of the coin, Rajiv Shankar
offers up a reformulation of Asian American Studies that is
unabashed in its call for separate spheres of racial/cultural
identity. Noting that South Asians have "offered to America
(and the world) considerable wealth in terms of spirituality,
peace, and civilization,” Shankar suggests that the South
Asian American ”category” only needs to be ”’admitted’” into

Asian American Studies proper, thereby producing a field

 

5 Prashad’s reformulation of W.E.B. DuBois’ famous ”How does it
feel to be a problem?" from The Souls of Blspk Folk ends up being “How
does it feel to be a solution?" (DuBois 1; Prashad viii). Over the
course of the book, Prashad takes pains to demonstrate how both South
Asian American immigrants and citizens can become a “weapon against
black folk” by acceding to the demands of mainstream white society and
capitalism (viii). As the inspiration for this section's subtitle,
Prakash’s reformulation marks the conflicted, inter- (and intra-) group
rivalries which can either lead to a new “solution" (with its
"multicultural” distillates) or towards the eradication of racial
subordination.

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where “under the genus Asian American we may have the species
East/Southeast Asian American and South Asian American” (R.
Shankar xi, xiii, emphasis in original). Notwithstanding the
biologisms of the previous statement, the tone of Shankar’s
piece is one of resignation and non-engagement, where South
Asian American Studies is both apart and alienated from the
”prevailing American epic” but ”unfolding its own unique
drama to claim an equally special place in the standard
American repertoire" xiii). While attuned to both the hedging
of Prashad’s strategic inclusion(s) and Shankar’s desire for
ethnic purity and state recognition, this section will
address the problem of “unity” as it relates to South Asian
America; as much concerned with ”grounding" theory in
"practice" as realizing the possibility of inclusion, South
Asian Americanist critiques of both Asian American Studies
and the racial state allow for conditional subjection in
order to trade for effective subjectivities in the academic
and political spheres; the central goal, then, is to make
racial structures more hospitable and inclusive.

The political, social, and literary effectiveness of the
South Asian American subject resides in the development of
the “species" that partially constitutes (and completes) the
"genus"; because the genus of ”Asian American Studies” proves
its incoherence by its historical neglect of South Asian
Americans, the species must both confront and seek a “proper”
place within the larger academic field. This strategy is

marked by a multi-layered deployment of epistemological

180

strategies involving reformulating the definition of the
”canonical" as well as Asian American ”identity"; yet as we
will see, the end-point will result in a kind of benign
apartheid. Rajini Srikanth and Lavina Shankar contend that
the “true test of legitimate inclusion . . . is the presence
of South Asian American texts in the Asian American
curriculum” (12). Because the authors never get around to
addressing the overall purpose of Asian American Studies
(save its role in disseminating texts to an academic public),
this strategy strongly invests in the canonical by locating
the standard for inclusion as a project of assimilation into
the larger body for canonical recognition. To counter or
temper this wholesale concession to Asian American Studies
(in the form of demanding full recognition), Shankar and
Srikanth also question the nature of Asian American identity
because it ”encompasses people of many different races,
linguistic groups, religions, cultures, and nations" (1).
Among this list of affiliations, perhaps the ”nations"
category is the most puzzling since it advances a notion of
identity as a naturalized ontological bearing; in other
words, the ”nation” of a subject’s origin is ”of" the person
or an internal possession that lives in and through the
subject’s existence. Because the authors are at pains to
point out the constructed nature of Asian American identity
as both a ”census label” and ”political and social
consciousness," they redeploy identity as a (national) given

in order to combat the problem of Asian American Studies’

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”narrower" definition of its subject(s) through the concept
of a ”felt identity" (1, 2, emphasis in original). The genus
can only benefit from allowing ”’multiple layers of
identity’" to be celebrated and recognized (7). The end
result of this redistilling of subjectivity is that the
“[in]coherent identity" of Asian America’s "premise" is
countered by ”smaller and more compact platforms [which] must
be used for making focused deliberations" (4). With the loss
of a large amount of faith in the possibility of panethnic
alliances for social and political change, Shankar and
Srikanth suggest that South Asian America should rarely share
a wider platform with Asian America since coherence can only
be found within the ethnic group/species. Much like the
desire to see South Asian American texts included on reading
lists, this reinvestment in ethnic particularity--without a
clear, transformative direction in mind for Asian American
Studies--results in a logic of the multiple which stresses
the incommensurability of political interests between the
canonical and subaltern; affiliated with but not "of" Asian
American Studies, South Asian American Studies protects an
identarian integrity in order to produce a wider variety of
subjects within Asian America.

This protectionism, however, is countered by Deepika
Bahri and Mary Vasudeva in a qualified way. Arguing that the
”use of ’South Asian’ to make visible a political
constituency is likely to lead to unproductive

generalizations, suggesting a false homogeneity," Bahri and

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Vasudeva claim that ”South Asian" is an ”aggregate category"
where ”various situations" or social positions, like caste-
status, may prove to be ”less or more relevant" depending on
the political exigencies faced (15, 16). The authors avoid a
wholesale jettisoning of the relation between Asian American
and South Asian American interests, but the trajectory of
their strategy depends on their notion of the ”aggregate."
Because the ”false homogeneity” mentioned above also helps
”identarian moves" in "demonizing the equally fictional
dominant Other" alongside the creation of ”minoritized
Others,” the aggregate category loses its ability to signify
a sum total outright (with regards to Asian American Studies)
(15); the possibilities for Asian Americanist theory and
politics are chained to an obligation to portray the
”dominant" in a fair manner. This obligation tends toward
social management since Bahri and Vasudeva also call for an
understanding of “South Asian" as ”contingent and discursive"
in nature (16); this discursive nature is compromised by a
general strategy of "fairness." If, indeed, we must be fair
to the dominant-—say, white supremacy--then we must also be
fair and well-meaning in our “meaningful discussion[s]" with
the dominant (16). Since the terms and conditions of what is
”meaningful" aren’t fully established by Bahri and Vasudeva
in this formulation, we are left with a situation where
instead of radical social and philosophical change being
possible, ethnic identities are calcified into their

dominant/subordinate positions and power relationships--

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guaranteeing that ”discussions" will turn out to be appeals
rather than demands. The aggregate that is Asian America,
then, is a (more) benign separatism: a critical mass of units
who conceive of the political (and white supremacy) as ending
up in a possible ”win-win" situation where inclusion--with
racialized identities used as an entry point into
negotiation--is the ultimate destination.

Developing the particular(ist) in hopes of realizing an
”intellectual paradigmatic shift, and a new vision of Asian
American studies scholarship and pedagogy," a group of seven
South Asian Americanists produced a joint analysis of their
field’s relation to Asian American Studies in 2000 (Davé et.
al. 67). Generally, the group’s aim is to move away from an
”inward-looking preoccupation with ethno-racial solidarity"
within Asian American Studies towards an ”active concern with
other ethnic and racial groups in the American socio-
political landscape" (71). Unique to all of the South Asian
Americanist writings analyzed here, the desire to seek (and
possibly develop) political and academic coalitions across
racial and ethnic lines in order to strengthen the field
promises to escape the pluralist spheres that marked previous
attempts to resituate South Asian Americans in a broader
academic discourse. Curiously, the writers double—back on
this promise and revert to standard first-/second-generation
narratives of South Asian American life to develop a sense of
the kinds of projects a more inclusive Asian American Studies

could undertake. For example, it is argued that first-

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generation immigrants ”from South Asia tend to closely cling
to their parochial sub-ethnic identities (Tamil, Sikh,
Bengali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Jain, and so forth)" while
the second-generation ”replicates and transforms these
[identity] boundaries in the (re)creation of their own
communities" (72, 73). Assuming the linear, developmental
transmission of cultural/ethnic ”traits" from one generation
to the next, the authors’ desire to determine the foundations
of South Asian American racial identity bears a strange
relation to the future of Asian American Studies, which must
rely on a mythos of subsequent generations embodying the
original’s characteristics and ”emanat[ing]” its qualities
through racial inheritance (73). These sub-ethnic
affiliations are equated with other "components of identity
building," like religion, caste loyalties, and ”linguistic
diversity" (75); with the clash of ”identity" and “history,"
along with the "collision of home and host country politics,"
now central research possibilities in the minds of South
Asian Americanists, Davé and his co-writers deem this
racialist logic "one of the most promising areas for future
research" (73).

This is to say, according to the seven scholars, that
the South Asian American ”species" must create its own areas
of future research in order to make itself ”matter" for Asian
American Studies in total, and the kinds of studies that the
authors suggest, like "South Asian cab-driver-passenger

relations" and ”interethnic relationships such as South Asian

185

marriages with Latinos," will serve to broaden to scope of
South Asian American Studies but never challenge the
fundamental racial assumptions of the “genus" (95). As a
result, analyses of the “lived experience of
transnationalism," which help to develop critiques of the
”nation state," will only serve to show how the "’local’"--
those ethnic traits which emerge from different divisions
within their national origins-—mediates the construction of
”community and nation” in order to establish a ”sense of
place and of location in grids of power" (78, 81).
Race/ethnicity/local(ity) is a chain of equivalence here, and
the attempt to create more localized, restricted identities
which reside within the ethnic group and respond to ”power"
mark a theory of subjection through identity: to the
idea/integrity of Asian American Studies as an “inclusive"
umbrella term which will respect South Asian American
differences.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to Asian American
Studies comes from Lavina Shankar’s ”With Kaleidoscope Eyes:
The Potential (Dangers) of Identarian Coalitions" which
appears in the same text has the introduction co-written with
Srikanth. Shankar’s ”kaleidoscopic and futuristic vision"--
the "next stage of cultural politics”-—develops the
”strategic essentialism" strategy more fully than the
previous texts (42, 25). ”Spurious sociological solidity"
must be refused in order to develop identarian coalitions via

a "strategic re-memorying and un-memorying" which, rather

186

 

than serve as an inventory or roster of ethnic
“consciousness," allows an oppressed group to go about
”infusing identity with political charge" (25, 26). With the
flexibility of contextually determining what ”Asian American"
means according to particular social, historical, and
political moments, (South) Asian America, in theory, will be
able to adapt their "historical differences” in a panethnic
setting to effect change (25).

At the same time that this flexibility of identity
allows for a greater freedom under the sign Asian American,
however, Shankar stresses the “heterogeneity" of these
”historical differences” among South Asians despite her
stated goal of ”forging a new collective memory" (27);
similar to the problem introduced by the counterhegemonic in
the Gramscian war of position, there is no stated endpoint
proper for this general strategy of strategic essentialism,
which makes Asian American Studies an eternal enterprise in
need of guiding hands to shape the ”forging" necessary to
produce a collective. For example, Shankar states two
”ultimate goal[s]": to “transcend the categories imposed by
colonial and imperial hegemonies" and the process of ”undoing
categories designed to keep us in place" (41, 42). Explicit
in both of these formulations is that the future resides in
the reaction to the dominant order which produces Asian
America. Likewise, the ”undoing" or "transcending" prescribed
brings South Asian America to a crisis point since

“historical differences"—-those differences produced by

187

colonial and imperial hegemonies that generate the material
inequalities which demand identarian coalitions composed of
historical differences--must be preserved for future
identities. Circling around the problem.of dis-abling power,
Shankar’s goal(s) of either surpassing or disfiguring
dominant “categories"--two antithetical thoughts--end up in
the same place: redeploying identities within a system of
subjection after strategic essentialism ends. Beyond the
"census label" that Shankar and Srikanth claim “Asian
American" is, there is no sustained way to address the
production of subjects by the racial state; rather, we are
encouraged to examine only the imposition of identity in
order to secure truer identities. Whatever the end result--
ethnic ”choice," benign separatism, multiple centers, etc.--
Shankar’s futuristic vision ends up in virtually the same
place it began: as a subject, with identarian possessions, in
a locatable sub-ethnic group. The genus and species both
remain, but in a friendlier, coalitional sense. The “justice"
in Shankar’s formulation is the ability to react to the
political strategically; in other critical areas, South Asian
American Studies proves the rule of Asian American Studies
(which establishes the need for coalitions by its past
exclusions). The benefit of claiming South Asian American
identity within Asian American Studies, without fundamentally
altering the structure of the dominant, will never dislodge
the privileging of subject(ion)s--as Prashad warns us.

Framing Asian America

188

Strategically opposed to the "framing" of the Asian
American subject which results in, predictably, racial
domination, Asian Americanist historians, theorists, and
literary scholars have attempted to (re)describe and
reinscribe the field in order to more accurately portray the
forces and influences that shape and detenmine Asian American
social and political possibilities. At the same time, any
question of how to ”frame” studies of Asian America--how to
situate and describe such work--must take into account what
feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott argues is essential for
”new visions of history": ”[M]aking . . . visible" is ”not
simply a matter of unearthing new facts" but also ”advancing
new interpretations which" provide ”new readings of politics"
and identity (3). Alongside this need to provide new ways of
interpreting historical (and literary) materials, “asking
where the identities come from, when they arise, and what
ends they serve," Scott writes, will allow scholars to avoid
the process by which ”descriptive labels” become ”fixed
categories" (7). Before analyzing the development of
contemporary Asian Americanist literary strategies, I will
examine two historiographical works in order to demonstrate
how the interpretive frames of ”biculturalism” and
"childhood" circumscribe the possibility of thinking other-
wise from traditional understandings of the racial, cultural,
and gendered Other, resulting in historical narratives of
Asian American subjects who are bound into cultural fixity.

The project of unearthing and recuperating Asian American

189

voices from the past, in the end, must guard against using
these voices only to confirm established modes of
comprehending subjectivity and identity.

Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese
Women in San Francisco begins with Yung claiming that her
personal family history grounds her larger concerns with
Chinese American history; as a result, she claims that this
personal, experience-driven revelation will guide us to
“insights into Chinese immigration patterns and the different
experiences of Chinese women from those of men" (1). This
eventually leads, as we will see, to Yung advocating for
Chinese American women’s ”personal experiences" at the
expense of also questioning how such experiences are produced
by wider-ranging discourses of "foreignness” concerning the
East/West divide. While the historical and legal
circumstances and prohibitions that affected Chinese women
were indeed stricter than those that applied to men during
the Exclusion era, Yung alters her argument slightly, marking
her desire to see Chinese American women as ”active agents":
”Taken together, these sources, I believe, provide an
alternative and more accurate view of Chinese American women
than has existed before, for they show definitively that
these women were not passive victims but active agents in
making their own history" (9). The ”sources" that Yung refers
to include oral histories, census data, and, interestingly,
interviews from Robert E. Park’s Survey of Race Relations.

The implications of this are important, mainly because what’s

190

at stake for Yung (”allowing women from the bottom up to tell
their own history”) partly relies upon the sources culled
from the Chicago School which demands the racial other
confess in order to verify and qualify their ability to
”assimilate" (11). The uncritical, unnuanced use of such
sources--and their implicit link to Park and his work on
amalgamation——presents us with a context where Chinese
American women’s history and ”agency" can only be reclaimed

with a tip of the hat to the amalgamation-tinged narratives
of the Chicago School.7

For example, Yung summarizes the situation of Chinese
American women as a “culture dilemma" where a schism
developed between their "desires and rights as individuals”
and the "traditional gender role expectations of their
parents" (107); this divide between East and West is instated
and will remain for the remainder of the work. Beyond merely
pointing out this general distinction, a more interesting
issue emerges in relation to Yung’s evaluative claims; she
writes: ”Whereas Alice [Sue Fun] was raised according to
Chinese tradition, Florence Chinn Kwan faced fewer
restrictions growing up in San Francisco because of the

liberal middle-class background of her parents" (112). Two

 

7 Yung is not the only scholar to use these personal interviews
produced by the Chicago School in this way. Ronald Takaki, for example,
cites the interviews as evidence of authentic Asian American voices in
his Strangers from a Different Shore. Likewise, Sucheng Chan, in her
article which will be discussed shortly, uses the interviews as data.
Given the highly mediated nature of such documents, it is fairly
astounding that none of these scholars deals with or addresses the
origin of the interviews or how they were framed by sociological
concerns.

191

general problems emerge here: low- or working-class Chinese
Americans cannot access the “liberal" leanings of the middle-
class and the proximity to more lax--and presumably less
patriarchal--modes of parenting also enables those middle-
class Chinese Americans to brook the chasm between Chinese
and American modes of gendered behavior. As such, the fact
that women of the middle class are able to become
”individuals" with their own “identities" marks a moment when
the claiming of identity coincides with the familial and
personal disavowal of an imaginary ”Chinese" behavioral
pattern or, as Park puts it, temperament; Chinese Americans,
then, only have to choose not to be racial subjects.
The central tension of Unbound Feet is between the
binaries that Yung deploys in order to make her historical
actors ”active agents’: home/world, public/private, and
”tradition"/freedom. Take, for example, the following:
As young daughters, Chinese American girls had
little choice but to give unquestioning obedience
to their parents. However, as they became older and
more exposed to a Western lifestyle and ideas of
individuality and equality through public school,
church, and popular culture, she began to resist
the traditional beliefs of their immigrant parents,
even to the extent of ridiculing their ”old—
fashioned ways." (115)

Yung employs a fairly straight-forward model of

"biculturalism" to explain how Chinese American women in San

192

Francisco negotiated the boundaries between tradition and
freedom, but because these boundaries are solely a result of
the backward Chinese parents, a dynamic is set up where the
family--because of the inability to come to terms with a
”new" social world--serves as the authoritarian source of
oppression instead of situating the parents and daughters
within a social and political world rife with negotiation and
compromise. Also, Yung lauds Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chiness
Daughter because Jade’s character ”escape[s]" from ”Chinese
tradition” through a bicultural identity that can, like her
pottery, combine ”classic Chinese and western utilitarian
motifs" (120). The ”utilitarian motifs" need to be questioned
at this particular moment; even though the goal of writing
the hidden histories of Chinese American women is crucial for
the Asian American Studies enterprise of examining how the
histories of racial and gendered subjection coalesce at
particular moments, Yung’s narrative/causal frame allows her
to create Chinese American female subjects marked by a dreary
sameness which allows for the ”freedom" of Americanization.
Since we can date Yung's strategy back to the 19205 and the
rise of Chicago Sociology, the ”new interpretations" that
Joan Scott calls for can never be realized: historical
recuperation, in this case, represents recapitulation.
Sucheng Chan, in her essay ”Race, Ethnic Culture, and
Gender in the Construction of Identities among Second-
Generation Chinese Americans, 18805 to 19305," uses Chinese

American autobiographies in an attempt to understand the

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Le

construction of ”identity" in her subjects during the
Exclusion era. In contrast to Yung’s strategy of arguing for
a transition from a particularist and racialized ”culture" to
a liberatory American (gendered) universalism, Chan attempts
to locate Exclusion—era identities within a universalist
psychological framework. Arguing that the selection of
autobiographies she analyzes is "representative," Chan
claims: ”These documents preserved more than the unique
voices of individuals; they likely captured the consciousness
of sizable numbers of Chinese Americans during the historical
period that these documents covered" (129). The
”consciousness" of Chinese Americans, however, relies upon
normative notions of childhood and development which Chan
uses to reclaim the "agency" and “identity" of her subjects’
ephemeral nature; this is accomplished by undergirding her
analysis with Erik H. Erikson’s theories of childhood
development. Offering a curative narrative, Chan contends
that
Although Erikson's theories have not widely been
applied to the study of ethnic identities because
he paid little attention to the impact of culture
on identity formation, a number of his insights,
particularly those on the adolescent phase of human
development, can help us better understand the
evolution of Chinese American identities. (130)
Later, Chan uses Erikson’s notion of “identity crisis" to

analyze why second-generation Chinese Americans felt excluded

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and targeted by their ”Euro—American" peers (138). At all of
these moments, Chan’s analysis hits a wall by merely
accepting the universal process of assimilation and
inflecting it with an ”ethnic" flavor; divorced from any
exigent social pressures, Chinese American identities in
literature/autobiographies only begin to make sense once a
comprehensive psychological explanatory apparatus is
mobilized and established instead of, as we will see, the
interpretation of language and representation(s).

One moment which clearly exemplifies Chan’s
epistemological stop--an intellectual decision to accept, as
a whole, particular disciplinary definitions of identity and
culture-—occurs in the middle of the essay when Victor Wong’s
autobiographical essay is discussed. weng, a Chinese American
who grew up in San Francisco in the 19305, expresses
frustration at his failure to understand Chinese American
culture: ”The thing that is so puzzling is not to know what
Chinese culture is. I mean, I’m taught by my parents what it
means to be Chinese, and then I watch their actions, and
there’s so much discrepancy" (Chan, "Race" 149, emphasis in
original). Chan interprets this passage as a failure on the
Chinese parents’ part; Chinese immigrant parents ”tried their
best to pass on to their children the ideals they had learned
from their own childhoods in China, [but] they did not always
follow those guiding principles after they arrived in the
United States" (149, emphasis in original). Apart from Chan’s

tight interpretive frame--where Chinese culture is something

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that must be aspired to and worked for--Wong’s statement
presents us with an opportunity to inquire about an
inconsistency or rupture within the concept of Chinese
culture in the first place; eliding Wong’s ”is" and
subsequent ”to be," Chan assumes a content and inventory of
Chinese culture--constituted by ”ideals"--without addressing,
respectively, the foundational and performative aspects and
definitions of Chinese culture that weng wishes his parents
would exemplify. As a result, the historical question of
Asian American subjectivity isn’t really a question, but
rather an investigation that anchors subjectivity to one
(universalist) model of understanding racialized identity
without entertaining the possibility of alternatives or,
frankly, providing an interpretation of such an identity.
Examining the constitution of the subject as an ”active
agent," then, prevents a questioning of how subjects are
manufactured and how subjection may eventually end.

The frame or borders of Asian America loosen in
contemporary literary criticism, which actively approaches

identity and subjection as first-order concerns that affect

how Asian American literary and cultural studies can proceed.8

 

3 In the following section, I will analyze a number of works that
both challenge the reading practices associated with Asian American
literary criticism in order to rethink our approaches to understanding
the nature of and prospects for Asian American subjection and identity.
By tracing the emergence of a literary criticism which admits
alternative reading practices and wider, more "global" contexts into
their analyses--especially in light of this chapter’s preoccupation with
subjection and subjectivity--we are able to view how the recurring
pressure points of race and racial subjection produce works which
attempt to revise the very foundations of Asian American Studies.

196

For example, Patricia Chu maintains that the “multiple
marginalization" that Asian American women writers face in
writing a ”literature defining American identity" invariably
results in a ”more complex range of narrative strategies than
their brothers require" (Chu 5). A recurring dilemma in these
literary studies, however, is how to surmount the obstacle of
a nation-bound identity given the diasporic history of Asian
America. Chu responds by reconsolidating the national,
assimilative narrative by arguing, “To be Asian American, one
claims Americanness but reshapes conventional narratives of
American subject formation" (6, emphasis in original). As a
result, subjectivity may only be reshaped or challenged by
ethnic particularity but never transformed due to a reliance
upon minimally "proving" Americanness. This process of proof-
through-difference generates ”literature that is both
American and transformative of established, implicitly Anglo-
American norms," intimating that Asian American literature
serves as a salvage project which (re)claims and ”transforms”
the racial organization of society so as to introduce more
”ethnic" and ethical norms. The end result of obliging this
literature to a work of recouping identity through
citizenship results in Chu’s claim that the ”interracial
couple who relish difference without inequity" in Maxine Hong
Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (which will be
discussed below) ”signal[s] the prospect of Asian American
subjects’ true interpellation into the nation" (188, emphasis

added). Benign racial differences which result in an equality

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that assimilates the Asian American subject into the national
narrative, however, follows an amalgamation logic: biological
access to whiteness and interracial reproduction initiates
the process of inclusion for Kingston’s Chinese American
characters. When Chu asks, at the end of her work, ”[W]hen
will Asian Americans write as assimilated subjects, and when
we do, what will it mean to write as Asian American?" the die
has already been cast: racial identity will disappear at the
moment (the violence of amalgamative) assimilation has been
overtaken by thoughts about “what we [Asian Americans] should
become" (188, 189). Alternately, to write as Asian American
after the ”success" of assimilation will mean that Asian
American literature has acceded to the racial order’s
concessions, accepting the limited revisions to racialized
and cultured subjectivity in order to take the next step
toward a ”new social order” where ”Asian American" exists in
a deracinated, cultured state (189). With Asian American
literature slowly becoming a predicate of ”straight” American
literature in purpose and content, Chu attempts to spur the
process of inclusion along without protest; her work
reinstates the borders of the nation and national identity so
that equality can be realized through a forced sameness in
literary intent and racial identity.

In a more direct manner, Jinqui Ling, in Narrating
Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in AsianyAmerican Litsraturs,
attempts to ”intervene” in the ”privileging of content over

form in assessments of ’traditional texts’" (Narrating v).

198

Because Asian American literary studies has surpassed the
need of ”mid-19705 and early 19805" critical works to examine
the ”social or political function" of literature, Ling
advocates for a methodology which stresses both cultural
studies and neo—pragmatist approaches in order to avoid a
”presentist theoretical agenda" (v, vii). Along with this
investment in developing a deep historical context to be more
“responsive" in the interpretation of Asian American literary
texts, Ling expresses his desire to construct a
”progressively pluralistic culture that creatively privileges
multiple centers" (viii). These multiple centers have two
major ramifications. First, ”historically constituted
constraints" upon writer’s thoughts must be foregrounded in
order to demonstrate how the ”easy fulfillment of their
strategically conceived counterhegemonic goals"--which
current works stress in their ”presentism"--have been
prevented by nebulous social and political forces which have
determined writers’ opportunities for publication (9);
squarely locating interpretive authority in the critic’s
ability to establish a definitive historical context, Ling
assumes that the historical record as it pertains to literary
production can be fully realized in a transparent way.
Secondly, Ling criticizes post-structuralist literary theory
in a general sense since it "does not arise from the actual
historical condition of Asian Americans’ displacement" from
the national narrative of citizenship (9). By noting how the

"uncritical application" of theory can never help the

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”socially disenfranchised" to speak ”meaningfully about their
social betterment," Ling’s populist stance stresses an
indigenous/autochthonous theoretical agenda whereby minority
literatures must produce their own interpretive theories
because they serve as alternative “centers" of discourse. The
tension between the historical constraints which determine
the ”sayable" in Asian American literature and the noble,
autochthonous nature of such literature is palpable; despite
Asian America’s subjection (and enforced racial limitations),
we must also develop a wholly separate theory of
interpretation that serves and "reflects" the ”peoples’"
concerns--as if the “people" appear without mediation.

The peoples’ concerns, however, are contained within
hermetically sealed pasts; since literary texts serve as
documentary evidence of the constraints writers faced in
forming their literary arguments, critics cannot pass
philosophical or epistemological judgement on these texts; we
can, however, rationalize our support for the texts’ goals
and aims. Ling notes how the ground-breaking Asian American
literary anthology Aiiieeeee! ”clearly reflects both the
limitations of the ideological horizons available" to the
editors and ”their provisional need for a one-directional
method of contestation”--evidenced by the cultural
nationalist bent of the collection (14). Thinking, while
certainly historical, becomes frozen in time, and because
contemporary critics are unable to come to terms with the

presentist frame they tend to place around ”dated" discourse,

200

we must respect the integrity of older arguments since only
certain modes of thinking were available at “that time." Ling
stresses how authors’ “social imagination[s]" were shaped by
three ”determinants" which are situated in a ”social-material
terrain . . . frequently inhospitable to the voices of the
emergent": “authorial design, available social space, and
accessible cultural resources” (30). But the “fundamental"
need for Asian American writers to construct an ”alternative
space in which to organize and articulate agency--through
lived historical subjects of the state" marks the two-tiered,
separatist nature of Ling’s critique: past and present are
incommensurable and "agency" is only productively theorized
in an ”alternative space” through real ”historical subjects"
(160). If our analyses of alternatives are limited by the
alternatives’ datedness (and our misguided critiques of them
due to our ”presentist" tendencies), they are failed
alternatives. Despite the variegated historical circumstances
that authors from different periods faced, the common origins
of hegemonic rule and counterhegemonic response(s) prove that
there are no separate spheres in developing these
alternatives since agency--or the desire to determine an
indigenous will--serves as an imagined escape from racial
subjection.

Advancing another attempt to escape the racialist
circumscription of Asian American literature, Viet Thanh
Nguyen stresses the ”ideological diversity" of contemporary

Asian America and how Asian Americanists actively work

201

against this diversity because of their “own biases and
priorities" affecting the interpretation of literary texts
(Nguyen vi). In Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics
in Asian America, Nguyen contends that critics need to
approach literature and politics in a more objective vein
since the ”actual multiplicity” of Asian America is often
submerged by the general ”intellectual perception" and
deformation of its ”actual" articulation (vi); in this more
”objective" and responsible vein, intellectuals can develop
effective ways to ”study, organize and lead"--ways which
avoid the ”crisis of representation" between the critically
imagined and palpably ”real" circumstances of Asian American
lives and thought (vi). Also, Nguyen asserts that the
institutionalization of Asian American Studies has lead, in
part, to a general ”strategy of panethnic entrepreneurship"
that critics engage in--where they trade in the "commodity of
race" (4). As a result, the search for "resistance" in
literary texts--”resistance” that ignores how “global
capitalism” reifies ”Asian American culture" by substituting
”relationships between things" for “human relationship[s]"--
is merely a careerist move meant to consolidate personal
privilege as an Asian Americanist intellectual (4-5, 9). But
Nguyen’s political critique is quickly undercut by his notion
of ”ideological diversity" in that he recognizes ”Asian
American neoconservative political leadership" and its
ability to “lay claim to the mantle of what Antonio Gramsci

calls the ’organic intellectual’—-the intellectual of the

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people, a position to which Asian American intellectuals now
generally aspire” (13). Bypassing the working-/subaltern-
class origins of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals who organize
counterhegemonic movements against the hegemonic state,
Nguyen substitutes the Asian Americanist academic "industry”
for the racial state, resulting in a critique which ignores
neoconservative complicity with racialist thought;
neoconservatives, in this formulation, serve as proxies for
the state in that the ”ideological diversity" they represent
is only opposite to more left-leaning academic politics. This
key dilemma puts Nguyen’s project of ”criticizing American
society’s methods of racial and class domination” at risk,
since the ”self-critique” that Asian Americanists should
submit to must operate within the context of ”real," diverse
Asian Americans who can, contradictorily, lay claim to
conservative revolution (11).

By noting the dissonance between the ”real” and
intellectually "fancied" Asian America, Nguyen’s strategy
mirrors Lisa Lowe’s desire to redefine the ”political project
for Asian American studies" so that the field ”does not
proceed from an assumption of the uniformity of the political
subject along lines of racial, ethnic, or cultural identity”
(”Epistemological" 274). The risks of acknowledging this
“diversity" with Asian America, however, are exposed in
Nguyen’s critique of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s novel Blu’s Hangipg
where, in contradistinction to the thought that ”Asian

America . . . [is] oppressed first by dominant [white]

203

society," the “local community, in many of the most important
events . . . [are] responsible for both the alienation and
inclusion of its members" (Nguyen 161, emphasis in original).
Removed from the larger social sphere of racial domination,
Nguyen uses intraethnic exclusions to support his
prescriptive theory of Asian Americans ”fracturing" around
“more complicated notion[s] of socioeconomic equality,"
especially in terms of ”economic interests" since racial
oppression can also be perpetuated by the racially oppressed
(166). This new orientation for Asian American politics
relies upon an understanding of whiteness where Asian
Americans possess the ability to write, someday, as
“assimilated subjects" so that they “may become white or
become aligned with whiteness" (169). The intellectual fancy
of Nguyen’s proposition--that Asian Americans will someday
assimilate (biologically?) and that race, in this way, is
mutable-—refuses to make a distinction between ontological
similarity and political alignments; put another way,
becoming white involves both a process of literally becoming

white and espousing, presumably, the white racial politics

that place Asian America in subordination.9 For Nguyen, using

 

9 In order to support his point, Nguyen claims that Ronald
Takaki’s notion that ethnicity is subordinate to race-~which is
“fundamental for Asian American intellectuals"--is “based upon" the
following ”tautology” (which, strictly speaking, is not a tautology):
“the Irish can become white because they look white, and the Chinese
cannot become white because they do not look white" (Nguyen 169). Though
correctly pointing out that ”race is . . . something that we learn to
see," Nguyen argues, wrongheadedly I believe, that race is and was "not
inherently visible through physical characteristics” in the present
(170). By assuming that the nineteenth—century illustrations and
political cartoons he mentions--notably those of Thomas Nast--are

204

race for ”pursuing the long-term radical political goals" is
dangerous because the ”short-term goals of a middle-class-
based project of nationalist assimilation into a capitalist
society" are more immediate, pressing, and ”real" (24,
emphasis in original). Preferring to confront the threat of
Asian America’s full integration into a global capitalist
system, Nguyen overlooks the systemic nature of racial

organization and forces a strategy of ”resistance” that
diminishes the ”lesser" threat of racial subjection.10

Seemingly evacuating the political from Viet Nguyen’s

sense of global capital, David Eng attempts to combine queer

 

evidence of major shifts in racial thought and not evidence of ongoing
conversations concerning the place of the Irish in the American racial
system, Nguyen claims that the "Irish did not look white" (169, emphasis
in original); Whatever the ”dynamic and unpredictable" nature of race
is or becomes, Nguyen’s idea that ethnicity can override race while race
still serves as an essential marker of differentiation--indeed, he does
not argue against this premise-—jumps the gun by assuming that
resistance can be coopted by whites' attempts to realize Asian American
incorporation by ”ethnicizing" them (170); in effect, Nguyen assumes the
rightness of a more extreme form of the ”model minority" thesis in that
Asian Americans, because all ethnicities (despite their racial status)
can become white in a wholesale manner. Likewise, Nguyen’s dismissal of
Takaki’s legal and historical analysis-~that the “American racial
pattern . . . will continue long after the enactment of legislation
prohibiting discrimination based on color, race, or ethnic origin,
unless public policies act affirmatively to overcome racial inequality"
because of racial subjection’s origin in codified legal exclusion(s)--
cannot confront the “long-term" nature of racial rule (Takaki,
”Reflections" 34).

10 This View can be contrasted with David Leiwei Li’s contention:
"[W]hile I recognize the inevitable political nature of all forms of
representation, I do not believe that the symbolic struggle over image
and identity in the aesthetic realm can necessarily be substituted for
the real struggle over social resources and justice" (Li 15). Whereas
Nguyen (re)deploys a notion of representation that is more accurate in
admitting the “ideological diversity" of Asian America (while minimizing
the urgency of racial oppression in favor of class issues), Li
disentangles representation from “justice," thereby viewing literature
and literary studies as the “cultural practice of testing boundaries,
critiquing existing social arrangements, and imagining more emancipatory
relations" (16).

205

theory with diasporic studies in order to “orient the future
development of Asian American political strategies . . . away
from a politics of cultural nationalism to a politics of
transnational culturalism" (Eng 220). Yet Eng’s project is
more directly concerned with addressing the ”’reality’ of
race," which appears at the intersection of the ”psychic" and
the ”material” (20). Noting the ”false opposition between the
’psychological’ trajectory of the humanities" solely to
describe Asian American identity and ”’material’ emphasis of
the social sciences” which aims to make racism
”quantifiable," Eng’s Racial Castration: Managing Masculinitv
in Asian America characterizes the typical Asian Americanist
concern with "home"-—with the nation serving as a site of
identity—-as not recognizing the ”material contradictions of
institutionalized racism that claim . . . inclusion” despite
Asian America’s being ”systemically excluded” (19-20, 22).
This approach, unlike those of Chu, Ling, and Nguyen,
promises to get at the heart of subjectivity's (re)production
through racial and sexual subjection by ”denaturaliz[ing]
claims to the space of the U.S. nation-state as enfranchised
citizen-subjects" (209). While I think key portions of Eng’s
proposal are essential for Asian American Studies to
incorporate, it is important to express reservations
concerning both “transnational culturalism" and the desire to
develop a ”sustained psychoanalytical model" which would, in
a “responsible" manner, combine with Asian American Studies

to ”reformulate and transform the conditions under which we

206

claim our identities and communities" (28). Rather than
incorporating the possibility of a future ”end" of/to Asian
American Studies as Kent Ono suggests, Eng advances a “model"
which attempts to create a more just and fair ground (or
foundation) on which to establish ”Asian American identity
and community" (28). Regardless of whether or not this
”ground" is more equalitarian or right—headed, claiming and
establishing a newer version of Asian America is still caught
in the bind of the "double gesture" of the state’s racial
recognition which contains an acknowledgement of minority
status while not fundamentally altering the social
organization of race (Martinot 26). Steve Martinot rightly
maintains that opposing ”racism.from within the racializing
function of the state" invariably betrays “itself to that
racializing function," and strategies must be developed to
counter the ”concretiz[ation]” of racial existence in order
to ”reencounter" the Other without “generalizations" (208).
This “reencounter,” however, is not about discovery or
new knowledges of an alternative Asian America, and Eng’s
Racial Castration cogently points out that the current modes
of racial belonging and subjectivity must be “denaturalized”
and delinked from the notion of a ”home" within a racial
system. The queering of Asian America, as we will see in R.
Linmark Zamora’s work below, begins with the de-formation of
the Asian American subject so that the performance of the
subject--as racialized or assimilated or amalgamated--can be

seen as dependent upon the forms of racialization already

207

 

 

 

in
At

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present and determinative of the subject in the first place.
At the crossroads of the epistemological and the
social/material and, arguably, the minority class closest to
”whiteness" as an economic structure, Asian America occupies
a unique position, a social emplacement that can both lay
claim to the space of ”America" and challenge it through the
apparent ”foreignness" of its appearance. By examining Maxine
Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, Chang-Rae
Lee’s Native Speaker, and R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling ths R’s
in the next section, we will see how strategies of reclaiming
America attempt to avoid the desires to be fully incorporated
into the (racial) American system while, at the same time,
offering possibilities for rethinking community, belonging,
and identity on non-exclusionary grounds.
Imagining

In the second epigraph of this chapter, the narrator of
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monksy: His FaksiBook
describes protagonist Wittman Ah Sing’s mental calculations
when dealing with Yoshi Ogasawara, a “Nisei girl of Okinawan
ancestry” who he’s ”in hate" with (107, 106). Yoshi tells a
group of white friends why she wants to have surgery on her
epicanthic folds: to create ”double lids" for her eyes
because whites ”’don’t like [single-lid] eyes like ours’"
(107). Wittman decides to invert the rules that govern the
”chessboard” or order of racialized standards of ”beauty" by
turning on Yoshi, calling her talk ”Nazi anthropology” while

thinking she’s a ”[s]ick seppuku chick” with her ”shameful,

208

unique deformity" (107, 108). Celebrated as Kingston’s
attempt to describe a "new community that is truly more
inclusive," Tripmaster Monkey investigates the possibility of
“upsetting" the racial order by re-presenting the narrative
of Asian America--and America writ large--through Wittman’s
ambitious, never-ending play that ends the novel (Chu 174).
Yet how do we deal with the rejection of Yoshi, Wittman’s
fellow Asian American, who ingratiates herself to the white
constituency by expressing a desire for surgery that will
partially realize a kind of Asian American racial
amalgamation? Shameful and deformed, Yoshi serves as an
object of hate for Wittman, an embodiment of Asian America
dissatisfied with itself and actively seeking a technology
(or surgery) of inclusion through the excision of its racial
looks. Because of Wittman’s development as an "ethnic” artist
who attempts to include everybody in his "play,” Kingston
details a possible shift in thinking for Asian America.
Rather than inverting the racial rule of order by “becoming"
white, Kingston, in the end, offers a vision of the
”impossible," an alternative to racialization which avoids
both accommodation and intraethnic exclusion and upsets and
overturns the racial order.

Wittman's hate, evidently, cannot accommodate the
”heterogeneity" of America that Elliot H. Shapiro claims is
at the center of Kingston’s theorizations of America (6).
Despite strategic citations of Chinese texts like Journey to

the West, the attempt by Wittman in Tripmaster Monkey to both

209

”define a community" and think that “[c]ommunity is not built
once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-
create it" reveals the central tension of a ”heterogeneous”
Asian America in search of ”unity": the attempt to produce
inclusion must be vigilant-—socially and politically--and
guard against the violence and exclusiveness of group
identity which creates the need for inclusion (Kingston 306).
Described as a kunstlerroman that attempts to address the
marginalization of the ethnic artist by making the ”margin .
. . a site of agency and empowerment," Kingston’s work also
relies upon the logic of the ”fake book,” a compendium of
jazz "standards" (with chord changes and lyrics) ostensibly
meant to serve as a minimal guide for musicians to use in
developing their own ”improvisations" and ”fresh
interpretations" of popular songs (Maini 243; H. Wong 3). If
community, as Wittman theorizes, must be imagined and re-
created according to a minimal template in order for agency
to be realized, then the content that undergirds or supports
this narrative must be examined; much like the fake-book
logic which encourages individual performance within a
“unified," translated standard, Kingston’s novel purportedly
advances a structuring of community that attempts to
”reconcile unity and identity" by demonstrating how Wittman’s
play, ”as in real life,” expresses ”things . . . [that are]
happening all over the place" (Kingston 298).

Despite all of these ”happenings," Wittman’s play leaves

us with an inclusive community that attempts to revise the

210

national narrative through the reclamation of American
identity; this community, as Irma Maini points out, can only
come from an individual’s “[imbibing] the lessons of communal
love and responsibility from his extended Chinese and
Chinese-American ’family’" (252). Wittman pines for a more
enlightened ethnic identity where the ”superior man loves
anyone he sets his mind to. Otherwise, we’re fucked" (337).
In the same breath and opposed to the critical assessments
that deem the novel a success in building a new ”community
based on multiplicity rather than uniformity," Kingston
informs us that the production of a ”new" Asian American
identity and community is a ”work" of "the impossible"
(Williams 98; Kingston 277). Rather than leave the world to
decisions about ”who" to love, Kingston uses Wittman as a
limit-case for arguments concerned with the ”inclusion" of
Asian America. Though the logics of nationhood and belonging
have determined Asian American subjectivity in the past, all
that we know now is that “they"--those who possess the
ability to enforce the borders of national identity--have (or
are) ”lost” (Kingston 340). And perhaps this is all we need
to know.

Broadly speaking, Wittman’s strategy of reclaiming
American identity is exemplified by his staging of a
perpetual play with an ever-expanding cast constituted by
whomever wants to join in. Before the play is staged,
however, Wittman applies for unemployment benefits; as a

condition of receiving the benefits, he must watch a cartoon

211

which offers instructions for job interviews. When the
cartoon’s voice-over commands applicants to "’Come alone to
the interview’," Wittman thinks the following:
An American stands alone. Alienated, tribeless,
individual. To be a successful American, leave your
tribe, your caravan, your gang, your partner, your
village cousins, your refugee family that you’re
making the money for, leave them behind. (Kingston
246)
The call to represent oneself as a deracinated worker
(removed from ”community") is analogous, in Wittman's mind,
to the racialist notion that Asians are ”inscrutable” and
”unknowable"; whites’ ”willful innocence" and the rules of
work and capitalist accumulation gloss over the enforced
estrangement of the ethnic (worker) from his/her social
context (310). All context--personal, familial, historical--
is left behind at the moment of incorporating the (racially)
impoverished into the nation. Wittman solves this problem by
claiming in his book-ending soliloquy, ”Pretty soon we'll all
be miscegenated and intermarried, we’ll be patriotic to more
than one place" (333). Introducing the possibility of
interracial love (and reproduction) as well as a future
without the "American" imperative of a patriotism that
excludes and must be worked for, Wittman envisions a
unification to come; this unification of America consists in
the disappearance of both race and nations.

While the realization of this dual disappearance is

212

never fully formulated by Wittman by the end of the novel,
Kingston argues that the nation only emerges by producing
”unity" through war. Joining a group who has dosed on LSD at
a party, a sober Wittman watches the ”snow" on a television.
With or without illicit drugs, everyone imagines pictures and
images on the set (on an ”open channel to a possible
future"), and Wittman pictures American "nuke mutants” after
World War III (Kingston 96). After the nuclear blast, he sees
a baby “attached to its mother’s back . . . permanently”
(96). Fused together with a common, suffering fate, the
dystopic mother/child figure represents the shared, violent
reproduction of the literal nuclear family (through nuclear
destruction). Thinking that the nuclear age ushers in an age
of accelerated ”evolution," nations can only effect unity
through a violent assault on “Nature" (96). Since this
violence exhibits a specifically “human" nature, Wittman’s
only curative is to be patient, wait for amalgamation to
happen, and, in the meantime, “declare" that he possesses an
”American face" (314). Staging a two-stage process of future
peace--making a down payment in the form of claiming Asian
America’s Americanness in order to usher in a new “nature" of
”peace"--Wittman envisions only two future options: the
state’s coercive unity or his own identity of declaration and
belonging.

At the end of the novel, however, Kingston has Wittman
reflect on this ”attack” on American exclusion, and he

realizes that despite the racial ordering, nuclear weapons,

213

and the “clanging and banging" of war, America continues to
be “lost" (340). Changing into a ”pacifist,” he realizes that
all wars of identity-—regardless of whether they end in a
plurality or a disaggregated multitude--are wars of
“master[y]" and domination (340). Rather than work on the
impossible full inclusion of the racialized group-~be it
through amalgamation or the claiming of Americanness to
guarantee a place in greater white society--Kingston’s novel
ends with a final call to cease the warring; in this way, the
impossible and unlocatable future apart the structures of
racial domination that cause segregation may be approached
without the lure of conditional inclusion.

Wars of identity take center stage in Chang-Rae Lee’s
Native Speaker, and the post-1965 nature of Asian America as
a product of increased immigration--supposedly producing a
new “Rome"--spurs on an increased surveillance of the
nation’s borders and racial hierarchies by white power (Lee
237). Perhaps the most obvious feature of the novel, besides
Lee’s reformulation of the spy novel, is the central figure
of family, and there are three separate configurations of
family which either confront or maintain the racial
structuring of society: Henry Park’s, John Kwang’s, and the
family that encompasses everyone within the borders of
America. As with John Kwang’s campaign to become mayor of New
York City (which meets the white political establishment’s
violence), Henry Park’s interracial relationship with Leila,

along with their "mixed" son Mitt, demonstrates the

214

inevitable death of any challenge to the fixed racial
ordering of America. In the end, we are left with a broken
politics which can only attempt to make minorities more
”visible" by erasing their political invisibility. As such,
the domestic concerns of Kingston prove to be important for
Lee’s critique: any ”denaturalization" of Asian American
identity must not collapse the distinction between Asian and
Asian American since, as Sau-ling Cynthia Wong points out,
the domestic and foreign as it relates to Asian America is
”still distinct," and the ”political consequences" of
assuming a “new" America (in a “transnational" sense) risks
forgetting the “minority" status of Asian Americans within
the American political structure ("Denationalization" 20).
Despite the ”biracial" make-up of his son Mitt, Henry
Park soon realizes that miscegenation will never effectively
counter the social enforcement of racial distinctions. As
such, the interracial family-—and its biological byproducts--
will always fail in addressing both social and political
exclusions. For example, Mitt is described as a ”child of
ceaseless movement,” and his body, for Henry, is ”beautifully
jumbled and subversive and historic" because ”[n]o one . . .
had ever looked like that" (Lee 101, 103). Contrasted with
Henry’s ”difficult face"--a face that purportedly represents
foreignness--Mitt’s white/Asian ”mix” holds a promise for
escaping racial determination: the "jumbled" becomes
”subversive” at the moment when one’s racial background can’t

be easily determined or posited (323). This dream of

215

inclusion through amalgamation, though, is quickly quashed by
Mitt’s death underneath a ”dog pile" where the white
neighborhood kids leap on top of Mitt and suffocate him--
playfully, literally, and “accident[ally]" enforcing racial
subordination (105). Noting, through memory, the “spontaneous
creche" of Mitt's death, Lee squarely dismisses any
liberatory logic of the “birth" of a new nation despite
Henry’s “romantic notion of identity": biracial nativity will
asphyxiate under the pressure and weight of a racial system
based on hypodescent (Lee 104; Chen 639). This much is
evident in the epithets Mitt faced before his death; the
neighborhood kids, after initially referring to Mitt in
standard anti-Asian epithets like ”Chink” and ”gook," begin
to call him “mutt" and ”mongrel” after seeing Henry and Leila
(103). The interracial family, then, consists of a tainted
whiteness which can never he escaped, and all attempts to
ground a liberatory racial politics upon race-mixing will
perpetually fail due to the enforceable borders of (pure)
white racial identity.

John Kwang, a local politician from Queens, attempts to
construct a multiracial political constituency in response to
non-whites’ limited access to American political structures;
this more inclusive grouping, however, is subject to the
regulatory mechanisms of the state, especially the
Immigration and Naturalization Service. In his campaign,
Kwang constructs a new ”house" and ”family" by investing in

the “pure idea of family . . . which in its most elemental

216

version must have nothing to do with blood" (Lee 146).
Linking up Korean American and African American concerns,
Kwang meets with Black ministers and, afterwards, tells a
throng of supporters to "think differently" in order to
realize that the “sadness and pain and injustice” of
racialized existence brooks the ”differences" between racial
groups’ differential treatment and histories of oppression
(151, 152). In spite his desire to create a coalitional
politics, Kwang’s establishment of a ggeh or Korean money
club proves to be the weak link that allows the INS to

effectively end his political campaign--due to the “illegal"
status of many of the ggeh’s members.11 Henry, as a spy

employed to gather information on Kwang, is obliged to
provide a list of the ggeh’s members to his boss, Dennis
Hoagland, because an anonymous source has been worried about
Kwang’s challenge to their ”vested interests" (18); we can
safely surmise from the narrative that the New York State and
U.S. governments have been keeping tabs on Kwang’s mayoral
campaign as part of their strategy to ”marginalize" and
”isolate" the "ethnic challenger" (36). As a result, Kwang’s
attempt at creating a ”family of thousands" confronts the
central problem of minority politics: ”There aren’t enough of

our own” (326). This is the Middle Passage that non-white

 

11 A ggeh is similar to the ”rotating credit systems" established
by Chinese Americans (woi), Korean Americans (kae), and Japanese
Americans (tanomoshi) earlier in the century to provide enough capital
to establish businesses. Generally, the rotating credit systems allowed
Asian Americans to borrow the money that banks wouldn’t lend them
because of racist lending practices (Takaki 275).

217

America still faces, according to Lee: the growing post-1965
immigrant constituency of Asian America, which represents a

”new life,” will invariably meet the old life of racial
hierarchy (327); Asian America still travels in bondage.12

As an alternative to building a political constituency,
Henry proposes an alternate understanding of America which
confronts the "invisibility" of Asian America by noting that
”who we are" as Americans should be a matter of linguistic
and ontological presence (349). In the final scene of the
novel, Henry accompanies Leila to her ESL classroom and helps
her teach English to the children of immigrants. Noting that
citizenship is solely an ”accident of birth,” Henry is also
aware of the underfunding of ESL classes (to the point of
claiming that the instruction won’t ”make much difference")
(Lee 334, 348). As a result, citizenship, while accidental,
serves as an institution vested in determining the standards
for linguistic assimilation (despite the lack of monetary
investment). This coercion without state support is countered
by Leila’s strategy of proving that the children have
"nothing to fear" (349); she gives each student a
personalized ”sunburst—shaped badge" written on it, letting
each child know that they are ”good citizen[s]" (349).
Patricia Chu reads the ending as a simple ”reaffirm[ation]":

the students will ”one day be assimilated subjects" because

 

12 Likewise, Kwang’s ggeh, and his campaign in general, fail
because he invests too highly in ”paternal[istic]" systems (Lee 334).
This can be seen is Kwang’s abusive relationship with his wife, May, as
well as his role as organizer of the ggeh, siring a new political
constituency which can only be conceptualized as ”family" (145, 252).

218

Leila “becomes the person who calls the names" of the
students as they wait for their badges (3). But the
"difficult names" (of ”who we are"), because they are
uttered--with difficulty--by Leila, works against Chu’s
argument; even Leila, who serves as the novel’s linguistic
“standard-bearer," has trouble assimilating the children’s
names into her lexicon (Lee 12).

Alternately, Min Song contends, accurately, that Leila
is portrayed in an ”atemporal" manner, and this banishment
from time (and character development) permits the patriarchal
investments of the novel’s male characters to develop over
the course of the narrative (and over the female characters)
(187). The misogynistic nature of the narrative, however,
allows Lee to posit Leila, also, as a figure of white
American reproduction, insuring the ”dream” of inclusion via
linguistic citizenship for the children of immigrants--a
narrative of immigrant development which appears against the
backdrop of unchanging standards of (white) citizenship and
inclusion. In opposition, Henry attempts to situate the
children in a temporal scheme by claiming that the students
are ”who we are" as a nation (349); the children represent
the growth and "diverse" nature of America due to its
burgeoning racial and linguistic complexity. To this end, the
”dozen lovely and native languages" that Leila speaks proves
the being-there--the always-already presence--of difference
within U.S. borders (349). Leila is a doubled character with

her pronunciation difficulties and her ease in including all

219

of the children as "citizens" regardless of their language
capacities, and this mirrors the formulation that Lee
advances overall: until the majority can reconcile its racial
standards of inclusion and citizenship with the
”difficulties" that racial, foreign, and linguistic others
embody, we will face an aggressive reproduction of white
America through deportations, violence, and regimes of
privilege. Unlike the general notion of cultural identity in
South Asian American Studies, Lee’s notion of distinction
without coercive judgement is idealistic, assuming a future
white benevolence instead of a redeployment of ethnic
identity and difference through cultural politics. But
without the thought of America’s potential deracinated being,
the possibility of a future without ”resistance”--without the
reinvestment in various racialisms--will never be realized.
Marking the tension between the ”uneven production of
abstract nationalist subjects" and the ”disavowal of social
identities," R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R's_relies upon
a discourse of the ”closet" in order to mark the “queer"
circumstances of subject production (Eng 224). Linmark
centers a majority of the narrative’s vignettes on Edgar
Ramirez and Vincente, two Filipino Americans living in the
poor Kalihi neighborhood on Oahu, Hawai’i; in doing so,
Vincente’s missing last name and his inability to come out of
the sexual closet exposes the central problem for Asian
America according to Linmark: the enforced inability to

articulate one’s ”full" racial and sexual ”queerness" for

220

fear of social repercussions is a reflection of the American
”style" of social integration (which depends upon continued
racial segregation) (Linmark 49). David Eng, in his analysis
of the novella, argues that ”queerness” allows for a ”form of
social and political organization that proffers the
provisional identity of a name," which allows a group to
develop a "progressive politics" based on negotiations of
identity (Eng 226). The end point of such a politics,
however, lies in a “transnational culturalism" (220); on the
other hand, I argue that Rolling the R’s forces the hand of
white supremacy by demanding Asian Americans determine the
”side" they are ”on" in combating social exclusions (Linmark
119). The condition necessary for progressive politics’
emergence is an unrepentant identification with a corrosive
queerness which attacks whites’ ”Asthmatic Otraphobia," the
condition of white protectionism that either suffocates
racial others or, if forced into the close proximity of the
nation-as-closet without an escape, suffocates itself
(Linmark 108). Present-day America, then, must come out of
the closet of ”constitutive [racial and sexual]
differentials" which result in social segregation (Eng 225).
The way to truly “feel mighty real” in the face of
oppression, for Linmark, is to ”make that move" (on the dance
floor, in the schools, in the government) so that all of us
will “be waitin’" for the endless articulation of an America
to come--apart from racial domination (Linmark 27).

In his fifth-grade classroom, Edgar Ramirez

221

characterizes America--constituted by a nationalist pedagogy
and reality which excludes racially- and linguistically-
deficient subjects in separate classes and school districts--
as ”not the freakin’ meltin' pot but one volcano” which, one
day, is ”goin’ erupt" (Linmark 49, 70). Ending Ms. Takemoto’s
exercise of having each student identify their ethnicity,
Edgar also points to the most pressing and difficult conflict
that comes with Asian American subjecthood/subjection:
determining which "side" one belongs to. Nelson Ariola, a
Filipino American who "says he is an American although he is
as Filipino as any Filipino can be," attempts to sidestep the
bounds of racial subjecthood by asserting that he’s ”’not
like’” other Filipinos because he doesn’t ”speak Tagalog or
Ilocano" (68). But English proficiency cannot save Nelson, as
Edgar reminds him, since he’s the ”’best candidate for Mr.
Pinoy--brown skin, yellow teeth, and no nose’" (68). Edgar, a
fair skin ”mestizo born in the U S of A," chides Nelson’s
middle-class-infected aspirations--the latter’s father is a
lawyer and his mother is a nurse--because, regardless of
social and economic success, the racial predicate will
inflect even whiteness with an ”ethnic" or ”cultural"
identity. Ms. Takemoto’s ethnicity-locating activity, which
demands an ”appreciation” of the mixed constitution of the
classroom and naturalizing/aestheticizing the modifying
effect of the non-white on ”America," reflects the impossible
status of Asian American belonging: assumed, ”appreciative"

inclusion is determined by the exclusions that engulf it.

222

By analogy, Linmark portrays the Hawaiian tourist
industry as complicit with this process of ethnic/racial
exclusion; as a result, ethnic identification is a strategy
which encourages ”recognition" for minorities but can never
help in insuring equality. White tourists, on the other hand,
are unable to see Hawai’i as anything else except a
destination for affirming patriotism (and divorcing the
island from the mainland’s racial economy via the ability to
indulge in leisure). There are two buses on Oahu: the
”unventilated green bus" that makes local stops and the
yellow air-conditioned bus which stops at the USS
Arizona/Pearl Harbor Memorial, the pineapple fields, the
sugar plantations, and ”Sea Life Park" (Linmark 106, 107).
Katrina, Edgar’s friend, mentions that the yellow bus can
”make one quick getaway to Waikiki" from Kalihi via the
freeway so that tourists don’t ”freak out" when they run into
the racial others that live on the island and who aren’t
involved in the tourism industry (107, 108). Both Katrina and
Edgar remember the white tourists from Orange County,
California, who mistakingly get on the green bus and
eventually die because of the stifling heat; and the
“Asthmatic Claustrophobia” of taking the green bus with the
locals becomes, in Edgar’s words, a ”newly diagnosed mental
disorder": “Asthmatic Otraphobia" (108). Being subjected to
the same treatment that racialized workers experienced during
“plantation days," the white tourists wilt, unable to cope

with the mere existence of ”multiracial" and economically

223

stratified Hawai’i. The illusion of Hawai'i as destination
and escape, so much a part of the islands’ racialized
economy, is easily shattered in the presence of economic
inequality. Indeed, this is why Linmark titles this
particular vignette ”Kalihi Is in the Heart"; the ghetto-ized
racial space of Kalihi is contained within the very
heart/pulse of American life but, like the volcano Edgar
mentions, Kalihi is also ready to cause a heart attack by
attesting to--through its presence amid the tourist
destinations--the racial subjection which undergirds whites’
ability to travel freely. Like Bulosan’s “America" (through
inversion), Kalihi is a space of pure negativity--the non-
place of failed aspirations which puts into question any
strategy attempting to bypass or aestheticize the ”ethnics"
in our midst.

Rolling the R’s offers us a moment to contemplate the
narrow, claustrophobic ”closet" of Asian American subjection
produced through a ”appreciation" of differences. By
denaturalizing the space of America’s white fantasy of
Hawai’i, Linmark’s work offers up the only available
political option for Asian Americans: avoiding the “denial”
and ”two-face closet-case" of assimilatory aspirations in
order to combat subjection (Linmark 131, 133). Indeed, Asian
America needs to go through a process of philosophical
”remixing," creating a ”restless[ness]” with various
mollifying ideologies-—mixedness, assimilation, amalgamation,

counter-hegemony, etc.--which redeploy the politics of racial

224

domination without undoing them (26, 27). Without
reformulating the present—day, envisioned “ends" of being
Asian American, ”we" are left in perilous territory. This
“remixing” could result in banal, (in)consequential
repetition for the sake of survival or enjoyment by not
deviating from the epistemological template of biological
racialisms, but the argumentative “stops"--reinvestments in
the racial status quo--analyzed over the course of the
previous chapters also give life, however cliché, to the
"ruthless criticism" that Karl Marx envisioned as a necessary
component of radical change (Marx 13). Asian American Studies
is capable of resisting without the directionless residue of
racialisms, and a world we can not anticipate--one apart from
racial determination-—must serve as the goal of thinking

together and, for the moment, taking ”sides."

225

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