The ways Chinese identity is perceived by education researchers is a confluence of deliberations on questions such as who is Chinese, how they are Chinese, how they come to identify as Chinese, and who gets to say who is and is not Chinese. This dissertation’s task is, as a result, not to define Chinese identities or Chineseness. Rather, I unpack the multiple discourses that shape Chineseness that impact the decisions that governments, social movements, and schools make to (re)present Chineseness and Asianness. These multiple contestations across space and time sought to stabilize or institutionalize Chinese identities into a single idea, nation-states, such as the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America, assert political, social, and cultural power. As well, individuals work to resist these state discourses to further shape their own and communities’ understandings of Chinese identity. To analyze the global movements and circulations of Chineseness across contexts, this dissertation uses Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) and decolonial theory across four discrete articles to center how Chineseness moves through each of the power structures (white supremacy, Han supremacy, [settler] coloniality, and anti-Blackness) operating on its (re)production(s). Across the chapters of this dissertation, I argue for the analytical utility of the concept of Han Supremacy to understand the global and cross-temporal movements of state discourses of Chineseness that shape the lived experiences of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American and Asian (APIDA/A) people and those identifying with Asian diasporic communities cross multiple curricular sites. In the first article, I conceptually disentangle the overlapping and entangled boundaries between Han, “Yellow,” Chinese, Asian, and People’s Republic of China identities. I historicized the fluid boundaries and institutionalization of ethnic Han norms, ontologies, and logics that became subsumed into Chinese identity. I then show how the concept of Han identity becomes operationalized into a form of supremacy with parallels to other supremacist ideologies and its implications on how Chinese identity moves and is understood in diasporic contexts. Next, in the second article, I use critical race archival analysis and rememory to demonstrate the movements of Chinese identities across nation-state contexts by introducing my expansive conceptualization of curriculum and the analytic possibility of a nomencurriculum, or curriculum of names. I show that, within this framework, names are curricular touchstones by which nation-states can bind and (b)order individuals within a paradigm of white supremacy and empire. I do so by analyzing my own adoption paperwork and namings as an assemblage of ideologies, using critical race archival methods in conversation with AsianCrit Counterstorytelling and rememory. The third article uses critical discourse analysis and critical race archival analysis to analyze the U.S. military’s training curriculum for soldiers during World War II. The document I analyze, Educational Manual No. 42 (1944) Our Chinese Ally, I argue is a window into how the U.S. government at the time mobilized its selective and stereotypical interpretation of the Chinese context to affirm its imperialist ambitions. Using critical race theory archival analysis and critical discursive analyses, I show racialized reverberations of this document across time. Finally, in the fourth article, I use critical textual analysis to show the resistances to these state discourses by conducting a critical ideological textual analysis of Gene Luen Yang’s (2006) American Born Chinese. I analyze the text to show the ways Yang engages in deliberate racial rhetorical positioning to destabilize racialized and xenophobic stereotypes mobilized against APIDA/A people and members of Asian diasporic communities. By adapting my methodologies and tuning my application of these two bodies of theory throughout these chapters, I show the contours and facets of Chinese identities as they are institutionalized and resisted. As a result, across these chapters, I argue that repairing these histories means critically examining the ways Chinese identities respond and bend to Han supremacy, Sinophobia, and Sinocentrism across curricular contexts.
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