Abstract: This essay examines narratives of success within two Asian American-directed films that saw mainstream recognition in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians (2018): Always Be My Maybe (2019) and Minari (2020). Specifically, I focus on how these two films present conflicts over the meaning of success, and ultimately what compromises, either with the self or with personal relationships, must be made in its pursuit. I argue that these films balance the need to frame Asian Americans through cultural difference to achieve mainstream legibility with desire to inhabit a racially neutral space. In doing so, these films frame their protagonists in opposition to ideas of whiteness as American culture but embrace the privileges of incorporation into neoliberal capitalist and imperial frameworks, inheriting imagery and positions of power traditionally dominated by whites. In attempting to center Asian American experience in their imaginaries, these films rely instead on Asian American participation in projects of neoliberal, American capital to be read as universal and thus racially neutral.
Abstract: Indian Matchmaking (2020–), a popular reality romance TV show, forwards the Indian American woman as an influential conduit of a marketable multiculturalism. Using contemporary arranged marriage as a framework, this article explores how racialized femininity acts as an attractive commodity spectacle. The Indian American woman is a crucible within which multiple, familiar axes of multicultural selfhood— cultural in-betweenness, gender trouble, and generational conflict—are transformed into popular entertainment. Ultimately, Indian Matchmaking shows how contemporary multiculturalism creates space for itself on the US national stage by turning potentially threatening differences into desirable commodities.
Abstract: This essay addresses the need for relational transpacific approaches to race and empire across groups, species, and sites. Pacific Islander knowledge is crucial for such approaches, but Asian American-ists must avoid extracting it. We should develop distinct frameworks accountable to Native Pacific knowledge. Juxtaposing Kanaka Maoli concepts with Asian American scholarship and Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being , I assemble a racial entanglement theory for the range of agencies in empire. I show how Hawai‘i’s colonization, the militarization of Pu‘uloa, whaling, and sandalwood extraction impacted iconic Asian American history, making Hawaiian struggles central to Asian American studies.
Abstract: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle , perhaps the most canonical alternate-history novel, has been read in terms of its reality’s relation to the actual world without consideration of Japanese racialization, a condition of its alternate world. Conversely, John Okada’s No-No Boy , the first known Japanese American novel, has been read in terms of Asian racialization in America without consideration of an alternate history also chronicled in the novel. This essay intersects the two novels based on the common historical basis of their ontologies (what they designate as real). Against the recent tendency in race studies to generalize history into ontology, I read history from ontology and find that the alternate histories are phantastical reflections of actual racial histories. While The Man in the High Castle renders literal Western modernity’s projection of deception as a Japanese reality in line with World War II–era geopolitical rivalry and domestic insecurity, No-No Boy depicts deception through a Japanese character as an interwar fascist tendency on which modernity as a whole falls back. In ontologizing the (self-)deceptions of modernity as an alternate history, Dick and Okada historicize race as a negative condition of modern phantasy.
Abstract: This article explores the political possibilities in the “morphing” of Asian American identity from an excluded racial category into an assimilable ethnicity by turning to Gish Jen’s second novel, Mona in the Promised Land ( Mona ). In contrast to Asian American studies’ more common radical accounts, Mona elevates upper-middle-class Jewishness, the paradigmatic white ethnic identity, by placing it at the center of Asian American identity. In doing so, I argue that Mona ’s bildungsroman form pushes the identification of Asian American as the “New Jews” beyond its reification in model minority discourse toward a rediscovery of diasporic consciousness. Specifically, through a recursive narrative logic that combines the marriage plot and the mother-daughter romance via Asian ethnic and Jewish romantic suitors as Mona ’s objects of desire, the novel rediscovers a diasporic consciousness that extends the social and political horizon of ethnicized Asian American identity beyond nation-states (both US and Asian nationals) and toward a geopolitical order rooted in counter-discourses and Jewish traditions of exile. Of course, this exilic foundation to Asian American ethnicity offers no political guarantees. It does, however, disrupt the presumption that the morphing of race into ethnicity for Asian American identity necessarily leads to the reproduction of white hegemony.
Abstract: What is the significance of Chinese immigrants making hiphop YouTube videos to tell stories of their working lives in the US? This article examines three non-commercialized hip-hop videos made by Chinese immigrants to elucidate class, gender, and racial dynamics within the Chinese restaurant industry that are largely invisible to the public. These dynamics reveal many contradictions and ambiguities that do not fit neatly in normative American politics, thus culminating into a condition of impossibility . This condition makes it difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how Chinese immigrants can move forward in broader struggles for socio-economic justice.
Abstract: This essay pursues an analysis of form through Lady Trieu, the Vietnamese American villain of Damon Lindelof’s hit HBO show Watchmen (2019). I argue that a formal reading of Lady Trieu and her mother/daughter Bian reframes the Asiatic woman’s complicity and injury within the violent machinations of the U.S. state by pivoting from a politics of presence to a metacritique of historical narration. Rather than theorize an ontology for Asiatic femininity, I argue that the Asiatic woman’s recalcitrant materiality—highlighted by Trieu’s gleaming, brittle bodily surface and circular genealogy—is the mark of an ontological indeterminacy that unsettles Watchmen (2019)’s attempt to absorb the Vietnam War within its reparative narrative of U.S. empire. By attending to the specificities and recursions of loss, Asiatic femininity’s aporetic materiality endeavors in the interpretive task of speculating another world, a hermeneutic labor that conditions the creative reproduction of memory. In, with, and on the Vietnamese American woman, this essay argues, the long and slow violences of the American War in Vietnam return as the trace of the mother: unforget-table, treacherous, undoing the image from its edges. This would be the feminist work of the surface, the formal aesthetic strategy of an insistently materialist Asiatic femininity.
Abstract: Drawing from the oral histories and personal archives of Estrella Alamar (a former leading actor in the preservation and promotion of Filipino American history in Chicago), I showcase how she subverted assumptions about Asian American women’s (a)political and subservient identities to navigate white supremacist spaces and gain a deeper understanding of her own political identity as a Filipina American woman. Reframing Estrella’s self-described invisibility during the 1960s Civil Rights Era and integration movement as a politicized invisibility makes way for new representations of: (1) How Filipino/Filipino Americans navigated ambiguous racial positioning in twentieth-century Chicago in ways that both upheld and challenged racial hierarchies; (2) the quotidian yet deeply transformative ways that Asian American women engage in anti-racist political movement; and (3) the legacy of Chicago’s Filipino American community leaders who worked across and against racial lines. In doing so, I argue that Estrella’s memories of quietly combatting anti-Blackness in her classrooms, Catholic encounter groups, and interpersonal relationships during the 1960s and 1970s unveils the ‘smaller’ yet impactful ways one can assert a political identity and combat social injustice outside of mainstream activist communities, even if such efforts are rendered invisible by those very same groups.
Abstract: Soon-Tek Oh’s 1970 play, Tondemonai—Never Happen! (hereinafter Tondemonai) , is a strangely neglected cultural artifact. A production of East West Players, it was the first commercially-produced play to dramatize Japanese American incarceration; and yet, despite also featuring queer kinship, it remains archived and practically forgotten in the academy. Its performance at a discursive center of Asian American cultural production disrupts a homogenized narrative in Asian American cultural studies—that the era was beset with queerphobic cultural nationalism. The play presents an opportunity to grapple with Asian American queer cultural nationalism targeting both racial castration and proto-homonationalism. After analyzing the play, I proffer a framework regarding homonationalism’s long emergence in transpacific terms, and reinterpret Lonny Kaneko’s classic 1976 short story “The Shoyu Kid” as another example of Asian American queer cultural nationalist storytelling. This article features archival stage photography of Tondemonai , which gives an impression of Asian American cultural production of the era as queerer than often presumed.
Abstract: This article makes a case for foregrounding activism in South Asian American studies (SAAS) as a means of grappling with contemporary political crises and structural inequalities. Situating SAAS within the broader field of Asian American studies (AAS), I engage two key interventions: Tamara Bhalla and Pawan Dhingra’s call to centralize “privilege” in SAAS (particularly caste- and class-based) and Diane Fujino and Robyn Rodriguez’s reminder to re-center activism in shaping forward directions for AAS. I explore how SAAS might continue taking inspiration from the original political commitments of ethnic studies—communal self-determination, liberation, and cross-racial solidarity—while also recognizing the diaspora’s internal complexities and contradictions. Drawing from my own experiences as an ethnic studies educator and a grassroots organizer, I illustrate how an activist-oriented approach can more deeply connect SAAS scholarship with on-the-ground struggles. These include movements addressing labor exploitation, environmental justice, and racialized/gendered violence as well as transnational solidarities that bring South Asian Americans into shared cause with other marginalized groups. In articulating these possibilities, I argue that the future of SAAS is best served by cultivating commitments that bridge rigorous academic inquiry with ongoing grassroots organizing.
