Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier

by David Palumbo-Liu

Overview

This book argues that the invention of Asian American identities serves as an index to the historical formation of modern America. By tracing constructions of "Asian American" to an interpenetrating dynamic between Asia and America, the author obtains a deeper understanding of key issues in American culture, history, and society.

The formation of America in the twentieth century has had everything to do with "westward expansion" across the "Pacific frontier" and the movement of Asians onto American soil. After the passage of the last piece of anti-Asian legislation in the 1930's, the United States found it had to grapple with both the presence of Asians already in America and the imperative to develop its neocolonial interests in East Asia. The author argues that, under these double imperatives, a great wall between "Asian" and "American" is constructed precisely when the two threatened to merge. Yet the very incompleteness of American identity has allowed specific and contingent fusion of "Asian" and "American" at particular historical junctures.

From the importation of Asian labor in the mid-nineteenth century, the territorialization of Hawaii and the Philippines in the late-nineteenth century, through wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and the Cold War with China, to today's Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group, the United States in the modern age has seen its national identity as strongly attached to the Pacific. As this has taken place, so has the formation of a variety of Asian American identities. Each contains a specific notion of America and reveals a particular conception of "Asian" and "American."

Complicating the usual notion of "identity politics" and drawing on a wide range of writings—sociological, historical, cultural, medical, anthropological, geographic, economic, journalistic, and political—the author studies both how the formation of these identifications discloses the response of America to the presence of Asians and how Asian Americans themselves have inhabited these roles and resisted such categorizations, inventing their own particular subjectivities as Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804734448
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	516
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

David Palumbo-Liu is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian (Stanford, 1993) and the co-editor of Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies (Stanford, 1997).

Table of Contents

	Introduction	1
Part I	Modernity, Asia, America
1	Pacific America: Projection, Introjection, and the Beginnings of Modern Asian America	17
2	Rescripting the Imaginary	43
Part II	Bodies and Souls
3	Written on the Face: Race, Nation, Migrancy, and Sex	81
4	Transacting Culture: Bodies at the Seam of the Social	116
Part III	Modeling the Nation
5	Citizens and Subnations	149
6	Disintegrations and Reconsolidations	182
Part IV	Placing Asian America
7	War, the Homeland, and the Traces of Memory	217
8	Demarcations and Fissures: Reconstructing Space	255
Part V	Mind Readings
9	Double Trouble: The Pathology of Ethnicity Meets White Schizophrenia	295
10	Asia Pacific: A Transnational Imaginary	337
	Conclusion	383
Appendix	Model Minority Discourse and the Course of Healing	395
	Notes	419
	Works Cited	467
	Index	497

Editorial Reviews

"Admirably grounded in history, and displaying a critical rigor in historicizing a contemporary reality."

Journal of Asian American Studies

"Only a true comparativist and interdisciplinary scholar could produce a work of such profound insights and erudition. For those well versed in critical race and ethnic studies, cultural, postcolonial, and postmodern studies, Asian American Studies, American Studies, and East Asian Studies, this book signifies the convergence and exemplifies the culmination of the new scholarship and theories that have emerged from these related fields during the past quarter century."

Choice

"A model of border-crossing scholarship.... Erudite in its range of scholarship and materials, using theory with critical finesse, and moving with ease across disciplinary and area boundaries, ... it should be of relevance to all scholars engaged in Asian American studies and cultural studies, as well as scholars in American, Asian, and Pacific studies."—Arif Dirlik, Duke University

"Passionate, wide-ranging, and serious, . . . an assault on our understanding of America's modernity, . . . highly suggestive for redefining the analytical terrain of American studies."—Aihwa Ong, author of Flexible Citizenship

"Admirably grounded in history, and displaying a critical rigor in historicizing a contemporary reality."—Journal of Asian American Studies

"Only a true comparativist and interdisciplinary scholar could produce a work of such profound insights and erudition. For those well versed in critical race and ethnic studies, cultural, postcolonial, and postmodern studies, Asian American Studies, American Studies, and East Asian Studies, this book signifies the convergence and exemplifies the culmination of the new scholarship and theories that have emerged from these related fields during the past quarter century."—Choice

"Palumbo-Liu's comprehensive study will have lasting value for scholars in this rapidly changing field. . . . Each chapter demonstrates solid historical perspective as well as thoughtful critical analysis and considerable political acumen."—American Literature

From the Publisher

"This book is a substantial contribution to interdisciplinary Asian American scholarship, especially in the attention Palumbo-Liu pays to the historical split between Asian and American, and in its extensive historical focus."

Journal of American Studies

"Palumbo-Liu's comprehensive study will have lasting value for scholars in this rapidly changing field. . . . Each chapter demonstrates solid historical perspective as well as thoughtful critical analysis and considerable political acumen."

American Literature

"A model of border-crossing scholarship.... Erudite in its range of scholarship and materials, using theory with critical finesse, and moving with ease across disciplinary and area boundaries, ... it should be of relevance to all scholars engaged in Asian American studies and cultural studies, as well as scholars in American, Asian, and Pacific studies."

Duke University - Arif Dirlik

"A work of consummate scholarship, David Palumbo-Liu's book contributes significantly to American Studies and Asian American Studies, and to a lesser extent, East Asian Studies. . . . Asian/American is remarkable for its elegant prose, its careful attention to historical, social, and cultural contexts, and its author's expertise at harnessing those contexts to produce not only finely nuanced readings of individual texts but also a sustained argument about American modernity."

New Centennial Review

"Passionate, wide-ranging, and serious, . . . an assault on our understanding of America's modernity, . . . highly suggestive for redefining the analytical terrain of American studies."

author of Flexible Citizenship - Aihwa Ong

"The picture on the dustjacket of Palumbo-Liu's study which shows the Statue of Liberty with Asian features remains more riddle than answer. Even as the face of the nation has been racialized, the exact nature of the implication of Asian/Americanness into white America is far from clear or stable. What Palumbo-Liu does in such an intriguing and complex way is to invite us to explore in much more detail and depth the politics of this implication."

American Studies

"His grasp of literary theory and method is a model in itself, and his ability to denote these ideas as they appear in applied social context grounds the text, creating an invaluable pedagogical framework for the working instructor."

Comparative Literature Studies

The thesis of this intense and intriguing study is initiated through the slash inserted between "Asian" and "American." Palumbo-Liu (comparative literature, Stanford Univ.) argues repeatedly that the slash, signaling a "split" as well as a "sliding over" between two concepts, is a persistent phenomenon threatening the identity of Asians and Americans as well as Asian Americans. Through the dynamic play of the implied meanings of the slash--inclusion and exclusion at the same time--Palumbo-Liu questions the validity of the notion that Asians are a "model minority." He probes deeply into social, cultural, and political processes to examine how Asians have been assimilated into American society at different junctions throughout history. This is comprehensive and complicated research, recommended for research libraries only.--Mark Meng, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Discusses the origin and development of conceptions of Asian-American identity throughout history and in modernity, with each phase revealing different ideas about the meaning of both "Asians" and "Americans." Palumbo-Liu (comparative literature, Stanford U.) tracks representations of Asian-Americans in literature, examines the legacies of Asian wars in rural American attitudes toward Asians, and explains how the presence of Asian-Americans has historically led to a broader reevaluation of relationships between whites and all ethnic minorities in American society. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews