Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora
352
Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora
352eBook
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Overview
With its recurrent themes of transnationalism, globalization, and postcoloniality, Orientations considers various embodiments of the Asian diaspora, including a rumination on minority discourses and performance studies, and a historical look at the journal Amerasia. Exploring the translation of knowledge from one community to another, other contributions consider such issues as Filipino immigrants’ strategies for enacting Asian American subjectivity and the link between area studies and the journal Subaltern Studies. In a section that focuses on how disciplines—or borders—form, one essay discusses “orientalist melancholy,” while another focuses on the construction of the Asian American persona during the Cold War. Other topics in the volume include the role Asian immigrants play in U.S. racial politics, Japanese American identity in postwar Japan, Asian American theater, and the effects of Asian and Asian American studies on constructions of American identity.
Contributors. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Rey Chow, Kandice Chuh, Sharon Hom, Yoshikuni Igarashi, Dorinne Kondo, Russell Leong, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, David Palumbo-Liu, R. Radhakrishnan, Karen Shimakawa, Sau-ling C. Wong
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822381259 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Kandice Chuh is Professor of English, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Karen Shimakawa is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Read an Excerpt
Orientations
Mapping studies in the Asian diasporaBy Kandice Chuh
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2739-2
Chapter One
(Un)Disciplined Subjects: (De)Colonizing the Academy? DORINNE KONDO
The editors of this volume have asked me to write an autobiographical political history, a reflection on the ways my career trajectory traces larger social and political transformations. Despite my engagement with reflexive writing practices, such an endeavor feels risky. Yet, as one of the few Asian Americans to begin in Asian studies and then move to Asian American studies, perhaps this "retrospective" can indeed address larger issues: a political history of the academy, the possibilities for intervention in disciplinary regimes, and the relation of Asian and Asian American studies. Though the direction of this movement is rhetorically overstated, one could read this trajectory as the unlearning of formative disciplines: from the epistemologies of anthropology and East Asian studies to those of Asian American studies, minority discourse, cultural studies, and performance studies; and from the academy narrowly defined to work in creative, artistic registers and to work that blurs the artistic and the critical. These movements are themselves enabled by demographic transformations within the academy, in which people who were formerly the objects of representation by the dominant are ourselves entering the academy and the arts in order to"represent ourselves," however problematic that enterprise might be. This in turn describes a political and historical horizon that is simultaneously shaped by the dominant and alive with possibilities for continued transformation. My account, then, instantiates certain shifts in epistemological regimes over the last twenty years and articulates the contradictory formation of one particular Asian American subject constituted by and moving within particular institutional and disciplinary histories. This movement articulates positions from which to reflect upon the relationship of Asian to Asian American studies.
The 1970s: Feminist Anthropolo, Asian Studies, Political Critique
My choice of anthropology as a discipline in retrospect seems the result of eminently political concerns: the allure of feminist anthropology and the presence of a vibrant, exciting feminist faculty at Stanford, where I was an undergraduate; the ways that Japanese and the anthropology of Japan became a vehicle for understanding aspects of Japanese American historical experience. Both the feminist project and the anti-Eurocentric deployment of anthropology offered an edge of political critique.
From anthropology, I took concerns I could now label phenomenological, existential, political, interpretivist: the focus on the experiential and the everyday, the linguistic/historical/cultural construction of subjectivity, a sensitivity to difference and to the ways language could articulate a world, and a skepticism toward the academy's bias toward textuality. Further, anthropology's reputation as a discipline for marginal people made it a comfortable place to be. For me, anthropology opened the question of racial difference via the trope of cultural difference. The discipline's liberal humanist imperative, to show that there are multiple and equally valid ways of "being human"-that category we cannot not want-was at that historical moment compelling given my position as a racially marginalized subject. At that early stage, anthropology and Asian studies represented self-discovery with an edge of political critique. Given a certain formation as a racialized subject, it is perhaps no surprise that I found attractive a discipline whose point of departure was cultural difference, experience, and everday life and that has historically been relatively open to "marginalized" people: ethnics, racial minorities, women. It now strikes me as especially ironic that this sense of possibility occurred at an institution whose founder, Leland Stanford, headed an organization that employed and exploited thousands of Asian Americans; indeed, both of my grandfathers worked for the Union Pacific Railroad for a brief period during their lives in the United States.
Disciplines
Graduate school is designed to create disciplined subjects, properly differentiated and socialized members of "the profession." My graduate school training and my first teaching position occurred within the context of the Department of Anthropology and an association with East Asian studies at Harvard, where I spent the years 1975-1989.
The contradictions of being an Asian American subject "doing" Asia (the sexual connotations of masculine penetration are apposite here) emerge starkly. East Asian studies in the United States is inescapably linked to the geopolitical histories of U.S.-Japan relations. Like many in my generation, my first three years of graduate education were funded by the National Defense Foreign Language fellowship, an eloquent articulation of the strategic political importance accorded research on Japan. Many of the "Japan hands" who were my teachers came to the field through the legacy of the Pacific War as members of the Occupation or as children of missionaries. Whatever the intentions of any individuals involved, at the institutional and geopolitical levels there can be no denying our area studies enmeshment in a geopolitics that inevitably involves a long Orientalist legacy. Still, Foucault reminds us that disciplinary regimes are productive as well as coercive; those of us who "did" Japan were the beneficiaries of considerable resources and Harvard's impressive amassing of "knowledge" of East Asia.
The late seventies and early eighties witnessed another fundamental challenge to disciplinary conventions: the reflexive turn, or what some have infelicitously called "postmodern" anthropology. The critique of fieldwork as enabled by colonialism, the scrutiny of the conventions of ethnographic writing, a focus on power relations constructing the ethnographic encounter-all were emergent at that moment. Much like the ferment caused by feminist anthropology, the problematizing of foundational concepts and conventions fostered the sense that an important disciplinary shift was in process.
My fieldwork experiences, dissertation, and first book instantiate a transition from the epistemologies of British social anthropology and East Asian studies to a reflexive, power-sensitive critique of ethnography. My own subject position as a Japanese American working in Japan overdetermined this shift, for almost inevitably my analytic attention was drawn to the power-laden, shifting processes of identity formation in everyday life. By the mid-1980s, a full-blown critique of the discipline from within had emerged. For me, this critical turn involved a close scrutiny of the ethnographer's positioning in fieldwork, incorporating the process by which an ethnographic problem emerges, and clarifying my stakes in the project as an Asian American. Rather than the "objective," dispassionate panoptical gaze, I sought to locate my angles of vision in specific, power-laden interactions. Movements of decolonization in anthropology were beginning to occur from within. Finally, the influence of poststructuralist feminist theory was generative. My first book, Crafting Selves (1990), is part of a discursive formation that arose in the seminar on gender run by Joan Scott at the Institute for Advanced Study. Through the presence of feminist scholars such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, and the notions of gender performativity/ performance, the work transformed from an interpretivist study of meaning to a poststructuralist analysis of the performance of gendered work identities, enacted within larger discursive fields of power.
Multi-, Inter-, Postdisciplinary Spaces
In different ways, challenges to the notion of a singular "culture" in the form of transnationalism, an experiential history as an Asian American subject, and feminist articulations of performance and performativity have shaped the research that formed the basis for my book About Face: Performing "Race" in Fashion and Theater (1997). One analytic axis pivots around the fabrication of difference-race, nation, gender, class, sexuality-in the globally dispersed, commodity capitalist world of international high fashion, especially the work of the so-called "Japanese avant-garde" designers who are credited with the all-black, loose-fitting, unisex fashion aesthetic of the early 1980s. Orientalisms, counter-Orientalisms, and autoexoticizing practices create complex, contradictory racial/national/gendered discourses in this industry that could be considered emblematic of our capitalist regime of truth. The fashion industry becomes a privileged site from which to problematize the notion of a singular "culture" via the notions of transnationalism and the global assembly line. For example, the fabrication of "Japan" and the work of the "Japanese" designers reverberates in the construction and performance of Asian American racial and gender identities.
A second site, Asian American theater, examines the challenges and reinscriptions of Orientalisms as they bear on the lives of Asian Americans. I view Asian American and multiracial theater as arenas for the performance and production of coalition and new political identities such as "people of color" that can contest our figuration as "Orientals." Inevitably problematic yet replete with possibility, theater compels passionate commitment as an ongoing political, artistic, and intellectual project.
This passion for theater arises from lived experiences as an Asian American subject. In long years on the East Coast, Asian American theater offered political sustenance and the vision of cultural and political possibility I rarely saw elsewhere. It is this vision that urgently requires documentation and a writing into history in both academic and popular registers. In such a context, critique becomes a political intervention, a way to make things better collectively. A physical move to Los Angeles locates me in a major center of Asian American cultural production, enabling me to write about and for performance. Since then, my work has continued to move toward spaces in and between the artistic and the critical, and in/ between disciplines. For example, playwriting classes at East West Players, the Odyssey Theater, and Moving Arts Theater-initially a fieldwork "participant observation" technique-have opened possibilities of contributing to this collective project in voices other than our customary academese.
Further, my work as a dramaturge at the Mark Taper Forum for Anna Deavere Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, a play based on the L.A. uprisings, has also fostered an equally inspiring sense of the political possibilities of multiracial collaboration. Using methods familiar to ethnographers, Smith created Twilight from over 200 interviews she did with Angelenos and others, recreating and performing these people and their words onstage. The play went from Los Angeles to productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival and then on to Broadway. Working on Twilight awakened me to the position of artists of color in mainstream theater and the constraints under which they must operate. It also highlighted the tense, contentious, yet utopian process of multiracial collaboration, in which sometimes difficult and painful disputes about race and attempts to be responsible to multiple and often conflicting communities resulted in an inevitably imperfect yet critically important intervention in mainstream theater. In moving toward theater, my work has shifted from studying an "Other" as an anthropologist to joining Asian American artists and artists of color as a partner in struggle, to help as best we can to intervene to aid in the social transformation of structures of power. Here, theater enables the creation and performance of emergent, heterogeneous, contentious, and politically necessary coalitions such as "Asian American" and "people of color." These productions in turn can become articulations of political empowerment that constitute always already complicitous critiques of the dominant.
Roughly, then, the movement I describe is one from disciplines to increasingly interdisciplinary spaces, from academic "study" to artistic "creation," from anthropology and East Asian studies to feminist theory, minority discourse, cultural studies, performance studies, and to performance itself. Perhaps the editors are right in seeing this as a movement-uneven, incomplete, and always complicit-toward decolonization. In thus seeking some overall direction to this path, however, I do not wish to imply that I have abandoned "my" discipline altogether. Indeed, such an abandonment would be impossible for any of us. Yet even as we are aware of the political baggage of our disciplinary training, there should be ways of bringing its useful aspects into interdisciplinary spaces.
For example, at first glance anthropology and East Asian studies are among the most obviously problematic academic locations in terms of their enmeshment in colonialism and the perpetuation of Orientalism. The critiques of anthropology from within and without are well-known and need no repetition here. Yet the discipline's (relative) openness to autocritique makes it for me a far more comfortable space than the more confidently positivistic or Eurocentrically humanistic disciplines. Ethnographic practices open themselves to critique; for example, the process of fieldwork invites a scrutiny of textualizing practices and power relations. Anyone who must somehow render the chaos and indeterminacy of everyday life into a patterned understanding in an "ethnography" must somehow come to terms with the obvious power relations involved in the imposition of our understandings on this indeterminacy. I would argue that similar indeterminacies are present in other disciplinary sites, but are more effectively masked or silenced. Moreover, the anthropological master trope, "culture," proves to be as useful as it is problematic. On the one hand, reified and monolithic notions of culture all too often elide power relations and history. Culture can be a less threatening, liberal humanist way of domesticating the more power-laden issue of race. Yet anthropology's attention to cultural difference as both taken-for-granted and interesting rather than threatening, has become all the more welcome to me the more time I spend in (often Eurocentric) interdisciplinary spaces such as cultural studies and feminist theory. Furthermore, the anthropological emphasis on everyday life rather than simply textual or Cultural (with a capital "C") artifacts, arises from a (liberal humanist) democratic impulse behind the more expansive notion of culture (small "c"). These disciplinary proclivities I carry through into my new work. Even though "theater" can be seen as Cultural, my attraction is to performance rather than to textual analysis, whether of the script or of our new texts: film and video. The ephemerality of performance, its implication of audiences, its resistance of fixity, make it more continuous with the anthropological focus on the contextual and on the practice of everyday life.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora / Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa
I. Investments and Interventions
(Un)Disciplined Subjects: (De)Colonizing the Academy? / Dorinne Kondo
(Re)Viewing and Asian American Diaspora: Multiculturalism, Interculturalism, and the Northwest Asian American Theatre / Karen Shimakawa
Creating Performative Communities: Through Text, Time, and Space / Russell Leong
Cross-Discipline Trafficking: What’s Justice Got to Do With It? / Sharon K. Hom
II. Translating Knowledge
Notes toward a Conversion between Area Studies and Diasporic Studies / Dipesh Chakrabarty
The Stakes of Textual Border-Crossings: Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices / Sau-Ling C. Wong
Biyuti in Everyday Life: Performance, Citizenship, and Survival among Filipinos in the United States / Martin F. Manalansan IV
Missile Internationalism / Kuan-Hsing Chen
III. Para-Sites, Or, Constituting Borders
Leading Questions / Rey Chow
Modeling the Nation: The Asian/American Split / David Palumbo-Liu
Postwar Japan / Yoshikuni Igarashi
Conjunctural Identities, Academic Adjancencies / R. Radhakrishnan
IV. Asian/American Epistemologies
Epistemological Shifts: National Ontology and the New Asian Immigrant / Lisa Lowe
“Imaginary Borders” / Kandice Chuh
“To Tell the Truth and Not Get Trapped”: Why Interethnic Antiracism Matters Now / George Lipsitz
References
Contributors
Index
What People are Saying About This
Bristling with provocations, this timely collection of intoxicating essays interrogates the margins of disciplinary and institutional centers, revealing unsettling glimpses of the intellectual and material investments in 'Asia,''America,' and the fields that figure and are configured by them. -- Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture