Asian/American : Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier

by Palumbo-Liu, David

• ISBN13: 9780804734448
• ISBN10: 0804734445
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-07-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

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"acrossthe "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.

Author Biography

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	(16)
Part I / Modernity, Asia, America
Pacific America: Projection, Introjection, and the Beginnings of Modern Asian America	17	(26)
Rescripting the Imaginary	43	(38)
Part II / Bodies and Souls
Written on the Face: Race, Nation , Migrancy and Sex	81	(35)
Transacting Culture: Bodies at the Seam of the Social	116	(33)
Part III / Modeling the Nation
Citizens and Subnations	149	(33)
Disintegrations and Reconsolidations	182	(35)
Part IV / Placing Asian America
War, the Homeland, and the Traces of Memory	217	(38)
Demarcations and Fissures: Reconstructing Space	255	(40)
Part V / Mind Readings
Double Trouble: The Pathology of Ethnicity Meets White Schizophrenia	295	(42)
Asia Pacific: A Transnational Imaginary	337	(46)
Conclusion	383	(12)
Appendix Model Minority Discourse and the Course of Healing	395	(24)
Notes	419	(48)
Works Cited	467	(30)
Index	497