Whither the Asian American coalition?

Pacific Historical Review

Volumn 76, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 585-604

  Spickard, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASIAN IMMIGRANT; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; SOCIAL HISTORY; SOCIAL ORGANIZATION; STRATEGIC APPROACH;

ASIA; EURASIA; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 35648976099     PISSN: 00308684     EISSN: 15338584     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/phr.2007.76.4.585     Document Type: Article

References (115)

1. Inevitably, an essay of this sort builds on other work that the author has been doing. Readers may discern here echoes of the ideas, and even some of the phrases, that appear in the some of my earlier writings, particularly: Paul Spickard, "Who Is an Asian? Who Is a Pacific Islander? Monoracialism, Multiracial People, and Asian American Communities," in Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima, eds., The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans (Philadelphia, 2001), 13-24
2. Spickard, "Pacific Diaspora?" in Paul Spickard, Joanne L. Rondilla, and Debbie Hippolite Wright, eds., Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific (Honolulu, 2002), 1-30
3. Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York, 2007)
4. and Debbie Hippolite Wright and Spickard, "Pacific Islander Americans and Asian American Identity," in Linda Trinh Võ and Rick Bonus, eds., Contemporary Asian American Communities (Philadelphia, 2002), 105-119.
5. Sources on Asian American panethnicity and the Asian American movement include: Karin Aguilar-San Juan, ed., The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s (Boston, 1994)
6. Edwin G. Burrows, Chinese and Japanese in Hawaii during the Sino-Japanese Conflict (Honolulu, 1939)
7. Doug Chin, Seattle's International District: The Making of a Pan-Asian American Community (Seattle, 2001)
8. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity (Philadelphia, 1992)
9. Espiritu, ed., Asian American Panethnicity, special issue of Amerasia Journal, 22 (Number 2, 1996)
10. Emma Gee, ed., Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Los Angeles, 1976)
11. Philip Kan Gotanda, Yankee Dawg You Die (New York, 1991)
12. Russell Jeung, Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (New Brunswick, N.J., 2005)
13. Edward J. W. Park and John S. W. Park, Probationary Americans: Contemporary Immigration Policies and the Shaping of Asian American Communities (New York, 2005)
14. Amy Tachiki, et al., eds., Roots: An Asian American Reader (Los Angeles, 1971)
15. Karen Umemoto, "'On Strike!' San Francisco State College Strike, 1968-1969: The Role of Asian American Students," Amerasia Journal 15 (Number 1, 1989), 3-41
16. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s (Washington, D.C., 1992)
17. Linda Trinh Võ, Mobilizing an Asian American Community (Philadelphia, 2004)
18. William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia, 1992)
19. Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams (New York, 2000).
20. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
21. Other sources on Orientalism include: Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (Baltimore, 1954)
22. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, 2003)
23. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, 1999)
24. Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley, 2005)
25. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002)
26. Sheng-Mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis, 2000)
27. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism (London, 2002)
28. Macfie, ed., Orientalism (New York, 2000)
29. Orientalism and the Legacy of Edward Said, special issue of Amerasia Journal, 31 (Number 1, 2005)
30. Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (New Brunswick, NJ., 1998)
31. Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York, 2002)
32. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York, 2001).
33. Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882 (Berkeley, 1969), 36.
34. Tuan, Forever Foreigners.
35. This is described in detail in Paul R. Spickard, Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group (New York, 1996), 65-68, 135-138.
36. See also Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District, from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle, 1994).
37. I witnessed this at the University of Washington in 1969-1971.
38. Conversation with the author, San Francisco, 1970.
39. Wei, The Asian American Movement, 42. "Asian American" was chosen over the White-inflected "Oriental" because, as was often said in the movement, "Orientals are objects like rugs. Asians are people."
40. The Fall of the I-Hotel, directed by Curtis Choy (National Asian American Telecommunications Association, 1993).
41. Helen Y. Zia, "The New Violence," in Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai, eds., Chinese American Voices (Berkeley, 2006), 345-352
42. "A Letter from Lily Chin," in ibid. [Lily Chin, Victor Chin's mother, wrote the letter, in Chinese, to the Detroit Chinese Welfare Council on March 18, 1983], 352-354
43. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima, Who Killed Vincent Chin? (New York, 1989)
44. Patricia Wong Hall and Victor M. Hwang, Anti-Asian Violence in North America (Walnut Creek, Calif, 2001).
45. These diagrams and this analysis first appeared in Spickard, "Who Is an Asian?" On the tenuous positioning of South Asians vis-à-vis the Asian American coalition, see Nazli Kibria, "Not Asian, Black or White? Reflections on South Asian American Racial Identity," Amerasia Journal, 22 (Number 2, 1996), 77-86
46. Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth, eds., A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (Philadelphia, 1998).
47. For example, see Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity (the book, not the issue of Amerasia Journal)
48. Harry H. L. Kitano and Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ., 1988)
49. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura, eds., Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology (New York, 2003)
50. Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (New York, 2003)
51. Asian Women United of California, eds., Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (Boston, 1989)
52. Juanita Tamayo Lott, Asian Americans: From Racial Category to Multiple Identities (Walnut Creek, Calif., 1998)
53. Lee C. Lee and Nolan W. S. Zane, eds., Handbook of Asian American Psychology (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1998).
54. For example, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston, 1991)
55. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, eds., The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia, 1994)
56. Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang, eds., Asian American Religions (New York, 2004)
57. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston, 1998)
58. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, ed., Teaching Asian America (Lanham, Md., 1998).
59. Jonathan Okamura, "Why There Are No Asian Americans in Hawai'i: The Continuing Significance of Local," in Peter Manicas, ed., Social Process in Hawai'i: A Reader (New York, 1995), 243ff.
60. Douglas Lee, Sucheng Chan, Alexander Mamak, and Pat Luce, Asian American and Pacific American Relations, Part One (Seattle, 1982), 3, 41-42, 44.
61. Hippolite Wright and Spickard, "Pacific Islander Americans and Asian American Identity," 115.
62. Vicente M. Diaz, "To 'P' or Not to 'P'? Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies," Journal of Asian American Studies, 7 (2004), 183-208
63. Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, "Engaging Hawaiians in the Expansion of the U.S. Empire," in ibid., 209-222
64. Amy Ku'leialoha Stillman, "Pacific-ing Asian Pacific American History," in ibid., 223-240
65. Joanne L. Rondilla, "The Filipino Question in Asia and the Pacific: Rethinking Regional Origins in Diaspora," in Spickard, Rondilla, and Hippolite Wright, eds., Pacific Diaspora, 56-66.
66. Diaz, McGregor, and Stillman were engaged in debate with Kehaulani Kauanui, who opposed linking Pacific Islanders with Asian Americans. I think Kauanui mistook the nature of the move they advocated. For her view on the subject, see Kehaulani Kauanui, "Asian American Studies and the 'Pacific Question,'" in Kent Ono, ed., Asian American Studies after Critical Mass (Malden, Mass., 2005), 123-143.
67. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai'i, special issue of Amerasia Journal 26 (Number 2, 2000).
68. Mark R. Peattie, Nan'yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (Honolulu, 1988)
69. Fujikane and Okamura, Whose Vision?
70. The literature on multiracial Asian Americans is large and growing rapidly, although less among historians than among scholars of other disciplines. The place to begin is Williams-Le-acon and Nakashima, eds., The Sum of Our Parts. Other notable contributions include: Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park, Calif., 1992)
71. Root, ed., The Multiracial Experience (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996)
72. Kip Fulbeck, Part Asian, 100% Hapa (San Francisco, 2006)
73. Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison, Wisc., 1989)
74. Spickard, "What Must I Be? Asian Americans and the Question of Multiethnic Identity," Amerasia Journal, 23 (Number 1, 1997), 43-60
75. Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Miss Spring Fragrance and Other Stories (Urbana, Ill., 1996)
76. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain, Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants (Minneapolis, 2006).
77. Conversation with the author, Berkeley, 1995.
78. Yen Le Espiritu, "Possibilities of a Multiracial Asian America," in Williams-León and Nakashima, eds., The Sum of Our Parts, 25-33.
79. Joanne Rondilla and Paul Spickard, Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans (Lanham, Md., 2007).
80. Karen Isaaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi-Mexican Americans (Philadelphia, 1994)
81. Allison Varzally, "Romantic Crossings: Making Love, Family, and Non-Whiteness in California, 1930-1950," Journal of American Ethnic History, 23 (Fall 2003), 3-54.
82. Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., "Burritos and Bagoong: Mexipinos and Multiethnic Identity in San Diego, California," in Marc Coronado, Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Jeffrey Moniz, and Laura Furlan Szanto, eds., Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide (Santa Barbara, 2003), 3-96
83. Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., "Mexipino: A History of Multiethnic Identity and the Formation of the Mexican and Filipino Communities of San Diego, 1900-1945" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007). Filipinos also mixed with Whites in many places, and with other Asians and Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.
84. Kathleen Tyau, A Little Too Much Is Enough (New York, 1996)
85. Paul R. Spickard and Rowena Fong, "Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America's Future?" Social Forces, 73 (1995), 1365-1383
86. Jeffrey Moniz and Paul Spickard, "Carving Out a Middle Ground: The Case of Hawai'i," in David L. Brunsma, ed., Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in a Color-Blind Era (Boulder, Colo., 2006). The terms "Pakeha" and "Haole" usually, but not always, imply European American.
87. See Acloption.com at http://international.adoption.com/foreign/ trends-ininternational-adoption-2003.html (accessed Feb. 5, 2007).
88. Some outstanding scholars are making a start. Mia Tuan, a sociologist at the University of Oregon, and Catherine Choy, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, are writing about Korean acloptees. Lily Welty, a University of California, Santa Barbara, historian, is writing about multiracial Japanese adoptees in the 1950s and 1960s.
89. See, e.g., Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin, eds., Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology By Korean Adoptees (Glendale, Calif., 1997)
90. Susan Soon-Keum Cox, ed., Voices from Another Place: A Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries (St. Paul, Minn., 1999)
91. Sara Dorow, ed., I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birth Mothers of Ae Ran Won to Their Children (St. Paul, Minn., 1999)
92. Dorow, Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship (New York, 2006)
93. First Person Plural [film], dir. Deann Borshay Liem (San Francisco, 2000)
94. Marie Myong-Ok Lee, Somebody's Daughter (Boston, 2005)
95. Kien Nguyen, The Unwanted: A Memoir (Boston, 2001)
96. Aimee Phan, We Should Never Meet (New York, 2004)
97. Rita J. Simon and Howard Altstein, Adoption Across Borders (Lanham, Md., 2000)
98. Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood: A Memoir (St. Paul, Minn., 2003)
99. Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, eds., Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (Boston, 2006)
100. Toby Alice Volkman, ed., Cultures of Transnational Adoption (Durham, N.C., 2005).
101. For the past several years the AAAS has featured papers, panels, and speeches by Arab Americans and other scholars on the question of Arab American-Asian American linkage. The April 2007 meeting included three such papers: Ibrahim G. Aoudé, "Between Two Worlds: Arab Americans, Homeland (in)Security, and Exile";
102. Sunaina Maira, "'By Any Means Necessary': War, Resistance, and Repression";
103. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, "'From the Bay to the Middle East, We've Got to Stop this US Beast': Filipino and Arab Transnationalisms and Solidarities."
104. A plenary panel, "The Question of Arab America," included Moustafa Bayourni, Thomas Abowd, Louise Cainkar, Steven Salaita, and Janice Terry;
105. it began with the question, "Are Arab Americans Asian Americans?" The answers varied, but all these Arab Americanists recognized its legitimacy.
106. Tuan, Forever Foreigners;
107. Wen Ho Lee, with Helen Zia, My Country Versus Me (New York, 2001). Even an American-born member of Congress, David Wu of Oregon, was denied entry to Los Alamos on racial grounds while on a congressional fact-finding mission.
108. Paul Spickard, "Who Is an American? Teaching about Racial and Ethnic Hierarchy," Immigration and Ethnic History Society Newsletter, 31 (May 1999).
109. Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race in America (NewYork, 1996). I deal with these issues at some length in Almost All Aliens. It is significant that only Asian and Middle Eastern peoples were found wanting on the Whiteness scale. Armenians were found to be White. No European-derived people ever had their Whiteness legally questioned.
110. Russell C. Leong, "Internees, in turn," Amerasia Journal, 31 (Number 3, 2005), vii-ix;
111. Bill Ong Hing, "Deporting Our Souls and Defending our Immigrants," in ibid., xi-xxxii;
112. Louise Cainkar and Sunaina Maira, "Targeting Arab/Muslim/South Asian Americans: Criminalization and Cultural Citizenship," in ibid., 1-28
113. Maira and Magid Shihade, "Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies: Thinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.," Journal of Asian American Studies, 9 (2006), 117-140
114. Ibrahim Aoudé, "Arab Americans and Ethnic Studies," in ibid., 141-155
115. Tram Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11 (Boston, 2005).