Asian America, Incorporated
Through a framework of "incorporation," Asian American studies reveal subject-to-subject, object-to-object, and subject-to-object modes of bodily regulation and movement. Imagining a collective liberation from white supremacist structures means imagining the Asian American subject as unincorporated, where it is not combined with pre-existing notions of American society, obscured by the pretense of inclusion, or furnished with a body that is not its own.
Subject-Object
Subject-Subject/
Object-Object
First definition of "incorporate" from OED: To "combine or unite into one body or uniform substance; to mix or blend thoroughly together"
(subject-subject)
Third definition of "incorporate" from OED: "To combine or form into a society or organization; esp. to constitute as a legal corporation"
(object-object)
Second definition of "incorporate" from OED: "To put into or include in the body or substance of something else; to put (one thing) in or into another so as to form one body or integral whole; to embody, include"
Fourth definition of "incorporate" from OED:
"To furnish with a body; to give bodily shape to"
The Model Minority
The "model" and "minority" have been combined into one substance, where Asian Americans are viewed as NOT the problem minority but rather an achievable portrait of perfection that obscures histories of oppression and suppresses a racial consciousness
Whites have combined Asianness with whiteness to paint an anti-Black narrative: "whites upheld Asians as 'near-whites' or 'whiter than whites' in the model minority stereotype" (Okihiro 62)
The Post-1965 Immigrant
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 shifted immigration policies from restriction to preference-based inclusion, aspiring to an ostensible global egalitarianism and democratic embodiment
Bill Ong Hing, “Two Contrasting Schemes: Understanding Immigration Policies Affecting Asians Before and After 1965” from Making and Remaking Asian American Through Immigration Policy
Naturalization
The Perpetual Alien
1913 and 1920 California Alien Land Laws
Yuji Ichioka, “The Early Japanese Immigrant Quest for Citizenship: The Background of the 1922 Ozawa Case,” Amerasia 4.2 (1977): 1-22
Ozawa actually made the land cases crucial since the land law relied on a language on naturalization that evaded race
- Prohibited individual Japanese and companies, the majority of whose members or stockholders were Japanese, from purchasing agricultural land and restricted the leasing of such land to three years
- Effectively prohibited immigrant Asians from owning land, other Western states followed CA’s lead
- The 1920 California Alien Land Law also made it illegal to lease agricultural land, driving Japanese farmers out of California agriculture
Japanese immigrants perceived this as a bread-and-butter/life-and-death issue as it was a serious threat to their livelihood, so they fought the law in many ways
The Immigration Act of 1924
Mae Ngai, “The Immigration Act of 1924,” from Major Problems in Asian American History
click to edit
Barred the further admission of any alien ineligible to citizenship, which brought all Japanese immigration to an abrupt end
Passed on the heels of Ozawa (1922) and Thind cases (1923), which solidified the concept “ineligible to citizenship” and agricultural alien land laws which drove Japanese and other Asians out of farming
Completed the legal construction of “Asiatic” as a racial category, yet at a formal level this law was based on categories of nationality and not of race as it avoided explicit racial language
"The Asian American" beginning in the 1980s
“Advocacy,” “access,” “legitimacy,” “empowerment,” “assertiveness” formed the basis for a new Asian American society
Subject, unincorporated
The "Asian American" in the late 60s and early 70s
The emergence of young professionals as community leaders has aided mass political mobilizations but also a diversification of political viewpoints, including neoconservatism
Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s”
Leading influence was Malcolm X (not MLK Jr. as some may believe) 
“Consciousness,” “theory,” “ideology,” “participatory democracy,” “community,” “liberation”
- Approach to political work shared by activists in grassroots struggles in Asian American neighborhoods like Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, Manilatowns, and International Districts around the nation, focusing on the relationship between political consciousness and social change
- Activists believed they could promote political change through direct action and mass education that raised political consciousness in the community, especially among the unorganized—low-income workers, tenants, small-business people, high school youth, etc.
This term was born out of student protests in 1968, where Berkeley students were inspired by the Black Power Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, founded the Asian American Political Alliance as way to unite Japanese, Chinese and Filipino American students on campus. They joined other groups including Black, Latino and Native American students at San Francisco State at the Third World Liberation Front strikes in 1968 and 1969 to demand ethnic studies and more faculty and students of color.
Ornamentalism
Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s”
1790 Naturalization Act
Granted all “free whites” the right to claim citizenship and barred all nonwhites until after the Civil War in 1870
1875 Page Act
Designed to deter immigration by Asian women by making the “importation” of women for the purposes of prostitution a felony and female U.S. citizens who married an “alien ineligible to citizenship” lost their own citizenship
Bachelor Societies
the 1875 Page Act, which effectively prohibited the immigration of Chinese women to the U.S., led to American Chinatowns becoming overwhelmingly male “bachelor” societies, and the Chinese American population was artificially truncated over many decades. This led to the concentration of Chinese men in “feminized” forms of work, such as laundry, restaurants, and other service sector jobs
“Chinese male immigrants could be said to occupy, before 1940, a ‘feminized’ position in relation to white male citizens, and after 1940, a ‘masculinity’ whose racialization is the material trace of the history of this ‘gendering’” (Lowe 11)
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
First legislation to exclude immigrants on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, or race: prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country for ten years (extended by the Geary Act in 1892)
Established a precedent for excluding or limiting immigration from other Asian countries during the first few decades of the twentieth century and thus successfully halted the development of larger Asian American communities in the US
Benevolent Assimilationism
1898 Treaty of Paris
President McKinley’s defense of the decision to colonize the Phillippines: as a Spanish colony, they were “unfit for self-government” and “there was nothing left for [the United States] to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplife and civilize and Christianize them
1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act
established the process for the Philippines, then an American territory, to become an independent country after a ten-year transition period, in the meantime excluded Filipino immigration
- When the Philippines became independent in 1946, Filipinos would lose their status as nationals of the US, regardless of where they lived and those in the US would be deported unless they became immigrants
- Between 1934 and 1946, any Filipino who desired to immigrate became subject to the immigration acts of 1917 and 1924, and the Philippines was considered a separate country with an annual quota of only 50 visas
- meanwhile, colonialism in the Philippines continued under the pretense of assimilationism
As the state legally transformed the Asian alien into the Asian American citizen, it formalized the disavowal of the history of racialized labor exploitation and disenfranchisement through the promise of political freedom. This was a pretense for forming one uniform white society where Asians "belonged" in this white sphere. (Lowe)
Asian American "culture"
The racialization of Asian Americans in relation to the state locates Asian American culture as a site for the emergence of another kind of political subject, which has been posed opposite to the category of citizenship as well as to what that concept entails in American culture
Lisa Lowe, “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique,” from Immigrant Acts
"...the demand that the immigrant subject 'develop' into an identification with the dominant forms of the nation gives rise to contradictory articulations that interrupt the demands for identity and identification" (Lowe 29)
Chinese coolies
Chinese coolies and workers were seen as a moral evil, incapable of assimilation and unworthy of citizenship (Okihiro)
St. Louis World's Fair
Exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair dramatically represented Filipino assimilation to proudly put imperialism on display
Paul A. Kramer, “Mixed Messages at the St. Louis World's Fair”
Pensionados were an exhibit of the Filipino capacity for and American success at assimilation
Chicago ethnic studies
Sociologists at UChicago, notably Robert E. Park, led a brand of ethnic studies which conceived of ethnicities or culture as the way to preserve white supremacy by assimilating problem minorities into the dominant majority (Okihiro)
Gary Okihiro, Introduction and Chapter 1 of Third World Studies
Unifying minorites and whites was seen was a function of maintaining existing relations of power
U.S. National Culture
Lisa Lowe, “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique,” from Immigrant Acts
The collectively forged images, histories, and narratives that combine individuals in relation to the national polity have contributed to a national culture that continues to be the medium through which the subject becomes, acts, and speaks as "American"
The Documentary
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity”
Documentarians perpetuate the myth of cinematic “naturalness" but this striving for authenticity, with the Asian American subject at the center of it, disrupts existing notions of "lived" and "future" realities
Orientialism
Edward Said, Ornamentalism (1978)
Western scholarship about the Eastern World is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power
Orientalism is a deliberate and productive embodiment of the Occident by the Orient
Executive Order 9066
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor activated and reconfirmed the stereotype and fear that stirred popular anger and fostered official acquiescence
2 theories of what caused this:
- Pressure-group theory where various West Coast groups out of self-interest pressured the government for mass evacuation
- Politican theory where West Coast policians for their own ends inflamed an apprehensive public
- Both these theories necessitated the furnishing of the Japanese body as a dangerous alien
Gary Y. Okihiro, “America’s Concentration Camps”
The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, which Gramsci identifies as the form of cultural leadership where certain cultural forms predominate over others
Third World Liberation Front
In response to real estate corporations planning to demolish the I-Hotel in San Francisco's Manilatown, housing activists, students, community members, and tenants united to protest and resist eviction
Curtis Choy, The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983)
Interest Convergence and Divergence
Brown v. Board (1954) was only possible because racial integration eventually converged with white interests:
racial segregation became viewed as an economic threat to the industrialization of the South and a setback to America’s reputation during the Cold War
Julie J. Park and Amy Liu, “Interest Convergence or Divergence?: A Critical Race Analysis of Asian Americans, Meritocracy, and Critical Mass in the Affirmative Action Debate”
Asians in the affirmative action debate were combined with white interests
in hindsight the Brown decision further marginalized the interests of poor and working-class Blacks and whites, hence representing an ultimate divergence of interests
Power re-creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge (knowledge and power nexus)
Nassau Hall Sit-In
Resulted in promises by the university to begin work to create an Asian American Studies program (made in 2018) and a Latino Studies program (made in 2009), but little was done in establishing the program
Students formed an organization to protest the lack of Asian American studies at Princeton
1993 report demanded improved admissions procedures, a definition in rules on racial harassment and bias, an Asian American Studies program, increasing women and Asian Americans for faculty positions, increased support to the Third World Center
Source : “Princeton Asian American Studies Task Force 1993 Report”
a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts
Through their participation in the San Francisco State strike, a generation of Asian American student activists reclaimed a heritage of struggle, linking their lives to the tradition of militancy of earlier generations of Filipino farm workers, Chinese immigrant garment and restaurant workers, and Japanese Americans in concentration camp
Asian American Studies program at Princeton
Source: “Princeton and Asian American Studies: A Report by the Princeton Asian American Students Association (AASA)” (2013)
The University's decision to include this program under the American Studies program reflects a broader compromise, one that was arguably necessary and/or inevitable in the institution-student relationship
Decreased emphasis on solidarity with other ethnic studies programs such as African Studies program (compares lack of resources to that tho)
Arguments by Ozawa and Thind
Ozawa’s lawyers argued that Congress’ original intent was to exclude Africans and American Indians—Ozawa was willing to argue that the Japanese were superior in culture and thus deserving of citizenship (thus attempting to unite the Japanese and white body)—but the court refused to budge
Thind noted that the Aryans of India are a “tall, long-headed race with distinct European features, and their color on the average is not as dark as the Portuguese or Spanish," and because marrying outside of caste is strictly forbidden in India, Thind argued that he was a “pure Aryan" (thus attempting to unite the Hindu and white body)
Bhagat Singh Thind v. US (1923)
Takao Ozawa v. US (1922)
Yellow Power
A direct outgrowth of the Black power movement, the yellow power movement advocated self-acceptance as the first step toward strengthening personalities of Asian Americans, attempting to form one society of politically empowered, non-passive Asians
“Yellow Power,” Giant Robot (Spring 1998)
Object 1: Black Power
Object 2: Yellow Power
Amy Uyematsu, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” (1989)
“Third World Liberation Front: Notice of Demands” (1968) Gidra, Vol.3, no. 1
Expressed unanimous voting support for the position of the Black Students Union
Solidarity in demanding a school of ethnic studies, new faculty positions for that school and for Black Studies program, all applications of non-white students be accepted in the fall of 1969, and faculty chosen by non-white people as their teachers be retained in their positions
Source: A timeline of Princeton Asian American Alumni Association
Focus shifted from admissions/formation of studies program to broader outreach/professional development
Photos and Film
Anna Pegler-Gordon, “Photographic Paper Sons: Resisting Immigration Identity Documentation, 1893-1943”
The photographs required of Chinese immigrants were central to the enforcement of their exclusion, but also were central to the evasion of exclusion laws. Chinese immigrants were both furnished with a body and furnished themselves.
Slaying the Dragon
Portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans in film and on TV have allowed white Hollywood to project white faces onto Asian bodies, rendering Asianness transferrable
The racialized Muslim body
Junaid Rana, “Tracing the Muslim Body: Race, US Deportation, and Pakistani Return Migration” (2013)
A process of racialization after 9/11 has made the visible Muslim body reliant on objects that render people into terrorism, panic, patriarchy, Taliban, fanatic, radical, barbaric, etc.
Source: Life Magazine, “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese” (1941)
In this literal map-like representation of visual racialization, body features are hyper-emphasized in furnishing Chinese and Japanese bodies and propelling wartime narratives. The "Chinese public servant" had a "higher bridge" and "scant beard" while the "Japanese warrior" had a "heavy beard" and "flatter nose."
Vincent Chin's murder sparked a push for Asian American rights advocacy, and a lot of this effort relied on the furnishing of a no longer living body, reconstructing Vincent Chin from photographs and family members' stories
Christine Choy, Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987)
By positioning the subject in a way disruptive to pre-existing expectations, societal constructions can also be disrupted
Minh-ha's Surname Viet Given Name Nam does this by forcing the audience to confront their own perceptions of Vietnamese women
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
Hawai'i Statehood
Dean Saranillo, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai’i Statehood
The U.S. attempted to combine Hawai'i into the states through a process that Saranillo describes as "manufacturing consent": where the U.S. government made sure that the process of U.S. statehood wasn’t disrupted by free democratic debate
"AAPI"
This label includes Pacific Islanders in name but not in body or discourse. By mapping a different history of indigenous culture, economic traffic, and settler colonialism onto one body that pretends to include Pacific Islanders but doesn’t, the Asian/Pacific Islander grouping poses the Pacific Islander body as a subject participating in a singular unification, but a disparity between definitions of the Asian American “immigrant” and the "Pacific Islander" reveals the atter to only exist as an object in a colonialist structure where the Asian American is the colonist.
Vision of Hawai'i as a multicultural melting pot
Produced a strong identity of resistance that both coexisted with and supported, yet in many ways overshadowed, specifically Native Hawaiian issues and losses
PIs exist as only 3 percent of the imagined “AAPI” grouping; “proceeding as though the identities, histories, and categorical constructions of ‘Asian American’ and ‘Pacific Islanders’ are the same actually impedes our understanding of both, and the consequences of those distortions are far more dire for Pacific Islanders” (744-745)
Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Are Not Asian Americans, and All Pacific Islanders Are Not Hawaiian” (2015)
Continental nationalism
AG Jeff Sessions during Trump’s presidency: “I really am amazed… that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States."
Brian Russell Roberts, “Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters”
In the Hawaiian language, Pae ´āina and pae moku, are translated to archipelago and they “conceive of mutliple lands as interconnected” and “imply active human and state intervention in the creation of an archipelago” (Roberts 16)
Things like "tiki culture," which emerged and spread across continental US in the mid-1950s coincided with the age of suburbanization, architectural modernism, and space exploration, thus it was considered an escapist fetishizing of simpler ways of life, modeled on "south seas" primitivist stereotypes
Amy K. Stillman, “Pacific-ing Asian Pacific American History” (2004)
Oceania
Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands”
The peoples of Oceania have not conceived of their world as small; it’s not just land surfaces but the surrounding ocean, the underworld, and the heavens above... "smallness is a state of mind” (Hau'ofa 31)
denotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants; this is where people and cultures moved and mingled, growing and expanding
“Islanders have broken out of their confinement, are moving around and away from their homelands, not so much because their countries are poor, but because they were unnaturally confined and severed from many of their traditional sources of wealth, and because it is in their blood to be mobile” (Hau'ofa 35)
Asian "Settler" Privilege
Source: Hawaiian Sovereignty Leader Haunani-Kay Trask Criticizes Asian ‘Settler’ Privilege and Collaboration with Colonialism (2000)
"The history of our colonization becomes a twice-told tale, first of discovery and settlement by European and American businessmen and missionaries, then of the plantation Japanese, Chinese, and eventually Filipino rise to dominance in the islands."
The conflation of the term "local" with "immigrant" glossed over the term "settler," obscuring Asian collaboration with colonialism in Hawai'i
International Division of Labor
Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, “The Political Economy of Capitalist Restructuring and the New Asian Immigration”
The international organization of labor markets has led to industrial production becoming increasingly shifted to developing countries, with the developed countries focusing more on providing business services to global enterprises
To move up technological ladder, many Asian developing countries promoting higher education, some sent to developed countries like US for advanced training; others have trained at home
Filipino exchange nurse migration
This took place in the context of US attempts to maintain its global dominance during the cold war and it prefigured the post-1965 immigration of Filipino nurses to the US that so many studies have attributed it solely to the “liberalization” and immigrant "inclusion" of US immigration laws
Catherine Ceniza Choy, “Your Cap Is a Passport’: Filipino Nurses and the U.S. Exchange Visitor Program”
In the case of Indian immigrants holding H-1B and H-4 visas, their "inclusion" in the US was often temporary and complicated by career and personal factors that led to many's return to India. The return became more appealing for the majority only after obtaining citizenship or a green card in the US so their time in the US was enveloped by a certain "temporariness" which made the return often seen as a stage
Amy Bhatt, “Returnees: ‘R2I,’ Citizenship, and the Domestic Sphere”
Socially reproductive work
Many Asian immigrants, working in the service sector, often embodied the labor of white Americans by caring for their children, homes, and food
A 2012 survey revealed that 2/3 of nannies, housekeepers, and home health aides were immigrants, half of whom were undocumented
Rachel Aviv, “The Cost of Caring” (New Yorker, 11 April 2016)
The proliferation of Asian nail salon workers across the U.S. reveals not only the capitalist exploitation of Asian female bodies, but also the “ornamental appendages” defining the women: solidly colored uniforms and bibs, pinned-up hairstyles, gloves, and nail toolkits. These appendages can also include the salon’s decor, which often includes plants, colorful wallpaper, and a coat rack. Ornamentalism calls us to ask how these women then desire their own personifications in an alternative way of being, if they are first aestheticized alongside things
Sarah Maslin Nir, “The Price of Nice Nails” (New York Times, 7 May 2015)
Surrogate women literally embody white mothers' children
The Farm by Joanne Ramos (2019)
The image of a “successful career woman" which aims to include women dominates “feminist” discourses, obscuring the poor, nonwhite women upon whose backs this image is curated
Excremental Colonialism
Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism,” from Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
The Filipino body has been combined with the visuals and substances of animals in the marketplace, and human waste in toilet, conflating Filipinos with execrement and creating a "living laboratory" (Anderson 113)
After the 90s, historical injustices have been re-articulated to form around a notion of belatedness. The post-90s redress is a culture that has been embodied as an ideological matrix of juridico-political processes
Lisa Yoneyama, “Transpacific Cold War Formations and the Question of (Un)Redressability,” Introduction to Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes
Secrecy
“The ‘secret war’ was a US liberal imperial strategy of militarization to promote decolonization and soveriengty at a time when the peoples of Asi, Africa, and Latin America struggled for emancipation from Western imperial powers” (Vang 28)
Military operations in Laos were masked as a form of inclusion: being for the benefit of the Laotian state and Hmong liberation
Ma Vang, “Secrecy as Knowledge,” from Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies
In response to anti-Asian hate crimes and a global pandemic, the Asian American Feminist Collective published "Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus," forming written activism for community care around gender-based violence, aid for sex workers, and protection against hate crimes
The son-in-law of Vicha Ratanapakdee evoked past tensions between Asians and African Americans, suggesting that it was the result of one race targeting another. This is where the uniformity of racial violence becomes dangerous.
Jaeah Lee, “Why Was Vicha Ratanapakdee Killed?,” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2021
Speaking "to" not "for"
R.O. Kwong differentiates these two actions in her article "A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking," in Vanity Fair
Is it possible to distinguish the two? What does this mean for the importance of collectivity?
Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism, 2018
With this lens, we are able to see the construction of Asianness beyond its flesh, imagining a racialized history not just of moving bodies but also of bodies moving within their own ambiguous personhood
Yellow bodies are furnished alongside machines, fabrics, decorated backgrounds and other ornamental appendages
Ornamentalism derives itself from Edward Said’s Orientalism in that there is an inherent power structure wherever society is white, masculine, and heteronormative. Orientalism tells a story of productive coercion and reduction between the hegemon of the Occident and the construction of the Orient. But while ornamentalism also rests on a projected image which benefits American imperialism, ornamentalism refuses to let the coerced subject exist without agency, and leaves room for the objectified self to imagine her own unmaking
While Orientalism seeks to include the Occident in discourse, it excludes women from the dominant visual definition of lesbians as butch, making femme and feminine-looking Asian women especially invisible
“The assumption of normtive heterosexuality embedded in American Orienalist discourse colludes with the image of the lesbian as butch and the stereotype of bisexuals as swinging straights to virtually erase the very existence of femme bisexual Asian women” (Lee 123)
Jee Yeun Lee, “Why Suzie Wong Is Not a Lesbian”
Cultural Appropriation
Often, what appears as "inclusion" is the appropriating and taking of other cultures that ultimately harms people's identities
Pseudonyms in literature: “Masking one’s name is a form of deception, but it’s a socially accepted one that doesn’t require that you or I invest the work with biographical authenticity, or a belief in journalistic truth” (Rekdal 138)
Paisley Rekdal, “On Cultural Appropriation - Letters One and Five”
There is a classism in the language of aesthetics ("beautiful/sublime" vs. "cute/cozy"), in part due to the fact that aesthetics such as cuteness rely on nonhuman things giving human features (Ngai 832)
Sianne Ngai - The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde
Queerness
The disruption of tabooness, gender norms, and social expectations of collectivity
In Patrick Lee's "Unspoken," queer and trans Asian Americans read letters to their immigrant parents about their gender identity, sexuality, and queerness
In Chicago, the Queer South Asian Community has formed families like Trikone surrounding shared experiences of both alienation and liberation
Source:“Exploring the Roots of Chicago’s Queer South Asian Community ” (NBC 2018) <https://www.nbcnews.com/video/exploring-the-roots-of-chicago-s-queer- south-asian-community-1263642179572>
"Representation"
At the Met Gala, Gemma Chan paid tribute to the first Chinese American movie star, Anna May Wong. Her black sequin dress was adorned with a dragon emblem, and her hair resembled a braided style that was often a part of Wong's iconic look. I have found myself struggling with the question of representation in the past year. Gemma Chan has become a champion at the forefront of Asian representation advocacy, and I am a personal fan of her acting. But as inspiring as it is to see Asian representation in the media, how far does representation go in dismantling this nation's deeply rooted seeds of white supremacy? How far does representation go when those who are "represented" are still seen in the context of whiteness? At the same time, progress becomes impossible without represented voices. In Chan's Instagram post, she says that Wong paved the way for those who came after her. Interestingly, Wong appeared on television decades before there were multiple Asian faces on screen. Wong was also exploited, filling the role of the "exotic" dragon lady or sexual temptress when Hollywood needed her. Chan's tribute to Wong asks the question: is representation, albeit exploited, necessary for a road to liberation? Is there such thing as a "net good" of policies such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which created both benefits and harms? Or, like Wong, will our "representation" only continue to be a cog in the American capitalist machine?
I’ve never known BTS super well, but over the years have grown more curious as to how the group has gained incredible global recognition with a hyper-present digital profile. BTS isn’t just a popular band or musical sensation anymore; they’re a cultural moment in history, a representation of international connectivity through social media, and perhaps, at least in part, a symbol of the modern Orient. This morning was not the first time that BTS spoke at a UN conference. They gave a speech in 2018, a virtual one in 2020, and today, another message that “relayed the experiences of the younger generation.” As a Korean American, it’s a strange feeling hearing from BTS fans all over the world just how entrenched they are in their support of the group. I remember thinking in high school that it was just a passing phase, a temporary obsession with Eastern culture. I even remember feeling like I had to detach myself from K-pop bands like BTS because I didn’t want to be perceived as “too Asian.” When thinking about the role that BTS has played on a global and digital scale for the younger generation, Said’s structure of Orientialism provides a useful lens. In today’s society, how is culture “flexible”? What underlying mechanisms of superiority exist to both propel non-Western cultural icons and also uphold Western hegemony?
Gary Y. Okihiro, “Is Yellow Black or White?" from Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture
Definition of "unincorporated" from OED:
"not formed into a legal corporation," "not included as part of a whole"
Subject: citizen
Object: alien
Subjects: patients, clients, customers, mothers, white families
Objects: nurses, domestic helpers, nail salon workers, surrogate mothers, nannies
"Subject": person or thing doing or being something
"Object": person or thing receiving the action
(this does not preclude the object from responding)
Through immigration policies and the exploitation of Chinese labor, Asian immigrations were furnished with the body of a perpetual alien, seen as an unassimilable foreigner and entirely incongruent with an existing America.
Subject: West (Occident)
Object: East (Orient)
Subject: Deceptive authenticity
Object: Culture, identity
Subject: Cold War U.S., neoliberal Asian America
Object: post-1965 Asian immigrant, model minority
Subject: Imperial U.S., U.S. colonist
Object: Philippines, "uncivilized" Filipinos
Subject: U.S. sovereignty
Object: Hmong Vietnamese
Object 1: Chinese male immigrants
Object 2: feminized forms of work, non-masculinity
Object 1: Asian alien
Object 2: Asian citizen
(combined by the state)
Object 1: "locals" in Hawai'i
Object 2: Asian "immigrant" in Hawai'i
(combined by the Asian settler)
Object 1: Hawai'i
Object 2: United States
(combined by U.S. government)
Object 1: white individuals, white objects
Object 2: forged images, histories, and narratives deemed "American"
Object 1: International organization of labor markets
Object 2: Asian developing countries
Yellow Power and Black Panthers grouped together on this cover
Subject 1: White interests, pro-affirmative action groups
Subject 2: pro-affirmative action Asian advocates
Subject(s): U.S. continental states
Subject(s): immigrants in Hawai'i, "Americanness," liberal ideals of inclusion
Subject(s): "model," "minority"
Object(s): Filipino body, execrement and human waste
Subject(s): White/American body, mouth/discourse
Subject 1: Asian immigrant desiring citizenship
Subject 2: white body
Subject 1: white supremacy
Subject 2: assimilating minorities
Subject 1: Asian American
Subject 2: Self-empowerment, Neoconservative
unincorporated from white power structures and the privilege of non-violence
unincorporated from erasure of experiences
uncorporated from U.S. national culture
unincorporated from stillness, smallness, continental nationalism
unincorporated from Orientalist heteronormativity