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ORIENTALISM AND THE POLITICS OF RACIALIZATION: The racialization of the…

- - - - Themes of assimilation:
        
        Paisley Rekdal, “On Cultural Appropriation - Letters One and Five”
        
        Cultural appropriation in literature, starting with questions of: how do we define cultural appropriation? Who is allowed to write what, and in what voice?
        
        Letter 5 in particular delves into the fictionalized voices of underrepresented minorities, particularly the ethical qualms of writing in a racially fake voice.
        
        Letter 1 looked at a poem of "sentimental racism," exploring an instance of mugging by two men, a supposed metaphor of a binary Black-white world.
        
        This reminded me of Edward Said's Orientalist concept of "Othering," applied in a setting of cultural appropriation by another.
      - A note on methodology: the genre as a whole of ASIAN AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY is a way for Asian Americans to reclaim the narrative -- they have a chance to tell the story in a way that traditional filmmaking has not granted.
  - - - How can the field of Asian American studies productively enagge with (rather than fully incorporate) the Pacific?
      - This reminded me of Susan's presentation on incorporation as a framework to be applied for marginalized communities.
      - Importantly, this reading underscores that the only commonalities between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders is the shared history of being exploited (730).
      - This also is deeply connected to notions of sovereignty and statehood, tying into greater themes of empire and nationalism.
    - - This reading delves into the role of national gov'ts and regional/international diplomacy, along with grassroots ordinary people in the study of Oceania as a region.
      - It aims to COUNTER the claim that countries of Polynesia and Micronesia are too small, poor, and isolated to develop any meaningful degree of autonomy (30)
      - To see the "Pacific as a 'sea of islands' rather than an 'islands in a sea'" (31)
      - Understanding the ocean as a part of the global environment, as well as the informal channels of circulation and movement.
  - - - Lisa Lowe says: this can be juxtaposed against model minority myth.
        
        Model Minority Myth: the stereotype that Asian Americans are culturally more hard-working and are therefore an example of how marginalized communities can overcome racist institutions in the U.S.
        
        Caudill and De Vos: stereotype that there is compatibility between value systems of Japan and American middle class culture
        
        Upholding Asians as ‘near-whites’ or ‘whiter than whites’ -- despite Asians facing white racism like Blacks in education and occupational barriers.
        Marginalization of Asians in black and white racial formation disciplines both Africans and Asians , and constitute the essential site of Asian American oppression.
        
        First arose in 1960s to explain low levels of juvenile delinquency in Chinese and Japanese Americans.
        
        Contrast Asians’ respect for law and order vs. Blacks’ civil rights marches.
        
        1970s - coincides with influx of Asian immigrants rise of the New Right and corporate offensive against the poor
        
        Ideological campaign meant to restore trust in capitalism and values associated with free enterprise
        
        Model minority myth stereotype symbolized moral vision of capitalism in 1980s -- celebration of traditional values, emphasis on hard work and self-reliance, respect for authority.
        
        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”
        
        This reading uses CRT tools of interest convergence and divergence to argue how Asian Americans exemplify the objective conceptualizations of meritocracy and critical mass in affirmative action.
      - Amy Uyematsu, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” (1989)
        
        Uyematsu situates the yellow power movement as akin to the Black Power movement as Third World struggles. She urges to break from the mold of silent Asian citizens.
      - THE PIVOTAL YEAR OF 1968
        
        Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s”
        
        This reading underscores how the struggles for liberation affected Asian American consciousness, arguing that hte turning point of 1968 let to militancy and violence due to no organization unity.
      - “Yellow Power,” Giant Robot (Spring 1998);
        
        This magazine cover features Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong.
      - Asian American conservatism
    - - Okibhiro argues that yellow is neither Black or white, but Asians and Africans share a subordinate position to the whites.
      - He argues taht we share a history of migration, interaction, adn cultural sharing
    - - Black Student Union
      - This source stands in solidarity with the BSU to establish a school of ethnic studies and to appropriate facutly positions for such a program.
  - - - 1995 Nassau Hall Sit-In: 17 Princeton undergraduates, mixed-race coalition to protest for ethnic studies at Princeton.
        
        “Princeton and Asian American Studies: A Report by the Princeton Asian American Students Association (AASA)” (2013);
        
        This report highlighted the need for an Asian American studies program, leading to the hiring of Professor Beth Lew-Williams.
        
        A timeline of Princeton Asian American Alumni Association
        
        A4P can be traced back to 1984 - archives show that it took a robust alumni base to build this network.
        
        “Princeton Asian American Studies Task Force 1993 Report”
        
        This 1993 document covered admissions, racial harassment, curriculum, and student life of Asian Americans, providing recommendations to the administration.
      - The Daily Princetonian, "‘A long battle fought’: The history of Princeton’s Asian American Studies program and a renewed push to expand," August 2021
        
        2021: the opening of the Effron Center for the Study of America
    - - Gary Okihiro, Introduction and Chapter 1 of Third World Studies
        
        How does cultural nationalism transform into comparative ethnic studies? Okihiro argues that the TWLF's spatial and ideological affiliation with the Third World and its people, suggests a curriculum built around the discourses and manifestations of imperialism and colonialsim. globally.
      - San Francisco State Strike
    - - Amy K. Stillman, “Pacific-ing Asian Pacific American History”
        
        This reading underscores the spatial dimension in which Asians and PIs were in interaction BEFORE community formation in the U.S. context.
  - - - Yuji Ichioka, “The Early Japanese Immigrant Response to the 1920 California Alien Land Law
        
        Not specifically at Japanese, but “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” This meant that individual Japanese and companies weren’t allowed to purchase or lease agriculture land.
        
        This prohibited Asian immigrants from owning land and other forms of property through the legal construction of nonwhites as ‘aliens ineligible for citizenship.’
      - What is the reality for Asian immigrants if they decide to return? In what ways do the boundaries of belonging CHANGE after coming to the U.S.?
        
        Amy Bhatt, “Returnees: ‘R2I,’ Citizenship, and the Domestic Sphere”
        
        "Being part of a racial minority population wtihin a white-majority region is a new experience for Indian transmigrants." (101)
        
        This reading explores how returnees adapt to life in India after living abroad, with a look at gendered work in migration and return.
      - Takao Ozawa v. US (1922)
        
        At the time, Japanese nationals were not eligible to become naturalized citizens.
        
        This case determined that Japanese nationals were not eligible for naturalization due to the fact that the Japanese could not be racially categorized as ‘Caucasian’.
        
        Despite Ozawa’s promising assimilation into mainstream American society and his outstanding qualifications of character and education, even Ozawa was denied U.S. citizenship on the grounds that the right to naturalization was reserved for Caucasians and those of African descent.
      - 'INELIGIBLE FOR CITIZENSHIP": What is the difference between the U.S. 'alien' and the U.S. 'national'?
        
        Mae Ngai, “The Immigration Act of 1924,” from Major Problems in Asian American History
        
        This reading explores how the naturalization and alnd cases solidified what it meant to be inelgiible for citizenship.
        
        The Supreme Court rulings on Asians in 1923 completed the llegal construction of 'Asiatic' as a racial category.
        
        Naturalization: many philosophers consider this a natural extension of citzienship.
      - Bhagat Singh Thind v. US (1923)
        
        the U.S. Supreme Court found that this Punjabi defendant was ineligible for citizenship, despite their acknowledgement that Asian Indians could technically be racially categorized as ‘Aryan’ or Caucasian.
        
        Instead, the WWI veteran’s citizenship was denied after the court declared Asian Indians were not ‘white persons’, citing common speech as its rationale over the previously accepted argument of racial scientific origin.
        
        THEME: STRIVING FOR WHITENESS AS A FORM OF BEING ACCEPTED AS AMERICAN
        
        Methodology: Looking at primary sources of court hearings is a demonstration of how fickle the legal system could be to uphold racialized institutions of power.
    - - Hawaiian Sovereignty Leader Haunani-Kay Trask Criticizes Asian ‘Settler’ Privilege and Collaboration with Colonialism (2000)
        
        This is a more recent account of how modern Hawai'i is grappling with legacies of U.S. colonialism and attempting to regain sovereingty on their own terms.
        
        They note how Asians (esp. Japanese) began to dominate post-Statehood, but it is necessary for their nationalist struggle to remain separately from American hegemony.
        
        This ties in closely with themes of empire and nationalism -- in particularly, this reading brings up self-determination and the importance of working with the Hawaiian nationalist movement, created BY Hawaiians.
    - - Lisa Lowe, “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique,” from Immigrant Acts
        
        Themes of U.S. culture
        
        It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as American. It is likewise through culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember, and in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently.
        
        If the nation uses American culture as a site of resolution for inequalities (unsolved by representative democracy), then the culture performs that reconciliation by naturalizing a universality that exempts the ‘non-American’ from its history of development OR admits the ‘non-American’ only through a ‘multiculturalism’ that aestheticizes ethnic differences as if they could be separated from history.
        
        “Culture is the medium of the present -- the imagined equivalencies and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective -- but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction.”
        
        Themes of Asian American culture as a SITE OF RESISTANCE
        
        The distance from the national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative formation that produces cultural expressions materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen in the nation
        
        Racialization of Asian Americans in relation to the state = LOCATES Asian American culture as a site of emergence of a political subject who has a historically alienated relation to the category of citizenship.
    - - Asian Americans are unable to own property
        
        California Alien Land Law 1913
        
        Not specifically at Japanese, but “aliens ineligible to citizenship” → individual Japanese and companies weren’t allowed to purchase agriculture land, couldn’t lease
        
        Couldn’t bequeath/sell land to other immigrants
- - - - Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
        
        Law that excluded Chinese for ten years, effectively closing Chinese immigration.
        
        Response to national clamor in 1879: California ballot on public sentiment, with 150k opposed.
        
        Did permit the entry of teachers, students, and merchants, but in small quotas.
      - The Page Act of 1875
        
        Chy Lung v. Freeman
        
        21 Chinese women were disallowed entry on the ground that they were ‘lewd’, although this was overturned by Supreme court.
        
        Kept Chinese from settling. This was a social subordination of Chinese labor, proximity to prostitution.
        
        Effectively halted immigration of Chinese women, preventing formation of families and generations among Chinese immigrants.
        
        Female U.S. citizens who married “alien ineligible for citizenship” lost their own citizenship
        
        Under the presumption of prostitution, this law effectively barred Chiense women and worsened an imbalanced sex ratio among Chinese.
      - 1790 Naturalization Act
        
        Specifically excluded African Americans and Native Americans. Even in 1870, when Congress extended right to naturalize Blacks, they denied Chinese because of ‘undesirable qualities’
      - 1917 Immigration Act (Asiatic Barred Zone Act)
        
        Extended Chinese exclusion laws to other Asians (except Japan), including South Asia.
        **Declared all Asians inadmissible except teachers, merchants, and students.
    - - Source: Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
        
        But, was it truly a win for Asian Americans? What kind of unanticipated effects did it have?
      - 1965: the pivotal year of the National Immigration and Nationality Act
        
        Bill Ong Hing, “Two Contrasting Schemes: Understanding Immigration Policies Affecting Asians Before and After 1965” from Making and Remaking Asian American Through Immigration Policy
        
        This reading explores the Asian arrivals and cycles of acceptance and rejection, particularly the laws and policies that framed the U.S. system.
        
        Prior to the exclusion laws, no federal statutes sought to bar Asian immigration or to control communities
  - - - Joanne Ramos, The Farm, 2019.
        
        The novel as a landscape of creative historical application -- although the story is fictional, it is intriguing how the author's note states how this is inspired from real-life pressures.
        
        This novel follows the journey of four women wrapped up in an elite firm that provides surrogacy firms to wealthy clients,
        
        Touches upon themes of motherhood, gendered labor, empires of care.
        
        Various stereotypes are explored of the professional working Asian woman, the desparate unskilled Filipino-Americans in care industries, and the bystander white woman who aims to make a difference.
      - Catherine Ceniza Choy, “Your Cap Is a Passport’: Filipino Nurses and the U.S. Exchange Visitor Program”
        
        Revisits the history of Filipino nurse migration to the United States, with a particular emphasis on the racialized, gendered, and class-based nature of the labor force in the context of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines
        
        She first argues how the origins of Filipino nurse migrations can be traced back to the creation of an Americanized hospital training system, a product of earlier U.S. colonial rule that ultimately reinforced multinational racial power dynamics
        
        Choy further asserts that it was actually this transnational nature of earlier exchange nurse migration that laid the groundwork for the post-1965 migratory influx of Filipino nurses to the U.S., complicating the work of earlier scholars who have suggested that migration from the Philippines spanning the late twentieth-century was exclusively due to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
      - Rachel Aviv, “The Cost of Caring” (New Yorker, 11 April 2016)
        
        This profile provided a qualitiative account of why Filipino American women often left their only families with young children to make enough salary abroad.
        
        Ironically, care-taking positions were often offered such that these women were hired to raise another white woman's child.
        
        METHODOLOGY: Following a few key people around as a form of interviewing proved to be very impactful.
      - It is worth noting that many of these sub-nodes are focused on U.S.-Philippine relations.
        
        This is a product of COLONIALISM and IMPERIALISM on the part of the U.S.
    - - in the context of the March 2021 Atlanta shooting, I appreciated how this reading spoke directly to the women who felt this loss.
      - This letter acknowledged the invisibility of the Asian American experience, as well as the fragility of the human body that came with such a loss.
    - - Film: Slaying the Dragon
        
        This film took advantage of moving clips to demonstrate the fluidity of the Asian American female as projected on the silver screen -- the visual platform of such a documentary was key in establishing the exotic portrayals of Asian American women in Hollywood.
        
        Showing how the Asian American woman has transformed from the terrifying 'dragon lady' stereotype, to the sexy exotic prostitute, and now looking towards the future.
      - Trinh T. Minh-ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
        
        This documentary included scenes on the Vietnamese woman and her relationship with femininity and culture.
      - Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity”
        
        A good vs. bad shot -- a beautiful shot is apt to lie, but a bad shot is a guarantee of authenticity
        
        "Making a film on/about the other consiststs of allowing them paternalistically speak for themselves
    - - Understanding "the yellow woman as a 'body ornament' whose perhumanity demands that we approach ontology, fleshliness, and aliveness differently." (2)
      - The yellow woman as she is circled yet excluded from humanity
      - Synthetic Asian feminiinity as opposed to the Black enslaved body
        
        "Where black femininity is vestibular, Asiatic femininity is ornamental" (6)
      - Racialized gender of the yellow woman: promiscuousness of these modes of racialized representations
        
        Cheng argues that both Orientalism and primitivism draw from technologies of Ornamentalism.
      - "Oriental female objectification' leads to an understanding of a human figure as and through ornament
      - Going beyond how Asiatic people have been used or how Oriental things have influenced our understanding
      - A conceptual paradigm to understand the fusion between thingness and personness
        
        The Euro-American aesthetic character of the white modern masculine nationalists are predicated on the REJECTION of the Oriental.
        
        Afong Moy
    - - While care has predominantly been a female-heavy industry, this resource produced in 2020 features an interesting cohort of femme Asian Americans providing specific advice and resources for the APIDA community.
      - I particularly enjoyed the feature of Alice Wong, a disabled Asian American that wrote about her ventilator needs being overruled as an invisible minority in the healthcare system.
  - - - In this analysis of butch/femme appearances in relation to Asian American women, a broader thesis on the invisibility of Asian Americans was put forth. Lee attempted to argue that queer Asian Americans fight for space in marginalized identities due to existing stereotypes via media.
    - - “Exploring the Roots of Chicago’s Queer South Asian Community ” (NBC 2018)
        
        In Patrick G. Lee's NBC Asian American short film segment, he explores the tradition for South Asian drag queens to explore their identity and sexuality openly, particularly identifying the stigmas that lie between those intersections.
        
        Worth noting is the specific focus on South Asians. Often, East Asians have been depicted as exotic, feminized, or perverted in 1900s texts during Yellow Peril. Focusing on South Asians is a completely different ball game.
    - - The same filmmaker produced an independent documentary/short film, interviewing various subjects about their relationship with their sexuality, their 'coming out' journey, and how this has impacted their family dynamics.
      - Focusing on gay, transgender, and cross-dressing Asian Americans, this source brings the raw conversations of acceptance and stigma into light.
      - Methodology: having a video and authentic/real-time documentary format (versus a movie or photo gallery) was the most effective means of capturing family reconciliation, such as the scene where a sister hugged her brother.
  - - - Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism,” from Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
        
        The biosocial lens used to understand defecation in colonial contexts is a powerful statement on how hygiene was a signal of larger racialized power dynamics in the Philippines.
    - - What kind of jobs have Asian American immigrants been relegated towards, particularly in the unskilled market?
        
        Sarah Maslin Nir, “The Price of Nice Nails” (New York Times, 7 May 2015)
        
        This article provides insight into the several Filipino/Asian American women who frequent nail salons -- not as clients, but as workers.
        
        Worth noting is the visual and structural racialized hierarchies reinforced by this article. Even in the pictures, it is clear to see how the white women are seated physically higher than Asian American women.
        
        Of course, it also produces a new dichotomy between East vs. Southeast Asian women. Not all Asian Americans are captured under a stereotype of service work, with many overtly succeeding and feeding into the model minority stereotype.
      - Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, “The Political Economy of Capitalist Restructuring and the New Asian Immigration”
        
        This text highlighted the economic labor divisions that plague a capitalistic world, pointing out the role of Asian immigration in an increasingly globalized world.
        
        With an analysis of profitability, wages, and labor in the context of Asian American studies, this is relevant to the Asian American body in terms of how a capitalist society expects one to work for progress.
        
        This has ties to the model minority myth -- that Asians are culturally more attuned to work harder, work longer hours, and simply work smarter than other racial minorities.
        
        In a historical context, it is also crucial to note that the post-1965 influx of Asian immigrants also contributed to the industrial success of the U.S.
  - - - Jaeah Lee, “Why Was Vicha Ratanapakdee Killed?,” The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2021
        
        Ratanapakdee was a victim of an anti-Asian hate crime, with a young Black male as the primary suspect. The family cited racial motivations, and although his death spurred an activism awakening across the nation, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes did not go down.
      - In May 2020, then-President Donald Trump referred to the SARS-CoV-2 virus as "the Chinese Virus," or the "kung-flu." (BBC)
      - Many outlets then linked the rise in anti-Asian discrimination, acts of violence, and hate crimes to this xenophobic rhetoric.
      - However, the field of Asian American Studies informs us that the American tradition of Asian exclusion and anti-Asian (particularly anti-Chinese hate crimes) stretches far past the realms of 2020.
    - - Helen Zia, Princeton '73 activist
      - On June 19, 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin went with friends to a strip club in Detroit to celebrate his upcoming wedding. That night, two white men who apparently thought Chin was Japanese beat him to death. At the killers’ trial, the men each received a $3,000 fine and zero prison time. The light sentencing sparked national outrage and fueled a movement for pan-Asian American rights.
      - Chin's death brought Asian Americans together across ethnic lines to form multiethnic and multiracial alliances, to organize for civil rights, and to advocate for change. Judge Kaufman's lenient sentencing angered not just Vincent Chin's family, but the entire Asian American community. Led by activist Helen Zia, several Asian American lawyers and community leaders banded together to create American Citizens for Justice.
      - This inspired other Asian Americans across the country to hold their own demonstrations. These protests resulted in the first federal civil rights trial for an Asian American.
- - - - 1898 Treaty of Paris
        
        After victory over Spain in 1898 in Spanish-American War, President McKinley concluded that the Philippines, a Spanish colony, were unfit for self-government and that there was nothing left for the U.S. to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.
        
        Filipinos became noncitizen nationals of the U.S. -- they could travel without regard to immigration laws, they weren’t subject to exclusion or deportation, and requirements for obtaining full citizenship were relaxed.
        
        <3k Filipinos actually immigrated by 1910, most of them were farm workers in Hawaii.
      - 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act
        
        But, we must also acknowledge the white nationalist sentiments behind granting Philippine independence.
        
        The refusal to extend Asians the right to naturalize = legacy of Congress’ attempt to satisfy economic ambitions and nativist demands
        Remained in full force til 1940s, symbolized peak of anti-immigrant power.
        
        Philippines Independence Act banned Filipinos from entering as U.S. nationals; it was predicated on the EXCLUSION of Filipinos.
        
        Filipinos lost status as nationals of the U.S., regardless of where they lived. Those in U.S. would be deported unless they became immigrants.
        Between 1934-1946, any Filipino who desired to immigrate became subject to the immigration acts of 1917 and 1924
        
        Done by exclusionists, anti-colonialists, and Filipino nationalists -- to exclude Filipino laborers, they had to support Filipino nationalists and anti-colonialists and grant the nation its freedom.
      - Benevolent assimilation
        
        ST. LOUIS WORLD FAIR (1904), or the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition
        
        Pensionados
        
        a Philippine student whose expenses are paid by the government while he studies abroad.
        
        Although less prominent in the narrative of assimilation, there were about 100 pensionados (ages 13-19) brought for a 1 month stay at the St. Louis World Fair in early August.
        
        3 regime’s goals for the Philippine exhibit
        
        Guide to visitors towards specific parts of exhibit in English
        
        Spectators and students to be awed by the fair.
        
        Exhibit of Filipino capacity for -- and American success at -- assimilation.
        
        Paul Kramer, "Mixed Messages at the St. Louis World Fair"
        
        This reading argues that the St. Louis World Fair was an exhibition of the colonial racial state, coveying hegemonic messages about race, capitalism, U.S. national superiority, and Asian spectacle.
        
        A specific form of assimilation that occurs when another force impedes on the autonomy of another to assimilate.
        
        Rudyard Kipling, the White Man's Burden
      - See "Gendered CARE in industry "for more on Filipino American migration, particularly for exchange nurses and industries of care.
        
        These programs were often a direct product of colonial racialized hierarchies (Choy)
    - - Through somatic control and moral training the colonial state attempted to shape the bodies and conduct of Filipinos and AMericans (106)
      - see PHSYICALITY of the body for more.
    - - Curtis Choy, The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983)
        
        International Hotel, often called I-Hotel, was a low-income single-room-occupancy residential hotel in San Francisco, California's Manilatown. It was home to many Asian Americans, specifically a large Filipino American population. Around 1954, the I-Hotel also famously housed in its basement Enrico Banduccci's original "hungry” nightclub. During the late 60s, real estate corporations proposed plans to demolish the hotel, which would necessitate displacing all of the I-Hotel's elderly tenants.
        
        METHODOLOGY: the shaky camcorder style of recording lnet a new feeling of authenticity to the movement
        
        When the International Hotel's elderly residents were forcibly removed in a pre-dawn operation by over 300 law officers in August 1977, Curtis Choy's cameras were there.
        
        San Francisco's Manilatown, a community whose hub since the twenties was the International Hotel, and a community which, like the hotel, was undermined in the sixties by the expansion of San Francisco's business district into neighboring areas, was a depiction of Filipino low-cost housing
      - NBC News, The Forgotten Victims of Hurricane Ida
    - - 1955 African and Asian meeting at Bandung
        
        Third World independence installed the sovereign nation-state, patterned on European model.
        
        Indonesian president Ahmed Sukarno told the 1955 Bandung Conference of newly independent African and Asian nations that the Third World’s historic turn was directed at the liberation of man from his bonds of fear, his bonds of poverty, the liberation of man from the physical, spiritual and intellectual bonds which have for long stunted the development of humanity’s majority.
        
        Edward Said says: By the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955, the entire Orient had gained its political independence from Western empires and confronted a new configuration of imperial powers, the U.S. and Soviet Union.
        
        Convened in the middle of the Cold War, expressed remarkable vision of a world free from racism and colonial rule and the achievement of lasting world peace.
        
        Edward Said, Orientalism
  - - - Dean Saranillo, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai’i Statehood
        
        This book looked at how settler state formation could be situated at the intersection of diaspora and indigeneity -- how the settlers were displaced and displacing.
        
        Understanding statehood as a knowledge-making spectacle that interacts with U.S. occupation and settler colonialism with the illusion of settler state permanence.
        
        Larger themes of migration to a settler-colonial space are explored in the context of empire and U.S. political contestation.
      - Transnational understandings of archipelago
        
        Brian Russell Roberts, “Archipelagic Thinking and the Borderwaters”
        
        This reading looks at the use of MAPS to understand how the US is an oceanic and archipelagic nation
        
        Roberts argues for the decontinentalization of studying and understanding America, looking at the U.S. as an ocean state
    - - Xenophobia spike after U.S. terrorism, politics of fear
        
        Junaid Rana, “Tracing the Muslim Body: Race, US Deportation, and Pakistani Return Migration”
        
        This reading shows how a threat to U.S. national identity led to a rise of anti-Muslim hate -- this is of particular interest when we consider the U.S.' geopolitical relationship with Asia and the Middle East.
      - This also relates to the idea of belonging and othering: who decides who gets to be American?
    - - Edward Said, Introduction to Orientalism
        
        Knowledge and power nexus: Top-down model of knowledge production -- how orientalism is about producing knowledge about the Orient to control the Orient (like corporate orientalism), but also involves all definitions
      - Orient vs. Occident: more than just the East v. West
        
        A European invention -- since antiquity, it was a blace of romance, exoticism. For the European visitor, it was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate.
        
        The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe, it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.
        
        Orient helped define Europe/West as its contrasting image, idea, personality, and experience.
        
        “Undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from various perspectives. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power.” (24)
  - - - Japanese-Americans Internment, 1943
        
        Gary Y. Okihiro, “America’s Concentration Camps”
        
        Japanese reactions to confinement actually differed, introducing a possible narrative of RESISTANCE.
        
        Executive Order 9066
        
        The incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
      - Political weaponization of Asian Americans during wartime
        
        Life Magazine, “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese” (1941)
        
        This source is a testament to how Americans perceived/judged Chinese vs. Japanese Americans during wartime -- despite the injustices committed against the Chinese a few decades earlier, Americans were quick to weaponize Chinese against Japanese due to geopolitical shifts in power.
        
        This can even be connected to the 1942 WWII documents released by the U.S. Army that were strictly anti-Japanese.
        
        "A Pocket Guide to China," U.S. Special Forces Army
        
        This is a war archive that tells soldiers how to become closer with Chinese peasants -- however, it actually is a form of anti-Japanese propaganda, one year before their internment.
    - - Yoneyama proposes that the transpacific can be understood as an alternative to Cold War geography
      - The architecture of postwar settlement can then be understood in the context of liberalism, nationalism, and decolonization.
    - - This reading looks at how the postcolonial Cold War context in Laos produced decolonization and Hmong refugee racial formation -- this directly relates to U.S. militarism, as well as colonialism via Hmong assertions of political autonomy.