(this is drawn from the proposal we submitted to the Mellon Foundation)

Overview

The twenty-first century has regularly been designated the Asian or Asian Pacific Century, the twenty-first century has at the same time been recognized as an extended moment of intense and spectacular violence against people of Asian descent. What are we to make of the co-incidence of Asia as a term referring to the centralization of global economic power in China, and as a term designating pronounced vulnerability to colonial and racist violence? Or the co-incidence of the widespread and award-winning embrace of Asian and Asian American popular culture – from K-Pop to Parasite and Everything Everywhere All At Once – and the pervasiveness of anti-Chinese rhetoric in policy debates and popular discussions of everything from spyware to contagion? We propose in this Mellon Sawyer Seminar to explore the multiple positionalities, uses, and values attributed to “Asia,” and to consider how and with what effects this term comes to have cultural and political meaning in the current moment. We ask: What can the study of the emergence, circulation, and impact of such meanings help us understand about contemporary modalities of racism and racial formation? How can such study help us understand and best address the national or local impact of racism by engaging the global context of U.S. race-making?

In contrast to approaches to these questions that follow the dominant critical protocols of Asian studies or Asian American studies, we will use the transpacific as the organizing analytic of the seminar. By doing so, we believe this seminar may afford not only new understandings of Asian racialization and anti-Asian racism, but also an opportunity to expand “the traditional narratives about history and culture of the Americas” in distinctive ways. We tend, in the United States, to root our understanding of race as an idea and social structure in transatlantic histories that focus on slavery and its afterlife and consider how other projects of racialization emerged in relation to, or as exception to, those foundational ideas. What happens to these ideas of race (and to concepts like racial capitalism) when we think transpacifically, through the heterogeneous histories of migration and affiliation across and within the Pacific? How might the expansiveness of thinking the transpacific together with the transatlantic enhance study of the centrality of race to the emergence of modernity?

Why Asia, why transpacific?

We intend with this seminar to occasion deliberate and deliberately slow consideration of present articulations of Asia and Asianness, in distinction from the more rapid, arguably tactical responses that have been mounted in recent times. Such tactical responses include the establishment of the STOPAAPIHate coalition in 2020, organized to collect data and mobilize community and political action against anti-Asian violence, and the enactment of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which explicitly cites the death in March 2021 of six women of Asian descent in a spa and massage parlor in Atlanta, Georgia at the hands of a young white man as catalyst. These efforts exemplify a strain of responses that emphasize the affective dimensions of racism, by highlighting spectacular acts of physical violence and calling for urgent action on behalf of people of Asian descent.

Meanwhile, academic and popular media regularly report on the latest actions of the Chinese state, commenting on its COVID policies, economic maneuvers, and political repression. Ongoing war in Ukraine, climate-induced flooding in Pakistan, arms testing in North Korea, social unrest in India, and the fractiousness of West Asian/Middle Eastern politics comprise some of the other news about Asia circulating in the United States. Taken as a whole, such coverage not only describes a robustly unsettled region but also and equally robustly calls into question the coherence of “Asia” and the non-portability of such slogans as “stop Asian hate.” In the U.S. academy, these conditions and critical challenges are typically sorted for consideration into area studies rubrics such as East Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, South Asian studies, and so on.

 As we hope this very brief sketch suggests, our proposed seminar acknowledges the need for a study of Asia and Asianness prompted by the current landscape of U.S. politics and culture both within and outside of the academy. It is not intended to be a corrective or a supplement to prevailing responses to current conditions per se. Instead, we wish to occasion collective thinking that in effect brackets “Asian” and “Asian American” as presumed subjects and objects of critical inquiry, to clarify what histories, geographies, cultures, peoples, relations, we are referring to in using these terms, and to grasp how these are being widely mobilized. In the face of spectacular violence and catastrophic environmental and political turmoil, it can be difficult to move away from a “damage-centered approach” and from the potency and seemingly straightforward explanatory narratives of identity politics. The kind of bracketing and corollary emphasis on the critical qualities and capaciousness of the transpacific we propose operate in a more scholarly, pedagogic, and reflexive tenor.

In developing the seminar in this direction, we bring forward two intellectual genealogies, which roughly correlate with our scholarly trajectories. One is that which has taken up “Asia” as a problem of thought, knowledge, and history. Epitomized by the scholarship of such intellectuals as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Sun Ge, and Laura Kang among others, this strain emphasizes the necessity of questioning the meaning and mobilization of “Asia,” given the world-shaping impact of Orientalism, racial capitalism, communism, and insurgent social, intellectual, and political movements across the region.^[1] Kandice Chuh’s work belongs to this genealogy, which has observed how fixed notions of Asia and Asian America have buttressed racialized and gendered social hierarchies and accordingly argued for sustained critical attention to the potent fictionality of these terms.^[2] The second genealogy, exemplified by the scholarship of Lisa Yoneyama, Takashi Fujitani, Chris Patterson, and Viet Nguyen among others, is that which has argued and elaborated the salience and power of the transpacific as a critical paradigm.^[3] The transpacific is not a substitute for Asia or Asian America so much as a critical approach that insists on the dynamism and relationality that comprise that material history. Trans here bears multiple meanings, referring at once to transit, transformation, transference, and transnationality. A construct auguring a set of histories and movements that hail Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas into a single geography, the transpacific focuses attention on the movements and fluidities, connections and transformations, through which these places and people have taken shape. Thuy Linh Tu’s work exemplifies the epistemological power of the transpacific as an approach, as she illuminates not only the connections among and across Vietnamese, Southeast Asian, and U.S. American histories, people, and cultural formations, but also how they formatively animate and shape these seemingly discrete places.^[4]

Our/these intellectual trajectories converge to produce a conversation deeply informed by historical materialism, poststructural theory, aesthetic inquiry, ethnography, feminist and queer theory, and critical race studies, all of which we will pull forward in taking the transpacific as the center of critical gravity for this seminar. The seminar will consider major contemporary shifts in American policy towards Asia and the Pacific—from those policies emphasizing the U.S.’s economic and political interests in the region, to those, like the intensely antagonistic stance of the Trump administration, which sees it as a military and industrial threat. We will explore how the long-held and constitutive ambivalence of the U.S.’s attitude toward the Pacific have been intertwined and shaped by the histories of war and empire, and by contemporary flows of images, ideas, feelings, bodies, capital and commodities across the Pacific, the Americas, and especially, in and through the idea of “Asia.”

The transpacific affords intentional space for the epistemological and intellectual work emerging from studies of the islands and indigenous peoples of and on the edges of the Pacific–work that has been vital to rethinking questions of popular aesthetics, social formations, and politics and to challenging narratives that assume a desire for identity with or assimilation into the U.S. nation. We recognize that this work has emerged alongside and has been deeply influenced by scholarship on the Black Atlantic and transatlantic studies, as well as on the Americas in a hemispheric frame. We see in our seminar an opportunity to consider the connections between these regions and fields of knowledge, through analysis of such formations as the Black Pacific and the Spanish Pacific, and such complex communities as has emerged in the Asian Caribbean and Asian Latin America. Our goal in highlighting the transpacific is not to reify it or to assert its primacy but to open up conversations about how “race” mutates across multiple fields and how “racism” as a structure of domination entangles us all.  A preliminary outline of the seminar’s thematic coverage is provided below.

Why the Graduate Center and NYU?

The Mellon Sawyer Seminar, designed as it is to afford sustained scholarly focus on topics neglected or otherwise understudied in the usual course of business, ideally suits the effort to develop critical attention to Asian America, Asianness, and the transpacific at the Graduate Center, and to buttress cross-institutional work on these topics regionally. While discussions about the transpacific and its relationship to Asian racialization in the United States have been ongoing for some time, there have been very few opportunities for scholars in the New York metropolitan area to engage in sustained dialogue about these matters and their current political stakes. Administratively housed at the Graduate Center, the seminar will allow scholars of Asian and Asian American studies to connect across the CUNY colleges, NYU, and the New York area more broadly. With their proven strengths in interdisciplinary humanities and humanistic social science scholarship and teaching, and their established records of fostering distinguished and enlivening intellectual communities, the Graduate Center and NYU are ideal partners in approaching the kinds of critical questions central to our proposed seminar. Moreover, we would with this seminar be establishing the basis for the consolidation of a regional network of interested scholars, teachers, and students; the cross-institutional nature of this seminar will enable us to draw on faculty and students from both NYU and the Graduate Center, but we expect that there will be widespread interest from scholars at surrounding and consortium institutions.

We note relatedly that this proposal is partly a result of the cross-institutional graduate course on the transpacific co-taught by Chuh and Tu in 2018. Formally offered by the Graduate Center’s PhD Program in English and NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the class brought together a thoroughly interdisciplinary roster of students from the Graduate Center and NYU, and the work distinctly benefited from such heterogeneity of field and institution. We are excited by the possibility of amplifying such work through this seminar, and by doing so in a way that contributes not only to growing our understanding of Asian racialization and transpacific thought, but – as described in the seminar description below – also to the intellectual and professional development of junior scholars.

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[1]Such scholarship includes the following tities: Edward Said, Orientalism 1978); Gayatri Spivak, In Other Words: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987) and Ohter Asias (2008); Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010); Laura Kang, Compositional Subjects (2002) and Traffic in Asian Women (2020); and Sun Ge, How Does Asia Mean? (2001)

[2] See Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003) and Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2002), co-edited with Karen Shimakawa; see also Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after’ Man (2018).

[3]Such scholarship includes the following titles: Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (2016); Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII (2011); Christopher B. Patterson, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (2018); Viet Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Amerging Field (2014).

[4] See The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (2011) and Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (2021).