In the innumerable forms that I have had to fill out for various reasons since I moved to the US, I have found it disturbing to indicate my ethnicity/race/place of origin. The category that applies to me is 'Asian' or 'Asian and Pacific Islander'. The discomfort is partly due to the fact that although in India people are divided along million lines, race is not one of them. Also I find that 'Asian' is a category which makes no sense except geographically. And, knowing that it is impossible to have separate 'boxes' for each country on a form does not make me feel any better.
I felt some of the same discomfort while reading Lisa Lowe because she used the category of Asian American extensively. And although I am not an Asian American , I feel that there is not 'Asian American' consciousness that makes it a useful categorization. Lowe mentions that Asian American is not a "natural or static category"; rather it is a strategic category. But I still find it difficult to conceptualize how such a category can be used strategically in the absence of a collective consciousness or common socio-economic political aims/demands from the people who fall under it.
The categories of Asian American/ Asian
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Hey Nithya,
Sometimes I teach classes with students from other countries who have recently started school at the U. Most of the time (I know "most" is a strong word, but truly most of the time) these students have a very different framework for understanding what race might mean in America. Your post makes me wonder if it's possible to make sense of US racial categories from a transnational perspective. I mean, like you said, what does "Asian American" do for someone from India? Does it do something other than violence? Clearly it serves a function in the US for some people but does it serve a function for people coming here and being racialized? In what ways might thinking about this at greater length/dialoging this allow people who come here from other places to better understand the ways race and racialization works for and against certain groups of people here? I'm interested to know more of what you think about this.
Best,
Anne
nithya,
i definitely agree with your discomfort of the category of asian american. to lowe's defense (?), i think the field has changed in the past several years to question the essentialist underpinnings of "asian american" and similarly, "asian american studies." i by no means am grounded in this field, but i think there has been some momentum gathering around separating the racialized "asian american body" (which often is figured through "east asian hegemony" over the category) from "asian american studies." one way this is playing out is in historical and literary work taking embodied "asian american" experience as self-evident (here, a de-essentializing move), and thinking about "asian american studies" as a type of critique (see kandice chuh's book from 2006, i think, imagine otherwise: towards asian american critique). as i think about subfields, i might go toward "asian american studies," but i think of this more of an "asian americanist critique" that encompasses the racial, gendered, and sexualized violences of empire, colonialism, and capitalism from a transnational perspective. not sure if that was helpful at all, but i agree that we this category is not as useful inasmuch as it homogenizes and posits an east asian norm.
mingwei
Wolf,
I have been pondering over the questions you posed in your comments for a few days now. I find the idea of a transnational perspective very intriguing and I feel it would be very useful; But as someone who is still coming to terms with race as category and its implications, I have no idea how such a perspective can be created and what it will look like.
I do not have any answers or concrete ideas to the questions you pose, but I do thing that this is something that needs more discussion.