Guest Editor's Preface

This special issue of JAAS emerged from two moments: one, a specific academic event, and the other, a larger historical and political crisis, both of which crystallized a set of questions at the core of Asian American studies that necessitate a focused discussion. The first moment was a plenary session on the intersections of Asian American and Arab American studies at the annual Association of Asian American Studies conference in Los Angeles in April, 2005. The plenary featured four presentations, by Ibrahim Aoudé, Moustafa Bayoumi, Vijay Prashad, and myself, that are represented by the papers in this issue, with the exception of Bayoumi who unfortunately was not able to contribute to the issue but whose work has spoken to this issue well before the conference. All the essays here have used this issue to extend, refine, and rethink the original arguments presented in the plenary, in conversation with the other authors. My essay here is co-authored with Magid Shihade, so the articles represent the work of two Asian Americanists and two Arabists/Arab Americanists.

The panel and the questions raised there and in the essays here are a response to a larger political and historical crisis that is apparent on three levels. First and most immediately, it is a response to the War on Terror waged by the Bush regime and the targeting of Arab, South Asian, and Muslim Americans after 9/11, both in the arena of state policies and in social practices. The increasingly common experiences of Arab Americans and particular Asian American communities due to this so-called racial profiling after 9/11 have generated both new alliances and shifting racial constructions that call for analyses of their implications for our theories of racial formation, nationalisms, and state repression.

Second, it was evident that these experiences of racial profiling pre-dated 9/11 in the case of Arab and Muslim Americans, and also for other groups that have long been the brunt of official and unofficial surveillance, profiling, and persecution. The "war on drugs," "war on gangs," and "war on immigration" that preceded 9/11 have used the criminalization of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos to enforce policies of discipline and punishment, detention and deportation that overlap, and are reinforced by, the current regime of "homeland security." The War on Terror has used some of the same approaches in the profiling of Arab, South Asian, and Muslim Americans, but it has also rested on a particular form of political profiling that is more akin to the targeting of Communists in the McCarthy era. It also extends a pattern of state surveillance of political activists who challenged central tenets of U.S. imperial policies, evident in the FBI's monitoring of the civil rights, anti-war, and later, Central American solidarity movements in the United States. This state repression, which used covert tactics later legalized under the PATRIOT Act, was directed against Arab Americans well before the events of 9/11 in order to silence criticism of U.S. policies in the Middle East—policies that rippled into Asia and other parts of the world and whose consequences continue to haunt us today. One of the aims of the AAAS plenary session, and now this issue of JAAS, is to situate these programs of repression and homeland subordination within the global frame of U.S. empire, linking domestic policies of profiling, detention, and deportation to foreign policies of the imperial state, as Aoudé's essay and the article by Shihade and myself suggest.

Third, all the papers respond to the dangers that liberal multiculturalism has created for Asian American studies and for Asian American political movements and suggest that a comparative Arab-Asian American studies project would be a form of resisting the traps of multiculturalist ethnic studies. Vijay Prashad offers a critique of multiculturalism's "bureaucratic approach to the problem of diversity" that Aoudé observes has been successful in its co-optation and fragmentation of ethnic studies, including Asian American studies. All the papers share a concern that Asian American studies challenge the segregation of knowledge within the boundaries of knowledge institutionalized...