Transformation and Agency in Asian American Cultural Studies

That a backward people or social group may need a coercive external discipline so as to be educated in the ways of civilisation does not mean that they should be reduced to slavery, unless one considers all state coercion to be slavery.

Antonio Gramsci, "Antonio Labriola [1]"

Methodologically, although we can never resist formalization in order to read a text . . . we can never formalize absolutely or completely.

Nahum Dimitri Chandler, "Originary Displacement" (2000)

This article seeks to open up the Asian American literary canon, to disentangle Asian American Studies from pedagogical projects that seek to create Asian Americans, and to extricate Asian American social and political identities from notions of Asian American culture. All of these goals can and should be affirmative projects that are able to wrestle with how the "figure of the subordinate, the figure of the other, gives rise in the movement of its production to the figure of the hegemon" and the ways in which our ruminations on the distribution of power must attend to differences in every possible context (Chandler 2000, 254). The stakes of any conversation concerning the possible futures of the discipline are high, and, certainly, the three goals above are related to a basic organizational concern that we all share: how our comprehensions of Asian American subjects directly shape our shared understanding(s) of society and the academy and, concomitantly, how our visions of social, academic, and political change apply to those who populate Asian America. At present, Asian American cultural studies face a quandary. The dilemma emerges in terms of how Asian Americanists attempt to understand the production of Asian American subjects and their proposed solutions meant to counter marginalization and racialization. For the purposes of this essay, I will examine the works of three prominent Asian Americanists: E. San Juan Jr., Lisa Lowe, and David Palumbo-Liu. These three scholars, arguably, have produced the most work on the question of Asian America, and their work undoubtedly demonstrates a high level of theoretical/philosophical rigor and sophistication. Each scholar's attempt to solve the problem of race relies on a specific mode of engagement (such as Lowe's and San Juan's reliance on the writings of Antonio Gramsci) that ends up reinstituting the very modes of relation that resistance intends to banish. The limitations of each argument discussed will reveal how, at the center of the field, the grounds of Asian American cultural studies have reiterated that which should be dismissed: a reliance upon racial(ist), exclusionary logics without either a dismissal of the calcified, particular Asian American identities, which are produced via exclusion, or an evacuation of hierarchies of power within Asian America. Political intervention, cultural production, and Asian American subjectivity can only be thought of, at different moments, as war or competition—like the Gramscian concept "hegemony"—and this ultimately determines the ways that each theorist's exit strategies from the social terrain(s) created by deployments of race end up being exclusionary in principle. In other words, each exit strategy meets a theoretical threshold that cannot be crossed, and it inadvertently repeats and replicates the racial domination it seeks to counter. We are reminded in the first epigraph above that even radical theorists like Antonio Gramsci have no problem, unwittingly or not, prescribing a kinder, gentler discipline in order to pursue counterhegemonic ends.

Lisa Lowe (1995) claims that "some cultural forms can succeed in producing alternatives in the encounter with . . . 'the law, capitalist exploitation, racialization, and gendering'" (49). This statement demands a number of questions, not least of which is how to define "cultural form" and what its exact relationship to Asian American culture is. Likewise, do these "alternatives"—produced in encounters with varying forms of interpellation and (materialist) determination—point in a specific direction, fundamentally altering the conditions that produce a need for alternatives in the first place? In another vein, Palumbo-Liu and San Juan are concerned with the history of subjectivities and racisms. Palumbo-Liu (1999) declares that a task "more worthwhile" than offering "alternatives" is to "ascertain at each...