Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (review)

Focusing on Asian American radicals of the late 1960s and '70s, Chains of Babylon offers a compelling interpretation of the complex historical origins of the racial identity "Asian American." In doing so, Daryl J. Maeda challenges entrenched narratives of the 1960s, which tend to portray the second half of the decade as being marked and marred by self-indulgent, divisive identity politics. Asian American activists, he argues ultimately, forged a movement, a new racial identity, in and through expansive and inclusive struggles against racism and imperialism, struggles rooted in strivings for multiethnic, interracial, and transnational solidarities.

Maeda illustrates his argument through engaging chapters on particular individuals, organizations, and cultural productions. After a largely contextual chapter on Asian American history before the 1960s, particularly on the different modes of political mobilization against white supremacy, Chains of Babylon turns to S. I. Hayakawa, a pivotal figure in the San Francisco State College strike of 1968-69. Rather than depict him as a one-dimensional villain, Maeda uses Hayakawa's academic work in linguistics and columns in the Chicago Defender in the 1940s to demonstrate his longstanding and unwavering commitment to liberal assimilation. That commitment would clash dramatically (and violently) with radical Asian American students organizing for the first time as "Asian Americans" and allying with fellow students of color. Reflecting and producing deep divisions among Asian Americans, Maeda argues, Hayakawa failed to comprehend and therefore attempted to repress the emergence of a new movement rejecting assimilation into the privileges of whiteness.

If rejecting whiteness set Asian American activists of the late 1960s apart from earlier political responses, Maeda proposes, embracing blackness enabled them to generate a new historical consciousness of racial oppression and resistance. His comparative chapter on the ways the Red Guard Party and Frank Chin performed blackness not only reveals the multiple ideological origins of Asian American racial subjectivity but also develops a much larger point in the study of race. It illustrates how racial identities have been inherently mutual, relational, and gendered formations, entangled processes that become visible through careful historical research and interdisciplinary questions and methods.

The last two chapters of Chains of Babylon capture the multiethnic, interracial, and transnational visions driving the Asian American movement, specifically by addressing the racial dimensions of the antiwar movement and the centrality of cultural expressions and productions to fostering political identities and projects. The racial rhetorics and brutal military tactics of the Vietnam War, Maeda argues, engendered among Asian Americans a pan-Asian consciousnesses stretching across the Pacific, a political sentiment and racial awareness absent in the mainstream antiwar movement. His readings of the play Honey Bucket (1975) and discussion of the musical group A Grain of Sand, in addition to informative biographical profiles, help to bring the Asian American movement—its hopes, limitations, and lasting legacies—alive.