Editor’s Preface

The theme of this issue could very well be institutions, whether they be the nonprofit community organization that Soo Ah Kwon focuses on in her article, the advertising firm that Shalini Shankar studies, or the specific interracial marriages found in Kelly Chong’s piece. In each, we discover Asian Americans whose lives are shaped by extraordinarily powerful forces channeled into conventional social forms, and who are simultaneously seeking ways to assert some kind of agency within such forms. The one force that seems to loom largest is neoliberalism, a now widely circulating term that tries to capture a present moment dominated by the shrinking of the role of government to military and police functions, the unfettering of businesses from regulatory restraints, and the valuation of individual gain above all else. While the term has been around for some time, it gained its current critical meaning more recently in Latin America, with the restructuring Chile endured after the toppling of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government being an early example of what needs to be critiqued. As Kwon succinctly puts it, illustrating how the term is now used within Asian American studies, neoliberalism can perhaps best be understood as a “mode of political, economic, and personal governance.”

If so, Kwon’s article can be said to examine the ways in which nonprofit organizations are increasingly taking on the political role once reserved for the government, often translating in the process the demand for racial justice and economic redistribution as merely a call for incorporating racial difference in ways that neutralize the force of such demand-making. Also, as Shankar argues, we can understand the ways in which Asian American advertising executives seek to thread a very fine needle between on the one hand the dominance of “post-racial” thinking, one which insists we are all alike in that we are all simply individuals, and on the other a way of thinking that values “not only entrepreneurship but also the power of consumption to shape identities, including those premised on race and ethnicity.” Perhaps not an impossible task, the work of both unseeing racial differences and making them visible all at the same time is what the executives Shankar observes must perform. And, finally, as Chong explores, this work does not only occur in the workplace; it occurs in the intimacy of marriages as well, where partners may often share experiences they understand in very different ways under the sway of sharply contradictory demands.

In a recent interview, educational theorist Henry Giroux makes this observation about what constraints neoliberalism imposes on public discourse in general: “a market society is one in which any democratic vision of a just society and good life have been [sic] replaced by the totalizing notion that the only framing mechanisms available in which one can address such questions are now supplied by market modes of governance, ideology, values and policies.”¹ As the articles in this issue make clear, such a “totalizing” milieu profoundly marks the political, the economic, and the personal for Asian Americans. Indeed, it is probably wise to insist that each of these categories are not discrete, but inextricably connected to one another, overlapping, networked, and therefore subject to interventions that can ripple across a wide strata of social formations. Small ideas or movements can thus magnify quickly within the interlocked institutions that govern lived experiences, especially if they can offer alternative and compelling visions of what is valuable, just, and joyous.

This may be a fragile ideal on which to hang our hopes. Nevertheless, as Lisa Marie Cacho has so lyrically observed, we need to keep such a prospect in mind, to insist on demanding more than what seems necessary or practical: “Of course, we cannot discount that fighting for basic survival needs in immediate, practical, and strategic ways is urgent, important work, but at the same time, a meaningful life is not a luxury but rather the purpose of struggle itself, the difference between surviving and living.”² What the articles in this issue collectively remind us is that the struggle continues everywhere, in every aspect of the ways we seek to live...