Humanities Hegemony?

At the 2013 Association for Asian American Studies conference in Seattle, President Mary Yu Danico asked plenary speakers to comment on “real or imagined divisions within Asian American Studies across disciplines.” If, implicitly, we were to address the marginalization of the social sciences in AAAS, I recognize that being in English locates me on the side of an unspoken hegemony. Ironically, it’s that very phrasing “real or imagined” that informs my comments on “divisions” here. My field lacks the heft of statistics, the certainty of data: “fiction,” after all, is defined in opposition to the real. But it’s not necessarily the object of study that marks differences among us. I want to address the question of disciplinary divides by making visible the foundations underlying my own critical methods in the humanities. I’ve been thinking self-critically about whether my work can be labeled interdisciplinary if these methods are still very much informed by literary studies. Finally, I want to speculate about humanities scholarship in the public sphere: Does race liberalism limit the horizon for engaging Asian American issues in the mainstream media? How can we engage general audiences if understanding race in the United States seems to be filtered through a single lens: discriminatory acts against African Americans perpetuated by racist individuals?

As a scholar, I identify ideologically invested narratives across cultural terrains. I see these narratives as both man-made and subject-making. My belief in the discursivity of lived experience and literature as persuasive rhetoric represents invisible foundations underlying my approach to race studies. Early on, I discovered that these foundations were not shared among academics—even those within the humanities. A case in point: When I was a graduate student working on women’s literature, a professor of Asian American history kindly inquired as to my dissertation project. I told her that I was looking at the charge of betrayal in Asian American writing, examining how the characterization of women as traitors illuminated the ways in which collective affiliations were constituted and policed. After hearing my summary, the historian asked, “Well, what about the writers who don’t do this?” I paused and lamely replied, “They’re not in it.”

And so it was revealed that I was a cherry picker. I was selectively curating, not channeling “the facts.” Like the fairy tale emperor, I had no clothes, no data set to cover my shame. Responding to critics of her creative work, Maxine Hong Kingston once famously asserted, “I am not a sociologist who measures truth by the percentage of times behaviour takes place.”²² Nor was I. But now I would not respond so defensively because I see that the exchange revealed our differing commitments to empiricism. Some of us feel confident that we can describe the world-as-it-is with some accuracy, and then again there are those of us invested in illuminating the version of reality that circulates as truth. For some of my colleagues in gender and women’s studies, engaging the topic “Women in Global Society” might provoke these questions: Who are they? What do they do? What issues do they face? On the other hand, my questions might be, how are they represented? How do they imagine themselves? How is the figure of Woman harnessed to specific political purposes?

Recognizing this distinction, I have to come clean as someone who does multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary work. I recently finished a book about the place of Asian Americans under segregation, “Partly Colored”: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (2010), in which my organizing conceit was the question, “Where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?” Against expectation, it is a question that I don’t answer definitively. I was interested in the ways that Jim Crow accommodated those who did not fit into a cultural and legal system predicated on the distinction “colored” and white, and wanted to push toward a different racial optic by asking, “What does it mean to represent between the terms that organize culture?” What I found was not merely evidence as to caste status, but an uneasiness that attends...