Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture

Foreword

xix Foreword Moon-Ho Jung Ioriginally encountered Gary Y. Okihiro and Margins and Mainstreams at Cornell University, where I was one of the first graduate students admitted to study Asian American history with a senior faculty member recruited to teach and research Asian American studies. Back in the early 1990s, it was by no means common to have a tenured professor specializing in Asian American studies on a university campus, particularly in a history department east of California. I was extremely fortunate, even if not entirely aware of my fortune at the time. Studying with Okihiro was not exactly easy—he made his first generation of graduate students read four books per week—but it forced me to recognize both the parochial limits and the expansive potential of Asian American studies. The highlight of my first semester of graduate studies in the fall of 1992 was reading Okihiro’s six lectures , freshly delivered the previous spring as a series at Amherst College. Those lectures, which would be published two years later as Margins and Mainstreams, blew me away. And for those of us trying to make sense of race, politics, and Asian American studies over the past twenty years, Margins and Mainstreams has been our guiding light, the book that awakened us to new intellectual and political possibilities and deepened our commitment to work toward those possibilities. Written amid the New Right’s unrelenting drive to defend “civilization” and “family values” from the unruly masses, Margins and Mainstreams offered an unapologetically radical framing of US history and challenged Asian Americanists to think boldly about our field. Okihiro pulled no punches. Begin- foreword ning with the opening chapter, “When and Where I Enter,” he sought to deconstruct liberal narratives of immigration and assimilation so rampant in US history and Asian American studies . Building on his earlier work on California and Hawai‘i,1 Okihiro located the origins of Asian American history not in the first Asian bodies to immigrate to what would become the United States but in Europe’s “expansion eastward and westward to Asia for conquest and trade” (7). Within that colonial world, he argued, Asians traveled across the Pacific as migrant laborers, their journeys fundamentally shaped by and linked to the Atlantic slave trade and America’s “manifest destiny” across North America. Okihiro summed up his reorientation of US history lyrically and succinctly: “Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to America; Americans went to Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to take the wealth of America ; Americans went to take the wealth of Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans went to conquer and colonize Asia” (28–29). My students invariably quote those lines in class, usually with big smiles on their faces. Margins and Mainstreams is as fresh today as it was twenty years ago, a reflection of the book’s enduring insights and the New Right’s enduring influence. Back in 1992, the much publicized Korean-black conflict gripped our attention, especially as large swathes of Los Angeles burned over four days of rage and anguish that spring. If the election of a black president in 2008 has helped to displace that violent image of race in America, the racial logics and rhetorics that Okihiro unpacked for us live on, in new manifestations and contexts to define our current moment. Asian Americans remain “perils” and “models” in US political 1 Timothy J. Lukes and Gary Y. Okihiro, Japanese Legacy: Farming and Community Life in California’s Santa Clara Valley (Cupertino: California History Center, 1985); Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). xxi culture—for example, in debates over the “war on terror” and immigration reforms—that continue to elide a wider history of interracial solidarities. Even as Latinos and Asian Americans have perhaps become more visible in the twenty-first century, the hegemony of the black-white binary in US racial discourse persistently casts nonblack nonwhites as like whites or like blacks. Seeing race in black and white and gendering racialized groups as simultaneously masculine threats and feminized objects, Okihiro argued, have constituted central elements to reproducing white supremacy and disabling alliances among peoples of color. If Okihiro’s historical argument sounds at times like an implausible appeal—such as, “We are a kindred people, African and Asian Americans” (34...