Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave

1. Introduction: The Asian American Ghetto

1 / Introduction: The Asian American Ghetto What images are evoked by the phrase “Asian American ghetto”? Is this phrase an oxymoron in that Asian Americans, long considered a model minority, would hardly be thought to live and work in ghettos? Yet the Asian diaspora has seen the creation of spatially defined, racially demarcated clusters of Asian American residence and work in the United States. The urban spaces are familiar to us through names like Chinatown , Koreatown, and Little Tokyo, and their gritty conditions can be described through the vocabulary of “ghetto.” But are these spaces ghettos ? Aren’t they more like cultural communities? Aren’t they spaces of densely woven cultural practice, where immigrants and diasporic travelers convene to partake in the comforts of their Asian culture, and where tourists visit to get a taste of it? If they are, and despite that inhabitants of and visitors to these spaces experience and witness poverty, labor exploitation , and residential squalor, wouldn’t these spaces be more aptly called “ethnic enclaves,” a less pejorative term, which, while denoting racial difference and segregation, does not carry the same sense of social deracination as “ghetto”? What language has been favored in describing racially segregated Asian American spaces? How do these linguistic choices reflect the ways that Asian American racial and class experiences are understood—and refuse to be understood? Writing the Ghetto examines these linguistic choices, the tension between “ghetto” and “ethnic enclave”; the Asian American spaces, mostly urban, but also suburban, that these choices are used to describe; and the literature through which these spaces are articulated and imagined. 2 / introduction To put it another way, this is an interdisciplinary study of the tension between class and culture, between “ghetto” on the one hand, which I define as a space of structurally imposed, racialized class inequity, of involuntary containment to racialized poverty and blight; and “ethnic enclave” on the other, a term that draws a rosier picture of racial-spatial segregation, and that in reference to Asian Americans foregrounds a sense of cultural community and culturally driven segregation, that is, voluntary, culturally chosen segregation. For Asian Americans, “ethnic enclave” and its vocabulary of cultural community have been preferred over “ghetto” to describe their racially segregated, economically impoverished spaces. This preference reflects a denial that racialized class inequity exists in America. This denial applies to different racial groups in varying degrees, but it is particularly keen in reference to Asian Americans . The language of “ghetto” is not eschewed for all racial groups. Indeed , it readily conjures up images of and is heavily relied upon to describe African American spaces. What produces these different lexicons for different racial groups? What produces the resistance to the lexicon of “ghetto” for Asian Americans? What is it about the specific ways that Asian Americans experience, or are said to experience, race and class that lends itself to this resistance? At stake is how Asian Americans are made legible or, more to the point, illegible in terms of class inequity. The illegibility of Asian American ghettoization is central to shoring up larger national investments in denying class inequity, in legitimating the myth of America’s exceptional classlessness. Asian American ghettoization is made illegible through what I will detail as “culturalizations” or “culturalist epistemologies,” ways of imagining Asian American subjectivity and experience primarily through the lens of culture. In general, culturalizations reconfigure and attribute externally formed social dynamics into and to a group’s putative cultural values and ethics. Regarding economic dynamics, culturalizations , as Arif Dirlik notes, attribute external, structural dynamics of political economy to interior, private workings of culture (265). Of concern here is how this attribution recasts the structural pressures that shape Asian Americans’ class positions, relations, and possibilities into expressions of Asian culture. This is emblematized in the preference for the term “ethnic enclave” over “ghetto.” By recasting the ghetto as an ethnic enclave, by recasting a space of structurally imposed class inequity as a cultural community, the structural pressures of race and class that create racialized ghettos recede from view and are replaced by culture, by the idea that Asian American ghettos are voluntarily formed introduction / 3 cultural communities. This cultural recasting obfuscates the structural processes of ghettoization, as well as reconfigures and naturalizes structural class inequity as cultural expression—class is turned into culture. The culturalization of class is not exclusive to Asian Americans, but it is particularly pronounced for them. It is...