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Introduction
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Introduction When vast areas in the city of Los Angeles were set ablaze in the spring of 1992, I was in Northern California approaching the end of my undergraduate education. As a major in ethnic studies and English, I had learned critical histories of Asian Americans, African Americans, Chicanos, and Native Americans. We recognized the distinctiveness of the various cultural groupings, but we also understood that these processes and formations of racialization were related through dominant ideologies of white supremacy. Despite our different histories, we assumed (and not without reason) that racism bound us all together. While our educational training offered us ample opportunity to examine race in a comparative context, the events in late April (from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Washington, D.C., and beyond) seemed to exceed our analytic frameworks and critical capacities. As the fires diminished and the blue-ribbon commissions were assembled, the social text was revealed as extraordinarily messy and chaotic, challenging us to critically reengage with the significance of race, class, and citizenship in America. This book is not about the uprisings in Los Angeles but has its roots in that maelstrom of theoretical activity in the wake of April 1992, which, as we shall see, stretches far back in time and will no doubt continue well into our “strange future.”1 For our students not old enough to even recall the uprisings, much less the nuances of the discourse that followed, I briefly recount the challenges and constraints of a range of critical responses. Many liberal voices generally framed the uprisings as yet another divide-and-conquer scenario, signifying a desire to displace the vexing problems of complexity and difference with an unconvincing call to recognize a common and “real” enemy. This insistence that both U.S. Asians and blacks were ultimately being subjugated to white supremacy begged the question of how these groups were being differently racialized by the U.S. state. Another homogenizing account described the uprisings as a modern-day class riot but did not seem to adequately address the racial x Introduction dimensions of how the black and Latino poor were differently positioned as social actors in the uprising. Nor did the more abstract class analytics seem to consider the possibility that Asian immigrant merchant-class sectors constituted any kind of racially specific petit-bourgeois formation. Most scholars and public intellectuals from ethnic studies took aim at the cultural essentialist explanations that pervaded the dominant media, by historicizing structural conditions of inequality and stratification . These analyses stressed macro political-economic shifts since the 1970s, such as deindustrialization, urban restructuring, and neoliberal state policies that devastated the black urban poor while facilitating two-tiered immigration (rich and poor) from Asia and Latin America. Although these analyses were the most influential on my own work, it became evident that they did not always engage the discourses being generated by those most affected by these processes. When attention was paid to “micro-level” discourses, the critiques that emerged from Asian American studies and African American studies acknowledged ethnic specificity yet were largely unable to connect the strategic situations of power with the more general states of domination. For instance, many Asian Americanist scholars, myself included, eventually focused on the state’s abandonment of Korean immigrant merchants during the rioting as concrete evidence of the enduring disenfranchisement of Asian Americans : proof of second-class citizenship. This politically sound maneuver to critique the state, however, was structured by a logic that essentially demanded that U.S. Asians had as much right as anyone else (i.e., whites) to be protected from “lawless” blacks and Latinos. Therefore, although the Asian Americanist critique of the U.S. state sought to substantiate the denial of citizenship rights without necessarily prescribing “law and order” as remediation, its terms nonetheless capitulated to discourses of black criminality and to the legitimacy of state violence. In the main, African Americanist scholarship offered analyses of the complex political economy of South Central Los Angeles, situating both the business practices and the racial attitudes of Korean merchants in a genealogy of ironic betrayals that had left a legacy of impoverished black frustration. What seemed difficult to name, however, was that black inner-city resentment of Korean immigrant merchants was not simply animated by the injustice of denigrating forms of antiblack racism (not a new development for inner-city black residents). What seemed to be a driving force in the mobilization of black inner-city communities against merchant exploitation was the perceived...