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7. Coda
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7 / Coda East Goes West and Dark Princess show us that re-imagining racial relations means restructuring the political space in which they operate; this reconfiguration of the relationship between racial difference and the nation-state necessitates the writing of a different kind of novel to tell a different kind of story. These novels make clear that time—the relationship between the past, present, and future—matters in articulating the significance of Afro-Asian connections over the span of a century. The purpose of this coda is to ruminate briefly on the present of Afro-Asian relations, but I would like to begin by thinking about what connections exist (if any) between the past that my book describes and the present in which African Americans and Asian Americans find themselves. I chose to focus on the early twentieth century as a way to complicate the widespread, late twentieth-century belief that Afro-Asian relations have always been and will always be fundamentally hostile because of essentialized cultural differences, a perception that reached its apotheosis with the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, the first day of which also happened to be the day that I took the oath of U.S. citizenship. It seems appropriate for me to close this book by meditating on the continuities and discontinuities that a century of African American and Asian American interactions present. In thinking about the relationship between these two time periods in Afro-Asian American history, it is tempting to conceptualize the earlier period as the ground from which the roots of Afro-Asian dynamics sprung. It is perhaps equally tempting to take the opposite tack and argue that Afro-Asian relations back then were something wholly and 170 / coda radically different from what is going on currently. However, as I hope my work suggests, these attempts to characterize definitively the ebb and flow that make up the history of Afro-Asian relations seem misguided. Any progress-oriented view of this history, which constructs our contemporary moment as more progressive than the earlier one and that imagines race relations on an ever-upward trajectory toward harmony and mutual understanding, would be inadequate in accounting for how the relationship between these two groups has changed and shifted over the century. This history cannot be constructed along causal lines; we cannot look to the early twentieth century as a way to explain the state of Afro-Asian relations in the United States today. It seems to me that the most helpful way to understand the long span of Afro-Asian American history is to think of the past as a corrective that complicates a heretofore unquestioned account of that history and as a gloss that explicates and contextualizes that relationship for us. It might seem strange to insist that Afro-Asian relations are not progressive in their movement through the century, especially in light of the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008. The euphoria it unleashed throughout the nation—even from those who did not vote for him—certainly contributed to the sense that “things are getting better.”1 Obama’s election also seems to represent a high point in the history of Afro-Asian relations, a triumphant counter to the narrative of hostility and resentment that reached its nadir in the early 1990s, with the Red Apple Boycott in New York City, the acquittal of Soon Ja Du for the murder of Latasha Harlins in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Riots.2 According to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, more than 75 percent of the Asian American voters they polled in several states voted for Obama, although only 58 percent of those voters were registered Democrats.3 The Los Angeles Times reported that Asian Americans in Los Angeles County voted in record numbers in 2008 and that 63 percent of them voted for Obama.4 While many segments of the population, not just Asian Americans, voted for Obama in order to make a clean break with the previous administration , it is undoubtedly the case that the details of Obama’s personal life—his birth in Hawaii, his exposure to Indonesian culture as a child, and the visible presence of his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and her husband, Konrad Ng, throughout the campaign—appealed to Asian American voters and contributed to the sense that Obama is sympathetic to Asian American issues. Indeed his biracial background and scholastic achievements lead the journalist Jeff Yang to wonder, “Could...