The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

Notes

213 Notes Introduction 1. These tensions are documented in the special issue Thinking Theory in Asian American Studies (Amerasia 21, nos. 1–2 [1995]). 2. Fearing legal repercussions, the association’s whole board resigned except for one graduate student who was assigned to incorporate and reconstitute the AAAS. 3. See Eithne Luibheid, “The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act: An ‘End’ to Exclusion?” positions 5, no. 2 (1997):501–22, as well as Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich , and Lucie Cheng, eds., The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 4. The recent acronyms APA (Asian Pacific American) and API (Asian Pacific Islander) are meant to signal the inclusion of Pacific Islander concerns under the Asian American rubric, but a growing number of Pacific Islanders are contesting their involuntary representation by Asian Americans. 5. Although some may disagree with this point, arguing that the study of literature , at least in the West, has always been tied to the formation of national cultures, we can, at the very least, say that such forms of representation operate in different ways with respect to “minority” versus “majority” cultures. 6. As this list suggests, the structure of nonrepresentative representation can be traced back to the seminal work of Gayatri Spivak. The trope of strategic essentialism in particular comes from her introduction to Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).7. See, for example, Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Pei-te Lien, The Making of Asian American through Political Participation (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2001); and Nazli Kibria, “College and Notions of ‘Asian American,’” Amerasia 25, no. 1 (1999):29–51. 8. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 9. For the sake of curiosity, and also to avoid the impression that I am simply trying to evade the issue, I will answer one question that always comes up by 214 Notes to the Introduction saying that I voted to revoke the fiction award and stand by that decision. This book arose in part out of my efforts to explain why. Chap te r 1 1. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), v. 2. As these terms indicate, the references for Nguyen’s analysis come from the work of Yen Le Espiritu and Aihwa Ong. In transferring these theoretical paradigms, however, Nguyen fails to identify the significant points of friction among them, as well as with the work of Bourdieu that he introduces. Ong’s account of flexible citizenship derives from postmodern analyses that assert the development of a new stage of global capitalism in terms of what is called flexible accumulation, whereas Espiritu’s analysis of panethnic entrepreneurship derives from the particular context of American race relations within which the Asian American category arises from a panethnic social movement. 3. Nguyen, Race and Resistance, 5. 4. According to Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 122, The theory of strictly economic practices is a particular case of a general theory of the economy of practices. Even when they give every appearance of disinterestedness because they escape the logic of “economic” interest (in the narrow sense) and are oriented towards nonmaterial stakes that are not easily quantified, as in “pre-capitalist” societies or in the cultural sphere of capitalist societies, practices never cease to comply with an economic logic. The correspondences which are established between the circulation of land sold and bought back, revenge killings “lent” and “redeemed,” or women given and received in marriage . . . require us to abandon the economic/ noneconomic dichotomy which makes it impossible to see the science of “economic” practices as a particular case of a science capable of treating all practices, including those that are experienced as disinterested or gratuitous, and therefore freed from the “economy,” as economic practices aimed at maximizing material or symbolic profit. See also Pierre Bourdieu, “The Economy of Symbolic Goods,” in his Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 5. Louis Althusser, “Ideology,” in his Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 174, italics in original. 6. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 70. 7. Omi and Winant note the lack of politics in...