Scrutinized!: Surveillance in Asian North American Literature

Notes

139 Notes Chapter 1: Introduction 1. In fact, the FBI monitored anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 “active cases on matters of race at any given time nationwide,” argue Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (112), as well as movements and members in the Communist Party USA, the American Indian Movement, the New Left, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. Also see James Kirkpatrick Davis’ Assault on the Left: The FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement and David Cunningham ’s There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence. 2. While Asian subjects were at first regarded as curious and exotic, whenever an Asian population grew significantly within a community, so grew the suspicion and hostility of non-Asians among whom they circulated. As the term “yellow peril” suggests, Asians posed threats to an established labor force; any Asian resistance suggested the potential for violence, and later their strength in numbers contributed to powerful voting blocs. The numerous acts, laws, and political decisions circumscribing Asians drew their impetus from a circumspect nation attempting to contain Asian infiltration and influence. Americans depended on Asian labor on the one hand but feared an accompanying Asian influx on the other. Invitations to immigration and later prohibitions against it, by nationality, map a contested relationship. In 1854 in California, for example, Chinese were forbidden from testifying against whites in court, disempowering the immigrants from defending themselves or other Chinese. The Asian Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred Chinese laborers from entry into the United States was extended indefinitely in 1902 to protect U.S. labor at the same time that Hawai‘i invited Korean laborers as strike breakers against Japanese plantation workers. Roosevelt’s 1907 Gentlemen ’s Agreement eventually limited Japanese immigrants and Korean labor- 140 Notes to Pages 2–9 ers, and it was not until the 1965 Immigration Act that many Koreans were welcomed to the United States again. Renounced as “enemy aliens,” more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, many of them U.S. citizens, were interned in camps until 1945. 3. She argues that in order to satisfy left-leaning Americans’ desire for internationalization with rightists’ demands to contain communism, President Truman created the “Cold War Consensus,” which favored economically growing and democratically aligned nations while containing those deemed dangerously communist. 4. See Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, in which she maps how legal restrictions around immigration crafted categories of racial categorization, which in turn structured the nation’s borders and its definitions of its citizens and illegal immigrants. 5. See Leslie Bow’s Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South. 6. Robert G. Lee in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture outlines “the six faces of the Oriental” from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1990s, naming them chronologically the alien, the pollutant, the threat, the yellow peril, the gook, and the model minority (8–10). 7. Anna Pegler-Gordon discusses how photographs were used in immigration policies in her In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy. See her chapter “First Impressions” (22–66). 8. Bandana Purkayastha and Anjana Narayan quote Kitano and Daniels in “Bridges and Chasms: Orientalism and the Constructions of Asian Indians in New England.” 9. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that while once prevalent narratives about the “biological and moral inferiority” of minorities, especially blacks, no longer exist, new narratives take their place in our current moment of color blindness, of “racism without racists,” the title of his book (2). 10. For books that call for more scholarly studies in the aesthetics of Asian North American fiction, see Rocío G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee’s Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing; and Xioajing Zhou and Samina Najimi’s Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. 11. See Ty’s The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives ; Elena Creef’s Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body; Anna Pegler-Gordon’s In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy; Shu-mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific; and Karen Shimakawa’s National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage. Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore’s Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility calls for new ways of seeing particular bodies that often remain strategically overlooked. 12. My work relies on current literary and...