The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans

Foreword

Foreword T he field of Asian American politics is rapidly expanding with the continuous contributions of a growing number of political scientists—as well as other social scientists, historians, and public-policy analysts— who have sought to document, analyze, theorize, and forecast the political dimensions of the Asian American experience. Most of these works focus on the electoral participation and representation of Asian Americans in relation to American domestic politics. This is due in part to the increasing visibility and influence of Asian American voters, campaign contributors, and elected officials and in part to the long-standing emphasis placed on electoral politics in research dealing with American racial and immigrant groups by political scientists. Although electoral politics undoubtedly will continue to be important, there are other aspects of Asian American politics that have been, and will likely continue to be, compelling and worthy of serious scholarly and policy attention. This splendid collection of essays on transnational politics provides an innovative multidisciplinary examination of an array of significant ways in which Asian Americans have engaged in and been affected by political activities , processes, relationships, and actors that are non-domestic or international in nature, particularly as they relate to their ancestral homelands, to other communities globally in their diasporic networks, and to the many forms of engagement by the United States in Asian and world politics. Through diverse methodological approaches involving the collection and analysis of archival, ethnographic, interview, census, and survey data, the essays explore three key questions: What role do Asian states and nationalisms play in the politics of Asian Americans? What are the practices and sites of Asian American transnational politics, and how do they help to construct a more complete and unified portrait of Asian American community politics as a whole? And how are the political behavior and identities of Asian Americans shaped by their transnational activities and relationships? The eleven essays examine these questions in relation to the historical and contemporary transnational political experiences of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, and Vietnamese Americans, as well as the findings of multiethnic attitudinal surveys. Insights are also offered on Korean and Cambodian Americans. Together, the essays provide ample evidence that transnational politics should be considered in gaining a more complete and dynamic understanding of Asian American politics than is possible by focusing exclusively on electoral participation. Christian Collet and Pei-te Lien are to be applauded for compiling this important book, which will be singularly influential on the further development of the field of Asian American politics. I have long advocated for a more inclusive, multifaceted paradigm for understanding the politics of Asian Americans and other minority and immigrant groups that encompasses electoral and non-electoral, as well as domestic and non-domestic, forms of political experiences and relationships at multiple levels of analysis (Nakanishi 1975a, 1975b, 1986, 2001). Although I have written extensively about Asian American electoral politics, my first two scholarly articles , both published in 1975, dealt with non-electoral and non-domestic political topics. The first was a case study titled“The Visual Panacea: Japanese Americans and the City of Smog,”which appeared in a volume edited by the renowned historian Akira Iriye titled Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations (Nakanishi 1975a). The book, which featured essays by a team of U.S. and Japanese scholars and policymakers, explored how Japanese and American government officials and their general publics perceived or misperceived one another with respect to contemporary policy-issue areas and historical encounters . In contrast, my article examined how different generations of Japanese American community leaders perceived both Japan and the United States and their bilateral relationships, and how those perceptions related to their broader political beliefs, ethnic identities, and political activities. Practically all of the leaders I interviewed were among the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were unjustly removed and incarcerated in concentration camps when war broke out between the United States and Japan during World War II. The study demonstrated that Japanese American leaders, despite their seemingly weak transnational ties with Japan, felt inescapably affected, both positively and negatively, by the complex bilateral relationships between the United States and Japan. They also believed that they continued to be victimized during periods of heightened public and policy concern about unfair trade imbalances, loss of jobs, and other tensions between the two countries. The second publication was a monograph for a series on race and international politics by the University of Denver’s Center on International Race Relax...