Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State (review)

Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State. By Robert S. Chang. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Robert Chang's Disoriented is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Asian Americans and the law. In the 1993 inaugural issue of the Asian Law Journal, Chang published a foundational article explaining the importance and necessity for a particular jurisprudence studying Asian Americans. He has continued to expand on that work, publishing primarily in law reviews. Legal scholarship, however, remains a scholarly tradition hostile to Asian American studies. Asian American scholars who do not regularly study and write within mainstream American legal studies will find it difficult to appreciate the degree and depth of resistance to the Asian American legal studies project. Chang therefore faces two disparate audiences: a skeptical legal academic community as well as a general audience for whom legal materials can present significant barriers. Chang succeeds admirably with both these audiences.

Chang's presentation is divided into three sections, each with several chapters. The first section, "A Meditation on Borders," engages two themes: racial-sexual policing and the border. Chang re-situates these themes within legal as well as cultural studies. In recent years, important contributions to Asian American studies by authors like Lisa Lowe, Sucheng Chan, and others have re-interpreted statutes and court cases which affected Asian Americans. Chang reverses the direction in his book, using cultural studies in his legal analysis. He first notes that the Supreme Court decisions of Ozawa (1922) and Thind (1923) established the juridical racial construction of Asians. He then turns to popular culture, examining two films, Birth of a Nation and The Cheat to describe racial-sexual policing of boundaries within the American national family. He concludes this opening chapter by returning to a legal case, the murder of Vincent Chin. This trajectory challenges traditional legal understandings of acceptable materials for legal deliberations.

His next chapter clarifies that the boundaries of this racial-sexual policing are the American family/nation. He explains that unlike the traditional juridical treatment of the border-an imagined line-in-the-sand-there is an important cultural construction of the border within the law. And the boundaries of this legal-cultural border are not limited to geographical constructions.

His middle section, "Developing a Critical Asian American Legal Studies," is the most important part of Chang's book. He describes the resistance to efforts to open traditional legal studies to Asian American and critical perspectives, and then presents a legal, narrative account of Asian America.

This account is best understood as divided between his two audiences. The opening chapter of this section, "Why We Need a Critical Asian American Legal Studies," repeats the familiar to an Asian American studies audience: there is continuing anti-Asian violence and anti-Asian racial discrimination. But within the legal academy, this is an account that is notable in its absence.

In recent years there have been published in law reviews some accounts of the treatment of Asian Americans. Chang himself notes in his introduction that a simple response would be to include narratives of the excluded. Instead of accommodation, however, the response of the legal academy has been resistance. Chapter 4, with the understated title, "Narrative Space," is Chang's response to this steadfast refusal to allow use of narrative in anything other than forms already recognized. That traditional legal discourse is inculcated in American law schools, practiced in American courts, and staunchly defended by the legal academy.

Chang then goes on to use legal materials as the skeletal framework for his narrative account of Asian America. Chang avoids use of the term Asian American history. His goal is not to present historical narrative, but to disrupt standard legal discourse. Statutes and court precedents are written in the present for application in the future. They do not normally consider narrative accounts of the social context in which an incident-Vincent Chin...