Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 "Asian Donorgate" Controversy in Perspective (review)

Aptly titled, this book has a singular purpose to help readers understand the conditions, facts, and meanings surrounding the 1996 campaign finance scandal to Asian (and other) Americans. Through a critical reading of the various discourses and the associated political practices related to the "Asian Donorgate," Chang produces a solid and inspiring contribution to the growing literature on the contemporary political experiences of Asian Americans. The book offers not only a rare treat to the politically concerned about the paradoxical and situational racial status of Asians in American politics, but a candid discussion of the dilemmas for community political organizing and empowerment given the opportunities and pitfalls that arise from globalization and the availability of transnational capital. Specifically, the author deconstructs events and discourses in the four-year period that begins with allegations of illegal campaign money raised by John Huang and several other naturalized Chinese Americans for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during President Clinton's reelection campaign in 1996. His research ends with the release of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized Taiwan-born nuclear scientist who was laid off and jailed for 9 months because of unfounded espionage charges. The choice of the two time-points was to reveal the pattern of shifting discourses and the consequences the former had on the development of the latter. By analyzing the ways that Asian American citizens were racialized as perpetual foreigners during this time period, the author shows "how citizenship and race in globalization play a critical role in locating Asian Americans as simultaneously marginal and central to mainstream American ideologies of nationhood" (3).

The discreetness of the author in his approach to the sensitive subject matter is evinced by the opening pages, when he scrupulously defines the increasingly popular but much abused and often misunderstood terms of globalization, flexibility, transnationalism, flexible citizenship, diaspora, and hybridity. The same kind of prudence is seen in the organization of the book, which has a section on research design and another on conceptual framework, and a "map" within subsequent chapters to prevent readers from getting lost in the jungle of complex ideas. Built upon themes of "shifting discourses," "neo-orientalism," "transnational citizenship," and "political agency and the public sphere," the book clearly articulates the flexible meanings of citizenship and challenges to community incorporation and empowerment regarding a highly transnationally-affiliated population. Besides the main methodology of discursive analysis, the author adopts sociological and anthropological approaches to data collection which involve elite interviews and archival research of governmental reports and news media coverage.

The book's primary theoretical framework is critical transnationalism, which specifically opposes celebratory discourses of transnationalism that wishfully foresee the end of world divisions and inequality in the era of globalization. Rather, as informed by prior conceptions of transnational citizenship, racial formation, and dual-domination and extraterritoriality, the author views as inevitable the emergence of new forms of power hierarchies that may transcend national borders but still maintain the structures of inequalities within each nation-state and other social and political boundaries. In addition to critiquing the traditional Eurocentric "foreignizing" discourses adopted by mainstream American media and politicians in the "Asian Donorgate" events that deny the possibility of dual citizenship and loyalties to the majority-immigrant community, the book expresses serious concern about the deepening class and political divisions as a result of unequal access to transnational capital and transborder mobility in the post-1965 Asian American community and the challenges that this reality imposes on community-organizing and strategies for sovereignty and empowerment. Herein lies the value of the theory of a progressive sense of citizenship, which exposes the problems of distinguishing "aliens" from "citizens" in the assimilationist notion of normative citizenship in the age of globalization and proposes an alternative model of citizenship that appreciates the multicultural diversity brought in by individuals who maintain transnational affiliations.

Whereas the author delivers powerful and repetitive attacks against the utility of the assimilation paradigm and the...