Challenging Inequalities: Nations, Races, and Communities

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) were presented in earlier versions as plenary presentations at the annual conference of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) held in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, April 23–26, 2009. One of the major reasons that Honolulu was selected as the conference site was because 2009 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Hawai‘i becoming a state, although the conference was not intended to contribute to any celebration of statehood. Instead, as the cochairs of the conference Program Committee, we conceived of the conference as an opportunity to reevaluate statehood for Hawai‘i and its people, particularly Native Hawaiians.

Accordingly, the conference theme was “Challenging Inequalities: Nations, Races and Communities,” that is, challenging inequalities among nations, among races, and among communities. As we wrote in the call for papers: “The conference theme can be interpreted in two different ways. Political, economic, and social inequalities among nations, races, and other communities are indeed challenging insofar as they have persisted to the present and continue to resist methodological and discursive reduction. At the same time, the theme can also be understood as a call for scholars, students, and community activists to develop ways to challenge inequalities in order to foster equality, justice, and fairness among nations, races, and communities of various backgrounds, including ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and nationality.”

To address the conference theme, three plenary sessions, held on separate days, focused on challenging inequalities among nations, challenging inequalities among races, and challenging inequalities among communities. The first plenary session was concerned with rethinking the unequal power relations between the nations of America and Hawai‘i that resulted in the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893, U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i in 1898, and statehood in 1959. The speakers in this session were Kekuni Blaisdell, emeritus professor of the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa, and Noenoe Silva and Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor, also from UH Mānoa, and the moderator was Ty Kawika Tengan of UH Mānoa. All three presenters are leaders in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, although they advocate different political positions and strategies. Unfortunately, only Dr. McGregor opted to submit an essay for this issue, but Professor Blaisdell kindly permitted us to quote from the written version of his presentation. To have another essay discussing statehood for Hawai‘i, we invited Dean Itsuji Saranillio, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside, to contribute an article based on his paper presented at the conference.

The second plenary session, “Challenging Inequalities among Races,” featured Mari Matsuda of UH Mānoa; Michael Omi of the University of California, Berkeley; and Linda Trinh Võ of the University of California, Irvine; with Augusto Espiritu of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as the moderator. All three of the presenters have articles in this issue.

The third plenary session, “Challenging Inequalities among Communities,” was intended to address other forms of inequality among and within Asian American groups, such as those based on ethnicity, gender, and class. The presenters were Shirley Hune of the University of Washington, Edward Park of Loyola Marymount University, and Lisa Park of the University of Minnesota, and the moderator was Hien Duc Do of San Jose State University. Only Lisa Park decided to submit an article for the issue, but both Shirley Hune and Edward Park provided us with copies of their presentations and allowed us to quote from them.

We express our grateful appreciation to the presenters and moderators for their thoughtful and inspiring contributions to the plenary sessions and to the contributors for their articles in this issue. We also would like to thank very much JAAS editor Huping Ling for inviting us to serve as coeditors of this special issue.

Challenging Inequalities among Nations: Hawai ‘i as State or Nation

As noted above, the first plenary session was directed to reexamining the historical circumstances and differential consequences of statehood for Hawaii’s people. On March 12, 1959, after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Hawaii...