Toward a "Subjectless" Discourse: Engaging Transnationalist and Postcolonial Approaches in Asian American Studies

Inspired by Avery Gordon's evocative envisioning of a transformative social existence, Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwiseanalytically employs Asian American literature to unravel and reflect upon the complex dimensions of the category "Asian America." ¹This productive enterprise questions the underpinnings of Asian American studies itself. As a field undergoing theoretical self-reflection, contemporary Asian American studies has often been characterized by the controversy over its representational politics. Since the field's inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Asian American studies scholars have been struggling with the epistemological question of its object of knowledge. Chuh "advanc(es) a critical approach to the study of Asian American literatures that conceives of that work as theoretical devices that help us apprehend and unravel the narrative dimensions of naturalized racial, sexual, gender, and national identities" (x). In so doing, Chuh questions the relationships between power, subjectivity, racial structures, historicity, and legal categories.

Imagine Otherwisebegins by recounting the controversy that erupted at the 1998 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference when the organization awarded Lois Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging(1997) the prize for best fiction. Set in Hawai'i, Blu's Hangingdirectly defies preconceived notions about the islands as a perfect paradise by grappling with dark themes such as poverty, despair, violence, and the loss of innocence. Yamanaka's stark portrayal of physical abuse sets three young Japanese American children against a Filipino American sexual predator. Some members of the Asian American Studies Association charged this representation with being racist against Filipinos and perpetuating negative stereotypes about Filipino men as sexual deviants. While Blu's Hangingconfronted many difficult and delicate issues within the Asian American community, the intra-ethnic conflict that would ensue at the association's meeting nonetheless surprised many. Chuh observes that "this controversy functioned as a crucible for testing the politics and practices of the association and its membership, dramatically highlighting marginalization and exclusionary knowledge politics within Asian American studies" (2). Using this test case as a starting point, Chuh brilliantly takes apart assumptions about "Asian America" in order to further a "subjectless analysis" that challenges Asian American representation as uniform, stable, monolithic, and essentialist.

Chuh unravels the limits of an identity-based paradigm as the foundational basis for Asian American studies and suggests that "critique" replace the subject as the object of inquiry. Using literary and legal texts, Chuh displaces cultural nationalism as a political objective in identity-based categories and provides a productive analysis of race and sexuality in order to dispel the idea of a uniform subjectivity. Through critical readings of Carlos Bulosan's novel America Is in the Heartand Bienvenido Santos's short story "Immigration Blues," Chuh argues for a need to rethink the U.S. colonization of the Philippines as a racialized and sexualized historical project that contributes to Filipinos/Filipino American subject formation (38). As she asserts, the domination of the Philippines by the United States not only demonstrated the virility of white masculinity, but also created conditions that contradicted American principles of liberty and justice. In particular, U.S. law prohibited colonized subjects of the nation-state from being incorporated as citizen-subjects. Chuh carefully examines literary productions and legal cases filed by Filipino Americans who sought citizenship through military service. Despite their legal status as U.S. nationals, Filipino immigrants remained ineligible for citizenship because of their racial status and perceived threatening masculinity. Chuh argues that these incoherent legal and cultural positionings of Filipino Americans refuse categorization within the framework of a singular nationalist discourse and thus function as "a critique rather than identity" (56).

Chuh uncovers the problem of privileging race as the primary analytical category and urges readers to think about other possibilities for organizing Asian American studies. The construct of "Filipino America" is promising precisely " becauseof its categorical flux" (57, her emphasis). Asian American studies may thus emerge "as a discourse critical of identity, of...