Model-Minority Imperialism (review)

In recent years, studies of US imperialism, colonialism, and empire have become prevalent in many disciplines. Victor Bascara adds to this literature by positioning Asian American literature and cultural politics as crucial sites from which to critique the development of the United States as a global power in the twentieth century. These Asian American perspectives highlight the contradictions between the ideals of America’s “civilizing” missions and its actual, exploitative practices. Bascara argues that the experiences of Asians in the US are marked with underdevelopment, exclusion, and intolerance, and are thus “living proof of America’s expansionist history” (8). Impacted by the violence and structural inequalities of US imperialism, Asian American stories reflect the colonial nature of the United States—a nature that often has been erased by declarations of American exceptionalism.

Model-Minority Imperialism offers a complex and provocative analysis of literary texts that deal with US minority group experiences in the twentieth century, including assimilationist ideologies and identity politics. Using the same narrative tools as those used by the Asian American writers he analyzes, Bascara structures his book in a non-chronological fashion, reading across time periods and genres to capture the discursive nature of Asian American subject formation and subjection. His interdisciplinary approach relies on a combination of social, cultural, and economic theories, as well as anthropological and historical methods. Drawing connections between imperialism, multiculturalism, and globalism, Bascara reveals them to be similar systems that legitimate the subordinated existence of minority groups and uphold racial and ethnic differences for the benefit of capitalist pursuits. Multiculturalism and globalism, he argues, both draw upon and perpetuate past imperial practices. Bascara demonstrates how current stereotypes of Asian Americans as model minorities obscure their experiences of labor exploitation, colonization, lack of citizenship rights, and internment. Yet it is precisely these historical scars that perpetually mark Asian Americans as other in the United States, hampering their incorporation as full-fledged members of the nation.

In the first four chapters, Bascara calls attention to the centrality of thwarted or failed assimilation in Asian American literary texts—texts that do not comply with the literary canon’s desire for positive assimilation narratives. Works by Carlos Bulosan, Fae Myenne Ng, Sui Sin Far, and Wayne Wang reveal the flaws and contradictions of assimilationist ideals through the experiences of Asian Americans across time, space, and class. Bascara also compares the images and struggles of the Reconstruction period with those of the colonization of Filipinos at the turn of the twentieth century, connecting the US civilizing mission for Filipinos to the project of racial uplift for newly freed slaves. Colonialism, Bascara argues, was supposed to learn from the mistakes of Reconstruction and improve on the process of assimilation. In the end, both failed to manage racial and cultural difference in the United States.

In Chapter Five, Bascara offers a study of R. Zamora Linmark’s novel, Rolling the R’s (1997). Making a case for humor as a powerful tool for resistance and critique in literary texts, Bascara praises Linmark’s ability to demonstrate the contradictions in US ideals through the hilarious acts of minority schoolchildren in 1970s Hawai’i. Bascara illustrates how students conform to the dictates of the US educational system even as they critique it. An example of this is a student poem that closely emulates Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” The student poem, however, presents less-traveled paths as those that lead to places of boredom rather than inspiration. The student’s lack of appreciation for classic American verse demonstrates how cultural ideals can be imposed on colonized individuals, yet still be rejected by them.

This analysis of imposed values and the resistance it engenders continues in the Epilogue, in which Bascara connects turn-of-the-century imperialism and the development of the Asian American movement later in the century to the Vietnam War. US activities abroad have always been described as burdens of the white race, but the imperialistic impulse also has been rationalized as a...