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Journal of Asian American Studies 5.3 (2002) 269-277



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Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Edited by Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

As attested to by the plethora of recent publications and conference calls for papers, academic interest in the (hardly interchangeable) "transnational," the "global," and the "diasporic" has not stopped crescendoing. This theorizing about things and peoples once disparate but now seen as linked seems to be contemporaneous, or to coincide, with calls or renewed exhortations for more interdisciplinarity. Virtually no area in the humanities and social sciences has not been touched by the demand for interdisciplinarity, and why not, for what academic discipline would not or could not profit from more collaboration across institutional divides?

Yet the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries between some fields of academic endeavor does not entail a simple coming together and joyful blurring of distinctions. Such has been and is the case with Asian studies and Asian American studies, two fields whose distinct genealogies as disciplines are inseparable from questions of U.S. history, racism, the Cold War, and three U.S. wars in Asia in the twentieth century. While recently, there has been more cross-disciplinary activity between the two areas of inquiry (for example, panels on Asian American issues at the Association for Asian Studies' annual meetings; growing interest in Asian culture and history at the Association for Asian American Studies' annual conferences; and, the special 1998 issue of positions: east asia cultures critique, guest-edited by Lisa Lowe and Elaine Kim), the specter of the Asian-American-as-perpetual-foreigner and not "truly" American continues to haunt these globalizing "multicultural" United States, 30 years after Frank Chin and his Aiiieeeee! posse—in one of the inaugural textual acts in the creation of what we now know as Asian American Studies—railed against American culture's "patroniz[ing] us as foreigners" and the dual "rejection by both Asia and white [End Page 269] America." By defiantly claiming this country for Asian Americans, those who helped to define this young discipline effectively distanced this newly named group from anything or anyone too Asian, too foreign.

Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, editors of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora, are well aware of the complexities inherent in the move to bring Asian studies and Asian American studies closer together. Their volume will prove valuable not only to those in the two fields directly addressed but also to anyone interested in the theoretical and practical difficulties (and possibilities) of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps more importantly, though this was not the intent of the editors, Orientations might cause some to pause before they jump on the diasporic studies caravan.

This volume is significant because it is the first to address the fraught linkages and disconnections between Asian studies and Asian American studies. Its strength lies in the range of scholars it brings together: from heavyweight senior scholars, such as Rey Chow, Lisa Lowe, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sau-ling Wong and George Lipsitz, to more junior scholars, such as Chuh and Shimakawa themselves; from Asian Americanists trained in traditional disciplines, Ethnic studies and/or Asian studies, to Asian studies specialists working in or between Asian studies, Asian American studies, and traditional fields; and from those based in the United States to those based abroad. The editors have also tried to include a somewhat broader range of disciplines (literature, history, law, anthropology, drama), while the writers themselves allude to different types of knowledge (theoretical, pedagogical, activist) and produce or invoke different types of writing and expressions (academic primarily but also activist, creative, and performative as in the work of Russell Leong and Dorinne Kondo).

Orientations grew out of a 1996 colloquium entitled "Disciplining Asia: Theorizing Studies in the Asia Diaspora," held at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the spectral hand of disciplines, discipline and disciplinarity—with their connotations of academic boundaries and coercive interpellation—is still felt throughout many of the essays (some still directly address themselves to the colloquium title, which was also the...

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