The Paradoxes of Asian/American Modernity

Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier By David Palumbo-Liu. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999

A WORK OF CONSUMMATE SCHOLARSHIP, DAVID PALUMBO-LIU'S BOOK CONtributes significantly to American Studies and Asian American Studies, and to a lesser extent, East Asian Studies. During the past ten years, scholars in these fields have been interrogating the traditional boundaries of their areas of study. Path-breaking books in this vein include Cultures of United States Imperialism (Duke University Press, 1993), edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease; Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (University of Washington Press, 1994) by Gary Okihiro; and Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (Routledge, 1997), edited by Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini. The essays in Kaplan and Pease's co-edited volume challenge conventional distinctions between domestic concerns and foreign affairs, and explain that such distinctions obscure the United States's role as an empire operating both within and beyond its national borders, which themselves have been negotiated through a process of imperialism and resistance. Okihiro's book argues that U.S. culture has been and continues to be defined by cultural, political, and social negotiations at the borders, or, as he calls them, the margins, specifically focusing our attention on the margin between Asia and America. Ong and Nonini's volume asks us to rethink narratives of center and periphery in an age marked, albeit unevenly, by global flows of capital, information, and populations. They emphasize, however, the need to pay close attention to the strategies of nation-states and the creativity of individual agents. Together, these books (among others) have eroded rarely questioned geopolitical and academic boundaries, not to do away with borders altogether, but rather to enable a more critical examination of their construction, reformulation, and consequence. Notwithstanding excellent work on Aztlán and other borderlands, scholarship about the nexus of America, Asia, and the Pacific region has produced particularly compelling and important interventions. With Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, Palumbo-Liu extends this impressive body of scholarship by exploring the paradoxes produced by the United States's crucial and dynamic relations with the Pacific region and East Asia. Even in such stellar company, Asian/American is remarkable for its elegant prose, its careful attention to historical, social, and cultural contexts, and its author's expertise at harnessing those contexts to produce not only finely nuanced readings of individual texts but also a sustained argument about American modernity. Wide-ranging, sophisticated, and long—at 504 pages—Palumbo-Liu's book asks a great deal of its readers but generously rewards their efforts.

Palumbo-Liu begins by explaining his insertion of a solidus—or slash—between Asian and American, where we usually encounter a space or a hyphen. To recognize this solidus as more than a typographical flourish and, more perfectly, as an indicator of Palumbo-Liu's understanding of what is at stake in the way the relation between these terms is signified, we must review the punctuational genealogy of "Asian American." Since the birth of this political moniker in the late 1960s, advocates for the space have argued that the insertion of a hyphen marks a debilitating split between the terms, essentially reinforcing a pseudo-psychological notion of "dual personality." In an era following the internment of Japanese Americans and during an era involving the harassment of U.S. scientists of Chinese descent, the diagnosis of dual personality comes uncomfortably close to the charge of divided loyalty. Within this politically treacherous context, the space asserts unity, and thereby denies duality, by figuring "Asian" as an adjective modifying the noun "American"; an "Asian American" is a kind of American. Other theorists like David Eng have suggested that we "risk" the insertion of the hyphen to acknowledge the importance of "Asia" in the social and psychic formation of "Asian American" ("Out Here and Over There," Social Text15 [1997]: 37...