Guest Editors’ Introduction

As philosophy of race, and critical philosophy of race in particular, has continued to develop in the academy, we have seen a great creative surge in philosophies that concern specific communities of color. Especially productive has been work in African American philosophy—both in quality and quantity.

How has Asian American philosophy fared? The first compilation of philosophical work on Asian American philosophy was published in 2003 in the APA’s Newsletter on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies.¹ This 2016 special issue of Critical Philosophy of Race is the third. In the thirteen years between, only a smattering of essays has been published. Clearly, there is a great need for development on this front! In broadly theoretical research, the work on Asian American experiences and realities has been largely undertaken by scholars in history, sociology, literature, and cultural studies. The remarkably low number of Asian American philosophers and the little amount of work in Asian American philosophy are situations that need explanation and address. This special issue does not offer this, but the conditions noted underscore the importance of the project undertaken here, namely to bring philosophy to bear on the long neglected experiences and realities of Asian Americans. And as critical work on race clarifies, the idea of Asia, Asians, and Asian Americans has played a central role in various stages of America’s racial formations, whether in immigration policy, civil liberties, war, or colonialism.

This special issue features three essays in Asian American philosophy, particularly in, we might call it, continental Asian American philosophy. Each addresses post-1965 Asian American experience as its subject matter, but importantly each also critiques, emends, and synthesizes at the theoretical level, from the standpoint of continental philosophy broadly construed, in order to more adequately illuminate and evaluate the largely unad-dressed experiences and realities of Asian Americans. It is not unusual for new objects of inquiry to demand renovation in the orienting perspectives themselves. And these three essays do this with insight and innovation.

In “Fantasies of Asian American Kinship Disrupted: Identification and Disidentification in Michael Kang’s The Motel,” Fred Lee examines what he calls “the Asian American Dream,” a common yearning by many Asian Americans for an uncritical type of incorporation in the post-1965 multicultural US polity. This form of incorporation is driven by an attachment to a white, male, heterosexual, middle-class ideal, and Lee’s account is a distinctive contribution to the critical literature on this type of dominative social reproduction. Lee’s analysis centered upon Kang’s 2005 independent film portrays, through the various relational struggles of an adolescent boy, Ernest Chin, the connections between the “gender, sexuality, and kinship formations of the Chin family to the racial, class, and national formations of Asian America.” On Lee’s account, the movie delivers an “allegory of identification/disidentification” with respect to the Asian American Dream, and this reading of the narrative is enabled by a hermeneutic employing psychoanalytic cultural studies and agonistic political theory. Specifically, Lee theorizes a conception of agonistic disidentification that synthesizes elements of the two theoretic traditions and thereby offers us an interpretive lens for understanding some of the deeper political dynamics of the movie protagonist’s relational struggles. Agonistic disidentification has the quality of Arendtian action because it is both a disruption within the subjection process and a productive mode of reconfiguring the remnants of disruption in less oppressive formations in an agonistic social order. And since the protagonist’s struggles with class, race, gender, and sexuality have a broader significance, representing the political dynamics of many aspects of post-1965 Asian America, Lee’s development of the concept of agonistic disidentification affords us a new critical lens by which to understand and critique the current social order and the assimilation challenges of Asian Americans more generally.

“Postcolonial Ambivalence and Phenomenological Ambiguity,” by Emily S. Lee, draws upon phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial traditions to explore Asian American subjectivities, particularly of Asian American women, through an examination of the lived experience of ambivalence and ambiguity. Although the postcolonial work of Homi Bhabha has...