Editor’s Preface

In the April 4, 2016 issue of the New Yorker, the foodie and Chinese food aficionado Calvin Trillin’s poetic missive, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” took aim at the seemingly endless forms of regional Chinese cuisines that have emerged in the U.S. culinary landscape. His poem was followed by an outpouring of criticism on social media as restaurateurs, novelists, literary critics, and the Asian American public writ large took umbrage—and justifiably so—at the latent racism of Trillin’s poem. Unsurprisingly, Trillin’s response was that this was just a parody of foodies, and that his object of ridicule might just as easily have been Italophiles a few years ago. Among the many responses to Trillin’s piece was “The World Is Our Oyster/Sauce: A Twitter Poem Inspired by Calvin Trillin” authored by Karissa Chen, Beth Nguyen, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Celeste Ng, “Have They Run Out of White Poets Yet?” by Timothy Yu, and Eddie Huang’s “Have They Run Out of Pumpkin Spice Lattes?” I write this preface on April 7, just three days after the publication of Trillin’s poem, and much will have unfolded by the time this issue is in print. It may no longer be relevant to the larger public, but the tenor of this debate is always relevant to Asian Americanists. Implicit in Trillin’s commentary is a sense of racial fatigue—that he is tired of bringing nuance to thinking about Asian American culinary fare; that history doesn’t matter; that Asian foods are fads; and most important, that Asian bodies will eventually run their course when the white bourgeoisie decides it is time that Asian America is no longer relevant.

In an election year, this question, of course, resonates differently. How, and when, are Asian Americans relevant? I want to deliberately frame this as an issue of relevance and in terms of the temporal metaphors evoked by Trillin’s poem to ask some more explicit questions about the state of Asian American studies. What do we do when the neoliberal university decides that we’ve run out of the need for Asian American studies and that practitioners in our field are merely the taste du jour? For a food studies scholar, it is not difficult to see the parallel between Trillin’s rhetoric and the choices that current administrations make about the kind of work that we can or should be doing. In a year when tenure-track hiring in Asian American studies seemed to hit an all-time low, it was hard not to think that universities had also come to the conclusion that the time for Asian America was over. The time for Asian American faculty was over. The global was where we needed to be.

The articles in this issue actively militate against this kind of dismissal of the field. Christine Cynn’s article reminds us of the historical contexts that racialize Chinese Americans in the early twentieth century. Michele Janette’s article, which focuses on Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth, argues that the novel tethers its narrative to migratory and deterritorialized rather than geographically fixed precursors, thus claiming a queer and affective rather than ancestral lineage. Denise Cruz and Joshua Chambers-Letson collectively show us where Asian American studies can be and what it can do. With their respective analyses of the Philippine-Canadian fashion scene and the performance art of Iraqi American Wafaa Bilal, they put pressure on the subjects and objects of Asian American critique, inviting us to think laterally and historically and to cleave important new spaces for research that speak to evolving forms of racial and queer subjectivity. Finally, Frances Tran’s brave and important article asks us to think about what it would mean to seek an engagement with Asian American studies that does not include institutionalization. What would it mean to think productively through failure? What are the commitments of the field?

While these articles do not directly respond to Trillin in any way, they are a product of the moment in which such a disregard of Asian Americanness can emerge. As author Monique Truong...