Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (review)

Daryl Maeda's Chains of Babylon serves as a cultural excavation of the lost history of the Asian-American movement (1960-1975) and the political origins of the panethnic Asian-American identity. While the term "Asian American" has taken on an innocuous demographic meaning haunted by the model minority label, the identity was born amidst the tumult and radicalism of the Third World Liberation movements. Maeda argues that the foundations of Asian America do not lie in the integrationist rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement, but rather in solidarity with the Black Power, Chicano, Puerto Rican and American-Indian movements. Maeda's work not only provides new perspectives and untold stories of this period in Asian-American political history, but also reinserts Asian Americans, an often-invisible minority, into the lines of U.S. history and 1960s politics writ large.

Beyond this worthy project in cultural history, Maeda also offers at least two other notable contributions of interest to sociological audiences. Maeda explicitly positions his study in dialogue with scholars of racial formation and racial triangulation. He seeks to demonstrate that Asian-American racial identity is constructed in relationship to both whiteness and blackness. To be clear, Asian-American activists formed their new panethnic identity in order to distance themselves from whiteness and charges of assimilationist accommodation.

Maeda builds upon previous scholarship by demonstrating that while Asian Americans attempted to distance themselves from whiteness, their new identity cannot be seen as a simplistic adoption of blackness in yellow face. The construction of a single racial identity from many discrete ethnic groups produced a distinct racial formation for Asian Americans predicated on both anti-racism and anti-imperialism. As Maeda observes, Asian-American involvement in the anti-war movement positioned them very differently than other racial minority activists. The war in Vietnam was a race war and Asian Americans looked like the enemy. Asian-American anti-war activism involved a transnational solidarity among Asian peoples who had long suffered at the hands of U.S. imperialism. Maeda clearly shows that while similar and in solidarity with black activism and black racial formation, Asian-American racialization followed its own distinct path.

Looking at Asian-American racial formation, Maeda also engages the growing field of new racial studies with his interest in race-making and the interlocking roles of macro- and micro-social processes shaping understandings of race. In revealing how Asian Americans looked to blackness as a key example of non-white racialization and model for radical activism, Maeda also makes clear that Asian Americans viewed their position in relation to blackness in a multitude of ways ranging from simple mimicry to social distancing. The understanding of Asian-American racial position with respect to blackness and whiteness was often predicated upon the micro-interactions between Asian Americans and black activists. Maeda demonstrates that the process of racialization for Asian Americans was not a simple or linear progression. Many competing perspectives and relationships helped to shape the new racial Asian-American identity.

Although Maeda does not explicitly reference the sociological literature on social movements, his cultural history of the Asian American movement certainly makes a contribution there. In particular, Maeda provides a prime example of social movements as a site of cultural production. Social movements also use culture (i.e., performance and music) to further movement messaging and gains. Maeda posits that the cultural artifacts of the Asian-American movement are key to understanding the solidification of a panethnic Asian-American identity during the 1960s and 1970s as well as its persistence as a political identity into the present.

As is true with all scholarly endeavors, Maeda's work is not without its limitations; Maeda states many of these at the outset of the book. However, as one of Maeda's main arguments rests upon the construction of Asian-American racial identity vis-à-vis whiteness and blackness, the absence of analysis on the relationship to Chicano/ Latino and American Indian political identities constructed in the same...