![]()
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, prolific writer and scholar, was among the most influential African American voices of the twentieth century. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Harvard University in 1890, he pursued graduate studies at the University of Berlin. Du Bois subsequently returned to Harvard where he received a Master of Arts and, in 1893, became the first African American to be awarded a doctorate from that university. Du Bois was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), served as its director for publicity and research and, until 1934, was both founder and first editor of The Crisis, the monthly journal of the NAACP. Writing in the April 1915 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois argued that:
The equality in political, industrial and social life which modern men must have in order to live, is not to be confounded with sameness. On the contrary, in our case, it is rather insistence upon the right of diversity; - upon the right of a human being to be a man even if he does not wear the same cut of vest, the same curl of hair or the same color of skin. Human equality does not even entail, as it is sometimes said, absolute equality of opportunity; for certainly the natural inequalities of inherent genius and varying gift make this a dubious phrase. But there is more and more clearly recognized minimum of opportunity and maximum of freedom to be, to move and to think, which the modern world denies to no being which it recognizes as a real man.
(Du Bois, 1915, 310–312)
Although the prophetic words of Du Bois date from the opening of the twentieth century, they resonate at least as clearly in the world of the twenty-first century as they did then. Recent events in the United States and elsewhere have tragically revealed that systemic racism and the racialization of minority populations remain unresolved. As a man of his time, moreover, Du Bois’s focus on the “color line” or the color stigmata was limited, both geographically and theoretically, by his experiences as a Black American man, and his education in the U.S. and Germany. As subsequent events during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have revealed, racialized forms of systemic discrimination, including genocide, exceeds the boundaries of the “color line” and has included populations categorized as “other” on the basis of ethnicity.
With certain exceptions, however, the public gaze has remained focused on the European or North American experience (e.g., the Holocaust, Balkan Wars in post-Soviet Yugoslavia). Similarly, and again with certain exceptions (e.g., the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict in Sri Lanka), interest in issues of race and ethnicity in Asia has remained the domain of scholars who have focused on a particular nation or sub-region. This volume, by contrast, seeks to provide a holistic and comparative coverage of South, Southeast, and East-Asia, as well as Australasia and Oceania, an area that extends from Pakistan in the West to Hawai’i in the East.
The total population of these sub-regions is well in excess of four billion, while that of South Asia (24.89%), Southeast Asia (8.5%), and East Asia (21.5%) collectively account for approximately 55% of the global population (U.S. Census Bureau July, 2020). What is more, as measured by nominal GDP, this vast region is home to three (the PRC, Japan, and India) of the top five economies in the world (World Bank, 2020, 1–4).
With the exception of former White settler nations, Australia and New Zealand, where “race relations” are predominantly reflective of the “color line”, all Asian countries are characterized by ethnic or, in some instances, racial heterogeneity, irrespective of size, geographical location, or national narratives based upon presumed ethnic and cultural homogeneity. In fact, categorizing the peoples of South, South East, and East-Asia, Australasia and Oceania on the basis of distinct ethnic groupings presents enormous challenges. Collectively, these sub-regions are home to thousands of languages and dialects, multiple religions, including both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, Islam, Roman Catholicism Protestantism, and indigenous forms of Animism. In India, for example, Hindi, itself comprised of multiple dialects, and English are the official languages used in government service, but a further 20 languages (e.g., Bengali, Tamil, Bangla, Urdu, Gujarati, and Kashmiri) are officially recognized. Analysis of the multicultural fabric of Indian society must also take into account the “scheduled castes” (Dalits – former untouchables), and the “scheduled tribes” (Adivasis), who constitute 16.6% and 8.6% of the total population respectively (Ravindrami and Rakhal, 2018, 19–20). While untouchability was officially outlawed in 1947, Dalits not only continue to experience discrimination in areas of everyday life, but, as a result, are among India’s most impoverished (Chalam, 2007, 81–90). The PRC officially recognizes the existence of 55 non-Han Chinese ethnic minority groups, though others exist (e.g., Oirat) but are not so recognized. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a self-described “multi-nationality” country consisting of 54 ethnic groups, while the Philippines, which is comprised of thousands of islands, contains nearly as many ethnic or sub-ethnic groups. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity), the national motto of Indonesia, reflects an official commitment to diversity and multiculturalism, as inscribed in the symbol of Garuda Pancasila. With a population in excess of 260 million, Indonesia is also home to hundreds of different ethnic groups, cultures and languages dispersed across approximately 6,000 islands (Ali, 2016, 74–103; Taylor, 2007, 5–7). In common with other countries in Southeast and South Asia, the cultural diversity that characterizes Indonesia is, to some extent, a consequence of centuries of European colonization, which entailed not only the imposition of new geographical boundaries, institutions of governance, and the manipulation of indigenous cultural differences, but also the migration of millions of colonial subjects as sources of labor power. Thus, in addition to the multiplicity of ethnic groups referred to above, we must also take into account the presence of Arab, Chinese, Indian, Sikh, European, and Eurasian communities throughout Asia.
Finally, while cultural diversity and, in some instances, a commitment to multiculturalism has provided benefits, the multiplicity of forms of governance, economic structures and institutions, religious beliefs, cultures, and ethnicities within and between the countries of Asia have been, and remain, sites of contestation that have resulted in both inter-state wars and ethnically fueled unrest and violent conflict within states. The list is lengthy and while we cannot ascribe ethnic differences as causal in every instance, ethnicity has figured prominently in virtually all intra-state conflicts since 1945:
- Since the partition of British India in 1947, India and Pakistan have engaged in three wars, the last of which (1971) led to the creation of Bangladesh, while conflicting claims over the status of Kashmir remain a source of tension, armed conflict, and cross-border terrorism between these nuclear states, a conflict that at times has transferred to the old Metropolis.
- The Korean War (1950–1953)
- The Chinese invasions of Tibet (1950, 1959)
- The Second Indochina War (1955–1975)
- The Sino-Indian War (1962)
- The Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975)
- The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (1978)
- The Sino-Vietnamese War (1979)
In addition to inter-state wars, intra-state conflicts, at times instigated by governments against specific minority ethnic populations, remain a feature of life in many Asian countries. These include: communal violence between Muslims and Buddhists in Myanmar and Thailand; ethnically inspired violence perpetrated against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (1965, 1998); intermittent clashes between Christians and Muslims in Eastern Indonesia; an ongoing de facto civil war between the Philippine government and Abu Sayyaf extremists allied with the Islamic State; communal violence in the Solomon Islands between indigenous and migrant communities during the 1990s that precipitated military intervention on the part of the Australian government in 2003; and Fiji, which has suffered from periods of communal violence and political upheaval between indigenous, mainly Christian, Fijians and ethnic Indians (Hindu), whose ancestors were brought to Fiji as labor during the British colonial period. Here, it is important to bear in mind that not all conflicts within Asia have been driven by sectarian or ethnic divisions. Nor is it the case that all members of a particular ethnic group have necessarily engaged in communal violence (Barter, 2017, 144–149). It is, however, the case that ethnicity has assumed a larger role than political ideologies. More recently, this has been tragically reflected in the forced migration of the mainly Muslim Rohingya population in Myanmar and the PRC’s suppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinxiang Province.
The chapters that comprise this volume are organized on the basis of four distinct, but interrelated sub-regions; South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Australasia and Oceania. The objective is not to seek a unitary conceptualization of race or ethnicity, but to identify and analyze both the continuities and discontinuities that characterize the social, political, and cultural understandings of race and ethnicity across this vast region. By situating the historical and contemporary salience of race and ethnicity within the broader Asian context, it is fundamentally concerned with the governance of the racial and ethnic diversity that characterizes multicultural contemporary Asian societies.
Thus, the analyses that follow include not only the relationship between ethnic or racial minorities and the state, but social relations within and between individual communities. These conceptual considerations shape not only the framework of governance, but also the means by which knowledge of national identity, and of “self” and “other”, are constructed and reconstructed over time. Some chapters provide a detailed analysis of the historical, often colonial, and ideological foundations of contemporary ethnic conflicts. In so doing, they also illuminate the constantly shifting terrain upon which conceptualizations of race and ethnicity have played out over time. Yet other chapters analyze ethnic diversity and identity in former “White” settler colonies (e.g., Australia and New Zealand). Regardless of approach, analyses are strengthened by the variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives (anthropology, international relations, development studies, public policy, media and communications, history, political science, cultural studies, and sociology) taken by different contributors.
In general, understandings of race, ethnicity and racialization, as well as associated theories, are of Western origin, where racism has remained a factor in social relations for centuries. European and North American racisms have most commonly been expressed through the ideologies of white superiority associated with colonialism, nationalist ideologies that denigrated or excluded particular ethnic, racial, and indigenous communities, and in the denial of rights to immigrant minorities. Although commonsense understandings of “race”, particularly in Western Europe and North America continue to focus on the color stigmata, this distinction only possesses significance in the material world. In other words, “race” as a social construct lacks biological significance. In the social or material world, moreover, there are numerous instances in which communities which are phenotypically indistinguishable from dominant groups have been constructed as “racially” other and consequently inferior. Examples of this can be found in mid-nineteenth century Britain, where the Irish were characterized as “racially” different, or, in the U.S., where Jews were officially designated as members of the Hebrew Race well into the twentieth century. Thus, while the concept of race possesses no explanatory power in terms of human biology, it has acted, and continues to act, as a signifier in human relations.
To summarize, these examples compel us to consider modalities of racism, including those of the interior, which classify peoples on the basis of assumed immutable biological or cultural characteristics, but are not necessarily associated with the color stigmata. This in turns suggests that a distinction must also be drawn between “race” as a social construct, racial theories, and racial ideologies, all of which are the products of the human imagination. The focus of our attention therefore shifts to the processes associated with racialization, their consequences in the material world, and how racialized minority and indigenous populations contest both their categorization as “racially” inferior, as well as the multiple forms of institutionalized discrimination that act as catalysts for further marginalization.
A core characteristic of racialized minorities is the imposition of a different and disparaged identity by a dominant or majority group. This may involve the unequal or partial denial of rights of citizenship, exclusions, or segregation in terms of areas of residence, occupation, education, as well as limited access to goods, territorial dispossession, opposition to intermarriage, or extermination, all of which may be justified by and attributed to popular, or commonsense understandings of genetic difference, superiority and inferiority (Spurr, 1993, 61–91). On the other hand, the fact that racial categorization is a social construct that evolves over time also means that these categories are infinitely flexible and by no means permanent.
Similarly, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that mainstream scholars began to acknowledge the centrality of ethnicity in social relations. A point that is emphasized in the Introduction to this volume. In part, this was due to the fact that social theory, particularly in Europe and North America, had been established on the basis of class relations and conflict within capitalist development. It was also reflective of a deeply embedded ethnocentrism in the social sciences and humanities, which largely effaced both the destruction of indigenous peoples, and the cultures and the exclusion of oppressed minority populations from national narratives. Even when ethnic or racial heterogeneity was acknowledged, the terms of that recognition assumed its future disappearance through policies of integration or assimilation (Cornell and Hartman, 2007, 44–51). This was also a period characterized by anti-colonial and anti-racist activism. Initial assumptions that ethnicity necessarily implied a positive sense of belonging to a specific cultural group defined by an inherited cultural commonality and an assumed common ancestry were, and remain, insufficient. Indeed, the assumption that ethnic groups are homogenous and, in some respects, immutable essentializes membership and ignores the diversity that exists within ethnic communities. The case of Asian Americans is one of many examples of how lived experience contradicts these primordial and racialized assumptions. The U.S. census category of Asian American and Pacific Islander, for example, elides not only the enormous differences between constituent communities, but the cultural diversity that exists within particular communities. Historically, the only experience that unites Asian Americans is that each has experienced forms of marginalization, exclusions, and discrimination imposed by a dominant White majority.
What is more, as Osuna and Weiner demonstrate in Chapter 28, “Okinawan-Japanese-Hawaiian identities”, the historical and contemporary experiences of Okinawan Americans, who have been officially subsumed as Japanese Americans, depart substantially from that of descendants of mainland Japanese immigrants, settlers, and citizens. In the broader context of Asia this raises important questions regarding the assumed degree of ethnic homogeneity that, for example, characterizes Korea and Japan, where signifiers of cultural diversity (e.g., dialect, local beliefs, practices, and even ancestry) have been suppressed through overarching discourses of “Japaneseness”, or “Koreanness”. The same applies to the Han majority in China, which, in fact, is comprised of multiple ethnicities within which self-identity is, at least in part, based upon provincial or even village origins (Rack, 2005, 10–13). Thus, any conceptualization of ethnicity and what constitutes an ethnic group must take into account the lived experiences of individuals as autonomous actors who inhabit multiple identities. A more nuanced approach to understanding the multiple and complex elements that constitute ethnicity must consider both self-identification and the characteristics and capacities attributed to or imposed upon a particular community. At the same time, we must recognize that ethnic groups, however constructed, exist as a material reality. This is particularly relevant since internationally recognized human rights standards (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Re...
