Disoriented

Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State

Robert Chang

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814790434
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Asiatisch-Amerikanische Studien

Does "Asian American" denote an ethnic or racial identification? Is a person of mixed ancestry, the child of Euro- and Asian American parents, Asian American? What does it mean to refer to first generation Hmong refugees and fifth generation Chinese Americans both as Asian American?

In Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation State, Robert Chang examines the current discourse on race and law and the implications of postmodern theory and affirmative action-all of which have largely excluded Asian Americans-in order to develop a theory of critical Asian American legal studies.

Demonstrating that the ongoing debate surrounding multiculturalism and immigration in the U.S. is really a struggle over the meaning of "America," Chang reveals how the construction of Asian American-ness has become a necessary component in stabilizing a national American identity-- a fact Chang criticizes as harmful to Asian Americans. Defining the many "borders" that operate in positive and negative ways to construct America as we know it, Chang analyzes the position of Asian Americans within America's black/white racial paradigm, how "the family" operates as a stand-in for race and nation, and how the figure of the immigrant embodies a central contradiction in allegories of America.

"Has profound political implications for race relations in the new century"
—Michigan Law Review, May 2001

Notes

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1. CALVIN COOLIDGE, AMERICA’S NEED FOR EDUCATION 56 (1925), quoted in WALTER BENN MICHAELS, OUR AMERICA: NATIVISM, MODERNISM, AND PLURALISM 3 (1995).

2. ELAINE H. KIM, ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WRITINGS AND THEIR SOCIAL CONTEXT xii (1982).

3. JUDITH BUTLER, GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBERSION OF IDENTITY 14 (1990).

4. E. San Juan, Jr., The Predicament of Filipinos in the United States: “Where are you from? When are you going back?” in THE STATE OF ASIAN AMERICA: ACTIVISM AND RESISTANCE IN THE UNITED STATES 205 (Karin Aguilar-San Juan ed., 1994).

5. The phrase “imaginary homelands” is Salman Rushdie’s. See the title essay in SALMAN RUSHDIE, IMAGINARY HOMELANDS: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM 1981–1991, at 9 (1991).

6. Countee Cullen, Heritage, in THE NEW NEGRO: VOICES OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 250 (Alain Locke ed., 1992).

7. MICHAELS, supra note 1, at 123 (citing ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA 46 (1992)).

8. Id. at 123–24 (quoting Cullen).

9. Cullen, supra note 6, at 251.

10. MICHAELS, supra note 1, at 124.

11. Yuji Ichioka, The Early Japanese Immigrant Quest for Citizenship: The Background of the 1922 Ozawa Case, 4 AMERASIA J. 1, 17 (1977), reprinted in 2 ASIAN AMERICANS AND THE LAW: JAPANESE IMMIGRANTS AND AMERICAN LAW 397, 413 (Charles McClain ed., 1994).

12. Id. at 18.

13. YEN LE ESPIRITU, ASIAN AMERICAN PANETHNICITY: BRIDGING INSTITUTIONS AND IDENTITIES 1–18 (1992).

14. Neil Gotanda, Toward Repeal of Asian Exclusion: The Magnuson Act of 1943, the Act of July 2, 1946, the Presidential Proclamation of July 4, 1946, the Act of August 9, 1946, and the Act of August 19, 1950, in ASIAN AMERICANS AND CONGRESS: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY (Hyung-chan Kim ed., 1996).

15. BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF NATIONALISM 6–7 (Rev. ed. 1991).

16. UNDER WESTERN EYES: WRITINGS FROM ASIAN AMERICA (Garrett Hongo ed., 1995); READING THE LITERATURE OF ASIAN AMERICA (Shirley Geok-lin Lim & Amy Ling eds., 1992); THE STATE OF ASIAN AMERICA, supra note 4.

17. ROGER DANIELS, ASIAN AMERICA: CHINESE AND JAPANESE IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1850, at xiv (1988).

18. CHANTAL MOUFFE, THE RETURN OF THE POLITICAL 4 (1993).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922); United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).

2. Immigration Act of 1924, ch. 190, 43 Stat. 153 § 13(c).

3. See Neil Gotanda, “Other Non-Whites” in American Legal History: A Review of Justice at War, 85 COLUM. L. REV. 1186, 1188 (1985) (reviewing PETER IRONS, JUSTICE AT WAR (1983)) (exploring “foreignness” as a “previously unexamined dimension of the relationship between race and law”).

4. Peter Fitzpatrick, “We know what it is when you do not ask us”: Nationalism as Racism, in NATIONALISM, RACISM AND THE RULE OF LAW 3, 23 (Peter Fitzpatrick ed., 1995).

5. WALTER BENN MICHAELS, OUR AMERICA: NATIVISM, MODERNISM, AND PLURALISM 6 (1995 (quoting KALLEN, CULTURE AND DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES 200 (1924; reprint 1970)).

6. See generally ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA: REFLECTIONS ON A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY (1991); Juan F. Perea, Demography and Distrust: An Essay on American Languages, Cultural Pluralism, and Official English, 77 MINN. L. REV. 269 (1992); Kevin R. Johnson, The New Nativism: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, in IMMIGRANTS OUT! THE NEW NATIVISM AND THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT IMPULSE IN THE UNITED STATES 165 (Juan F. Perea ed., 1997); Natsu Saito, Alien and Non-Alien Alike: Citizenship, “Foreignness” and Racial Hierarchy in American Law, 76 OR. L. REV. 261 (1997).

7. PATRICIA WILLIAMS, THE ROOSTER’S EGG: ON THE PERSISTENCE OF PREJUDICE 65 (1995).

8. See RODOLFO ACUNA, OCCUPIED AMERICA: A HISTORY OF CHICANOS 18–20 (3d ed. 1988); SUZANNE OBOLER, ETHNIC LABELS, LATINO LIVES: IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF (RE)PRESENTATION IN THE UNITED STATES 33 (1995).

9. D. W. GRIFFITH, THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915).

10. J...