Keywords for Asian American Studies

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, K. Scott Wong, Linda Trinh Võ

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479834983
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Coutumes et traditions

Born out of the Civil Rights and Third World Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American Studies has grown significantly over the past four decades, both as a distinct field of inquiry and as a potent site of critique. Characterized by transnational, trans-Pacific, and trans-hemispheric considerations of race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, gender, sexuality, and class, this multidisciplinary field engages with a set of concepts profoundly shaped by past and present histories of racialization and social formation. The keywords included in this collection are central to social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies and reflect the ways in which Asian American Studies has transformed scholarly discourses, research agendas, and pedagogical frameworks.Spanning multiple histories, numerous migrations, and diverse populations, Keywords for Asian American Studies reconsiders and recalibrates the ever-shifting borders of Asian American studies as a distinctly interdisciplinary field. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

1

Adoption

Catherine Ceniza Choy

In Asian American studies, the word “adoption” is increasingly significant for elucidating the breadth and depth of Asian American demographics, cultural expression, contemporary issues, and history. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the sight of an Asian child with white American parents has become a new social norm. Between 1971 and 2001, U.S. citizens adopted 265,677 children from other countries, and over half of those were from Asian countries. In 2000 and 2001, China was the leading sending country of adoptive children to the United States. South Korea, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, and the Philippines were among the top twenty sending countries (Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute 2013). Thus, the terms “international adoption,” “intercountry adoption,” and “transnational adoption” are used to describe the global dimensions of Asian adoption in the United States (Volkman 2005; Eleana Kim 2010).

A related keyword is “diaspora,” which acknowledges the broader histories of Asian international adoption across time and space. Since the end of the Korean War, approximately two hundred thousand Korean children have been sent to the United States for adoption and an additional fifty thousand have been sent to Europe (Yuh 2005). Because white Americans predominantly adopt these children, the words “transracial” and “cross-cultural” are additional key modifying terms for describing this phenomenon (A. Louie 2009; Davis 2012). However, Asian Americans have also adopted children from Asia. The phenomenon of “transethnic” and “multiethnic” adoption (wherein one or both of the parents is Asian American) thus deserves further study.

American adoptive parents and adult Asian American adoptees have made a mark on American national culture by spearheading organizations, such as Families with Children from China and Also-Known-As, that expand the traditional boundaries of kinship and community. They have created specialized virtual networks, print media, and heritage camps, which provide resources and support to other adoptive families and potential adoptive parents. In doing so, they participate in “global family making,” the process through which people create and sustain a family by consciously crossing national and often racial borders (Choy 2013). These “global families” are well known to the general public through mainstream news stories about celebrities as well as ordinary Americans adopting children from Asia. These narratives typically portray the phenomenon as a virtuous example of contemporary U.S. multiculturalism and a desirable way to create a family.

The international and transracial adoption of Asian children is also highly controversial. Since the late 1990s, anthologies, documentary films, and memoirs by Korean American adoptees about their upbringing emphasize the themes of American racism and alienation (Bishoff and Rankin 1997; Borshay Liem 2000; Borshay Liem 2010; Trenka 2003; Trenka 2009). The popularity of the seemingly positive stereotype of Asian Americans as “model minorities” in relation to negative “less than model” stereotypes of African Americans adds further complexity to issues of race in Asian international adoption. Some scholars have argued that these stereotypes undergird a racial preference for Asian children over African American children (Dorow 2006).

Furthermore, the decreasing supply of white babies in the United States that began in the second half of the twentieth century—a result of factors including the creation of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, and the increasing social legitimacy of single parenting—contributes to the commodification of Asian children for an international adoption market. Charges of “baby selling” and child abduction have resulted in suspensions of international adoptions from Vietnam and Cambodia. Some scholars have strongly criticized international adoption, characterizing it as a global market that transports babies from poorer to richer nations and likening it to a form of forced migration and human trafficking (Hubinette 2006).

These controversies have a longer history rooted in the post–World War II and Cold War presence of the U.S. military in Asia. Americans adopted Japanese and Korean war orphans, but their adoption of mixed-race Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese children (popularly known as Amerasians), a population fathered by U.S. servicemen with Asian women, captured the hearts and minds of the general public. The distinctive racial features of these mixed Asian-and-American children made them visible targets for abuse. And the lack of U.S. and Asian governmental support, and desertion by their American fathers, influenced their mothers’ decisions to abandon them, creating a group of children available for adoption.

International adoption from China is popularly conceived as a recent history, beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the emergence of China’s “one-child policy” and its increasing standardization of international adoption. While the policy may have eased the pressure of rapid population growth on Chinese communities, it has been widely criticized for motivating Chinese families, living in a patriarchal society with a marked cultural preference for boys, to relinquish baby girls for adoption. However, an earlier period of Chinese international adoption took place in the 1950s and 1960s under the auspices of the “Hong Kong Project,” through which Chinese American and white American families adopted hundreds of Chinese boys and girls who had been relinquished by refugee families fleeing communist mainland China.

Individual advocates who had themselves adopted children internationally—most notably Oregon farmer Harry Holt, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Pearl S. Buck, and Hollywood actress Jane Russell—and international social service agencies, such as the International Social Service–United States of America (ISS-USA) branch, popularized and facilitated Asian international adoption in the United States. While Russell’s WAIF (World Adoption International Fund) worked with the ISS-USA, Harry Holt organized the Holt Adoption Program (now known as Holt International) and Pearl S. Buck founded Welcome House, which continues to facilitate international adoptions. In the 1950s and 1960s, competition between social service agencies and individuals over who should oversee international adoption processes, and the controversy over proxy adoptions—through which adoptive parents adopted a child “sight unseen” through a third party abroad—dominated their interactions. In later years, more cooperative relations would prevail.

Until recently, the history of Asian international adoption was a topic markedly absent from Asian American studies. In the past decade, however, a critical mass of scholarship has emerged. The leadership of Korean adoptee artists and scholars has been pivotal in making Asian adoptee concerns integral to the field. Under the executive directorship of filmmaker and producer Deann Borshay Liem, NAATA (National Asian American Telecommunications Association, now the Center for Asian American Media) showcased films about Asian international adoption. The Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) features an Asian Adoptee section, which Kim Park Nelson founded in 2007. At the groups’s annual meetings, scholarly panels regularly feature recent research on Asian international adoption.

Finally, the keyword “adoption” has enabled political as well as scholarly projects that are critical of the dominant narrative about Asian international adoption, which casts the phenomenon as the humanitarian rescue of Asian children by white American families. Scholars and activists have called attention to the global inequities that persist in Asian international adoption, the significance of birth families, the social reality of adult adoptees, and the historical and political ties that bind international adoptees to immigrants. They emphasize that Asian international adoption is a unique phenomenon deserving of scholarly attention on its own terms as well as a generative lens through which we can view our increasingly global society.

2

Art

Margo Machida

Whereas all human societies have developed visual idioms, the idea of Art (with a capital “A”) is elusive, much debated, and often closely entwined with social and class hierarchies, and subjective matters of value, taste, and sensibility. Its historic application as a cultural category and definitions of what constitutes visual art have varied significantly from culture to culture, across different historic periods, and according to the background, position, and perception of the viewer. Especially in the modern West, distinctions have typically been drawn between “high” or “fine” art, and crafts or applied arts. “Fine” art has been conceived as a specialized, elevated focus of aesthetic activity with its own intellectual history, professional principles, standards of judgment, and notions of individual “genius.” By contrast, crafts, design, and vernacular practices deemed as “tribal,” “primitive,” “folk,” or “outsider” art were often treated as lesser. While the Western tradition of visual art once referred mainly to painting, sculpture, drawing, and graphics, the invention of groundbreaking technologies—photography, film, television, the computer—and the appearance of new practices including video, digital, mixed media, web-based, conceptual, installation, performance, body, land, and earth art have repeatedly enlarged and complicated the ways in which visual artistic activity is understood and utilized. Moreover, as distinctions continue to erode between the realms of the “fine” arts, visual and material culture, and everyday life, it is more commonplace for artists to draw upon and integrate methods and materials from a range of sources, including craft, commercial, and industrial processes.

The term “Asian American art,” like “Asian American,” first came into general usage as a discrete subject of interest in the late 1960s and 1970s with the contemporaneous rise of the Asian American movement and establishment of ethnic studies as an academic field, beginning on the West Coast. Fueled by broad-based protest, identity, and counterculture movements, this turbulent moment witnessed the potent convergence of heightened ethnic awareness, cultural activism, and politically inspired cultural production. Activist scholars and writers published the first critical writings that sought to frame constituent elements of a distinct Asian American identity and culture. This emergent panethnic formulation was premised on the belief that despite their many differences and longstanding antagonisms, Asian groups shared common struggles and aspirations to establish themselves in the face of a difficult domestic history marked by racism, discrimination, exclusion, and economic exploitation.

Exposure to ethnic studies programs also galvanized members of this generation to use art to promote social change. Consequently, the 1970s witnessed the nationwide formation of grassroots organizations by loose groupings of artists, writers, scholars, college students, and cultural activists that played a foundational role in the Asian American community arts movement (Wei 1993; Louie and Omatsu 2001). Pioneering organizations were established with a strong visual arts component like Basement Workshop in New York, and Kearny Street Workshop and Japantown Art and Media Workshop in San Francisco. Activist artists produced large-scale public murals, silk-screened posters, prints, and illustrations intended to impart clear messages that could be apprehended by the broadest possible audience (Cockcroft, Weber, and Cockcroft 1977). Cuban graphics, Cultural Revolution–era Chinese political posters, the Chicano art movement, and Mexican murals influenced these efforts as expressions of solidarity with liberatory struggles against racism and imperialism in the U.S. and the Third World (Machida 2008). Similarly, in the early 1970s, visual art regularly appeared in the Asian American alternative press—including periodicals such as Aion and Gidra in California, and Bridge magazine in New York—as illustrations, comics, photography, and portraits of people and community life.

During the early years of the Asian American movement, a highly politicized approach to cultural development influenced by writings such as Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” prevailed. Its advocates conceived of art as a force for revolutionary transformation and emphasized the artist’s social and political responsibility to produce work of relevance to a community identified chiefly with the Asian American working class and immigrants. In conjunction with highlighting social problems, and crafting empowering images to counter distortive representations imposed by the dominant culture, activist artists sought to envision a distinctive Asian American culture. However, their efforts to articulate a definitive aesthetic and, by extension, something that could legitimately be called “Asian American art” proved problematic. The issue would lead to perennial debates over whether the term “Asian American art” refers to the background of the maker or to a particular subject matter—that is, work that directly addresses some historic, social, or political aspect of Asian American experience. With conceptions of Asian American art shifting substantially after the 1970s, a wide spectrum of opinion subsequently arose about how, or if, an Asian American visual aesthetic should be defined (A. Tam 2000). Reflective of a variety of ideological and intellectual orientations, these views have ranged from prescriptive formulations inflected by political doctrines to deconstructive critiques of the term itself.

The intensifying interest in Asian American artists likewise led to the emergence of Asian American arts writing, critical discourse, curatorial projects, and archival efforts in the 1970s. Such developments converged with wider efforts by activist scholars and critics, under the umbrella term “multiculturalism,” to challenge the strictures of Eurocentric art historical and aesthetic canons and bring forward art by nonwhite groups in U.S. society (Lippard 1990). These allied practices would contribute to the gradual formation of Asian American art history over the ensuing decades. Such ventures, in which seminal community-based Asian American arts organizations played a generative role, understandably associated Asian American art with the groups that comprised the largest domestic Asian populations of the period: peoples of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent. The imprint of that era, as manifested in many exhibitions throughout the 1980s, would exert a significant influence on extant discourses about what constitutes Asian American art. The 1990s witnessed an unprecedented number of museum and gallery exhibitions organized under either an Asian American frame or ethnic-specific rubrics such as Japanese American, Chinese American, Korean American, Filipino American, and Vietnamese American art. Many of these shows centered on identity, sociopolitical, and historic issues related to the transpacific trajectory of U.S. involvement in Asia, including the pervasive, multigenerational effects on U.S. Asian communities of war in Korea and Southeast Asia, the colonization of the Philippines, and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans (Machida 2009).

Yet by the late 1970s, conceptions of Asian American art were ripe for a radical realignment due to the demographic transformation of the U.S. Asian population, resulting from changes in inequitable federal immigration laws, and an expanding backlash against multiculturalism and identity politics. Due to the 1965 abolition of restrictions that severely limited Asian immigration to the U.S., along with refugee statutes enacted after the Vietnam War, new entrants had begun to outstrip the U.S.-born generations whose forebears had mostly settled by the early twentieth century. Beyond the profound impact of this new wave of immigration and transnational circulation on the internal landscape of Asian America, the so-called “culture wars” were also rapidly gaining momentum. Not only was ethnoracial difference as a defining concept under widespread attack in America by the 1980s, but also due to parallel intellectual challenges to discourses of identification and strategies of representation, categories such as nation, race, ethnicity, and gender, and even unitary conceptions of the self were being reconceived as multidimensional, shifting, contingent, and discontinuous (Trinh 1992).

Ever more resistant to being labeled as Asian Americans, by the 1990s younger artists, curators, critics, and scholars perceived that identity, especially when filtered through the lens of race and autobiography, had virtually become a new delimiting canon for minoritized artists. In this move away from rhetorics of race and identity politics, formulations like “post-racial” and “post-identity” art gained increasing currency. As any interest in cultural specificity and affiliation risked being associated with a confining essentialism, those who continued to characterize their subject as “Asian American” art inevitably found themselves treading through a dense political and intellectual minefield. Moreover Asian American art, unlike other disciplines in ethnic studies that were firmly established before the 1980s, was still a subject-in-formation when it ran afoul of this polarizing climate (Elaine Kim 2003).

Visual art, moreover, was largely overlooked as a research priority in Asian American studies, unlike other aspects of visual culture such as film, television, and print media. The paucity of serious and sustained Asian Americanist scholarly writing on the subject is attributed to conditions specific to the genesis and ideological roots of a field concerned with ongoing struggles with racism and marginalization (G. Chang 2008). The role of visual art in the everyday lives of Asian communities was seldom mentioned until the 1990s, given Asian American scholarship’s emphasis on bottom-up approaches to social history and labor studies. Indeed the subject was often viewed with ambivalence, due to its presumptive links to elite and elitist interests with no relevance to the lives and circumstances of the Asian American masses. Visual representation was also scrutinized for its function in providing dominant culture with a means to negatively stereotype and suppress Asian efforts to claim a place for themselves in this nation.

Another powerful influence in repositioning Asian American art and cultural criticism—as framed through an array of scholarly and curatorial projects—has come via the accelerating influx of Asian artists and intellectuals to the U.S. during the post-1965 era, which has increasingly placed Asian American art and artists in dynamic conversation with art and ideas emerging from Asian nations and global overseas Asian communities (A. Yang 1998). As identity- and nation-based rhetorics are relativized by discourses of diaspora, transnationality, and globalization, the idea of diaspora, while sometimes criticized for its links to nationalism, provides a basis for the comparative study of distinct yet multivalent identifications that transcend dichotomous notions of domestic identity (DeSouza 1997). By utilizing a diasporic lens, and by positing an “aesthetics of diaspora,” visual art by Asians in the U.S. was reconceived as part of a broad continuum of Asian and Asian diasporic artistic production. These included interstitial frames like “transexperience” and “intersecting communities of affinities” that were respectively applied to jointly position work by overseas Chinese artists residing in three Western nations (the United States, Australia, and France) (M. Chiu 2006), and to trace the formation and artistic production of mixed Asian American and Asian artist collectives in New York and Tokyo (A. Chang 2008). More recent pandiasporic exhibitions organized both domestically and abroad would similarly emphasize international connections by juxtaposing artists in Asia with their ethnic counterparts in Asian diasporas, among them a Korean biennial that brought together works by Korean and Korean diasporic artists from the U.S., Kazakhstan, China, Brazil, and Japan (Y. S. Min 2002).

Overall, the past two decades have proved to be an especially fertile period, distinguished by an upsurge of publications, research initiatives, and thematic and survey exhibitions on and of Asian American art, including projects by scholars in Asia and the Pacific. Much as the foundational work in this field has simultaneously proceeded inside and outside the academy, it is due to the combined efforts of curators, critics, artists, academics, art museums, alternative spaces, community arts and artist-run groups, and historical societies that the scope of the contemporary discourse on Asian American art continues to expand. Tracing individual artists’ creative and personal trajectories, these projects variously reveal intricately configured circuits of cultural production and differing contexts in which artistic work is produced, displayed, interpreted, and marketed. Amid these expansive conceptions of contemporary Asian American participation in ongoing flows of artists, ideas, and cultural influences between Asia, Oceania, the Am...