The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies

Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Cindy I-Fen Cheng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317813910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the field of Asian American Studies, as a generation of researchers have expanded the field with new paradigms and methodological tools.

Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work done in the past decades and the place of Asian Americans in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research in the field of Asian American Studies has progressed. Previous work in the field has focused on establishing a place for Asian Americans within American history. This volume engages more contemporary research, which draws on new archives, art, literature, film, and music, to examine how Asian Americans are redefining their national identities, and to show how race interacts with gender, sexuality, class, and the built environment, to reveal the diversity of the United States. Organized into five parts, and addressing a multitude of interdisciplinary areas of interest to Asian American scholars, it covers:

• a reframing of key themes such as transnationality, postcolonialism, and critical race theory

• U.S. imperialism and its impact on Asian Americans

• war and displacement

• the garment industry

• Asian Americans and sports

• race and the built environment

• social change and political participation

• and many more themes.

Exploring people, practice, politics, and places, this cutting-edge volume brings together the best themes current in Asian American Studies today, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field.

PART ONE

Shifting Paradigms

1
ON RACIAL STEREOTYPING

Leslie Bow

As an adult, graphic novelist Gene Yang was startled to discover his childhood rendering of an ethnic joke in an old sketchbook. In his cartoon, a buck-toothed Mandarin giggles, “Me Chinese. Me play joke. Me go pee pee in your Coke.”¹ A Chinese American, Yang puzzled over his ability to access American racial stereotypes while refusing to see them as self-implicating. Was the stereotype such a gross exaggeration that it bore no relationship to his self-conception? Or is this wishful thinking? Caricature would find pointed use in his first graphic novel, American Born Chinese: Chin-Kee, the excruciating embodiment of all Chinese stereotypes, is sent to test the novel’s self-hating protagonist. Their encounter culminates in a kung-fu movie parody, a battle symbolizing Asian Americans’ struggle with the reviled form of misrepresentation popularly known as the stereotype.

Not surprisingly, in its very definition, stereotyping invokes race: it represents “oversimplified opinion, affective attitudes, or uncritical judgment (as of a person, a race, an issue, or an event)” (Websters). Unlike the archetype, the stereotype is neither a primary nor an ideal projection but a reduction without variation; repetition without change is inherent to its form. While we rely upon categorizing in order to make sense of the world, racial stereotypes are now largely under stood to represent inaccurate biases that both deindividualize and dehumanize. Reifying notions of group difference, stereotyping enables hierarchy by constructing and reinforcing distinction. It establishes a foundation for prejudice by explicitly or implicitly ranking peoples as superior or inferior.

A cultural arm of white supremacy, racial stereotypes nevertheless impersonate as immutable, transhistorical, as it ever was. While they are historically specific, they are often represented as reflecting timeless traits or ascribed to genetic inheritance. As stereotypes converge with belief in biological differences, they reflect antiquated, eugenicist views of evolutionary distinctions between peoples, race as “species” difference. For example, the representation of Filipino and Hawaiian primitivism justified nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism.² Propaganda surrounding Japanese patriotic fanaticism contributed to the internment of Japanese Americans as “enemy aliens” during World War II.³ The perception that Asian Americans are good at math derives from 1965 immigration reforms that privileged labor pools in technology and medicine, reforms that resulted in increased immigration from Asia (Ong and Liu 1994). In spite of this historicity, Asians are represented as “naturally” sly, clever, or frugal, just as they are “naturally” mathematic ally inclined and technologically advanced or primitive and childlike; emotionally repressed or happy-go-lucky; effeminate and timid or inherently cruel and immune to pain; uncoordinated, poor drivers or good with their hands. Note that contradiction never worried the work of the stereotype.

It is not simply that fixity alleviates anxieties surrounding difference by attempting to make the unknown knowable, but that stereotypical beliefs justify actions towards racial groups. They do not merely reflect, but produce culture; stereotyping serves an ideological role linked to social control. Psychologist Richard Lee expresses a generally held view stating, “Stereotypes of any group are inherently inaccurate because they try to shoehorn all members of the group being stereotyped into a single conception while ignoring the wide diversity within the group. Moreover, some stereotypes are simply wrong and are perpetuated by the majority group in order to bias perception of the targeted group” (Richard Lee 2013: n.p.). Lee’s view speaks to two truisms underlying dominant conceptions of stereotypes: they are both factually and morally “wrong.” Identifying stereotypical content surrounding Asian Americans and mobilizing around the offensive racial image is still an activist necessity. Yet at one level, both the question of accuracy—stereotype as false generalization—and of ethics—good images vs. bad ones—cloud the more abstract stakes underlying racial stereotyping. How might we deepen the analytic frame of race studies by looking beyond the content of racial stereotypes either to establish their inaccuracy or evaluate their degrees of offense?

Asian American encounters with the racial stereotype suggest the complexities underlying categorization, complexities that enrich our understanding of the “damaged knowledge” that is the racial stereotype (Mithlo 2008). Is the move to stereotype “just human nature”? How do cognitive and linguistic structures underlying stereotyping reflect racial profiling? Are “positive” stereotypes also harmful? Where does the productive cultural generalization end and stereotyping begin? Any analysis of the content of Asian stereotypes circulating in the U.S. should not obfuscate their purpose: representation enables the exercise of power. In what follows, I briefly explore the content of stereotypical imagery, a project that is ongoing and always incomplete, but, more importantly, the desiring structures that underlie it.

Structures of Typing: Othering, Alterity, Syllogism

The racial stereotype serves a productive function; it is a useful if pernicious fiction. Edward Said’s allegory of Self and Other in Orientalism (1978) neatly articulates the political stakes underlying the attempt to establish distinctions between peoples. Here, constructing a notion of the “barbarian” enables an unspoken norm, the “civilized”:

A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call “the land of the barbarians.” In other words, this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary … [The] imaginative geography of the “our land–barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our own minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours.”

Said 1978: 54

The actual content that defines “us” from “them” is arbitrary to the abstract processes of differentiation. What is significant is that the Other serves the purpose of self-definition. In Orientalism, Said makes this point more historically, arguing that European identity during and after the Enlightenment was formed through projections about the “Orient.” Said defined “Orientalism” as a discourse primarily about the Middle East produced by English, French, and German literature, science, politics, and sociology. This discourse did not only serve to justify European colonial endeavors but produced another effect: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said 1978: 3). The stereotype fixes difference not for its own sake, but in order to secure what passes as the norm.

The structure of racialization implied by Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and invoked by psychoanalyst Franz Fanon likewise highlights relationally defined identity or what is often deemed alterity or “Othering.” If the colonized “is a Malagasy,” Fanon wrote, “it is because the white man has come” (Fanon 1991:98). To make an analogous point, he echoes Jean-Paul Sartre in asserting, “It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew” (Fanon 1991: 93). Whether articulated through nationality, region, skin color, ethnicity, or religion, difference emerges out of a dialectical relationship with an invisible center or norm. Similarly, Slavoj Zizek highlights the purpose underlying anti-Semitic stereotypes in noting that “all the phantasmic richness of the traits supposed to characterize Jews (avidity, the spirit of intrigue, and so on) is here to conceal not the fact that ‘Jews are really not like that’, not the empirical reality of Jews, but the fact that in the anti-Semitic construction of a ‘Jew’, we are concerned with a purely structural function” (Zizek 1989: 99). This “structural function” is the making of alterity; a key insight of structuralist feminism, for example, is the notion of gender alterity: “Man” (X) as the norm against which “Woman” (Not X) becomes defined. The fallout of accepting this X/Not-X binary is accessibly portrayed in Dr. Seuss’s story of the hapless Sneetches whose fluctuating senses of self-worth hinge upon an arbitrary mark: “You could only play if your bellies had stars/And the Plain-Belly children had none upon thars” (Seuss 1961: 5). That is, the mark of (often visual) difference can be arbitrary; what is important is the social meaning ascribed to it and the degree to which one internalizes that meaning.

Unveiling this structure makes clear that racial stereotypes are not merely negative or derogatory towards a specific group, but productive on behalf of another; in the U.S., they help establish white identity through negation. Toni Morrison makes this clear in recognizing the role that African Americans play in the national imaginary. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she writes, “The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self” (Morrison 1992: 17). Positing racial difference in a medium such as literature does not simply reflect or reinforce preexisting views, it also serves a more abstract purpose in establishing white identity via contrast: what it is not. I focus here on the structures of alterity, but I want to note that they are triggered by larger material and economic forces at specific points in history. Defining and scapegoating populations serves the economic interests of the elite; specific case studies of this dynamic appear in this volume (Cheng 2016).

Examples of human classification based on the projection of racial, religious, or geographic difference are historically specific and contextual. Does this specificity prove or disprove the generally held idea that the move to classify or “type” represents a “universal” human trait? Attempting to understand the logic of anti-Semitism after the Holocaust, Sartre relates the following anecdote: “A young woman said to me: ‘I have had the most horrible experiences with furriers; they robbed me, they burned the fur I entrusted to them. Well, they were all Jews.’” Unpacking the logic underlying her bias, he asks, “But why did she choose to hate Jews rather than furriers? Why Jews or furriers rather than such and such a Jew or such and such a furrier?” His answer: “Because she had in her a predisposition toward anti-Semitism” (Sartre 1970: 11–12). Sartre’s work goes on to explore the “predisposition” towards prejudice as it derives from environment; here, the anti-Semitic beliefs circulating in Europe prior to World War II. Exploring how children learn social biases, anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld offers another explanation to Sartre’s question, “why did she choose to hate Jews rather than furriers?”: “The answer evidently involves the realization that the intuitive object of a prejudice is more likely to be a kind of thing rather than a property of that thing” (Hirschfeld 1988: 628). Surprisingly, Hirschfeld’s answer points to noncontextual, linguistic logic: we are more likely to assign (here, negative) value to things (e.g. people) rather than their properties (in this case, occupation). Race and ethnicity, he notes, are “psychologically privileged” insofar as they are seen to be “inalienable aspects of a person’s being” (Hirschfeld 1988: 628). This is not to affirm the often-repeated truism, “Stereotyping is just human nature.” Rather, it is to say that forming stereotypical belief reflects not only historical context, but structures of language and cognition.

This is also distinct from positing that human beings are innately racist, a truism that often allows people to throw up their hands on racial issues as if there is nothing that can be done. Nevertheless, classifying people into distinct groups and assigning these groups value can be seen as a function of cognition. The volume of academic studies exploring how young children apprehend social categories like race and ethnicity speaks to the “universal” processes of categorization as a means of understanding the world. But I would suggest that those processes also reveal the faulty reasoning underlying racial stereotyping among adults. Studies in the racial perceptions of children confirm psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark’s broadest 1939 hypothesis that between the ages of three and four years, children ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Reclaiming the Political Project of Asian American Studies
• Part One Shifting Paradigms
• Part Two War, Colonization, and U.S. Imperialism
• Part Three Globalization, Global Restructuring, and the Question of National Belongings
• Part Four Representations Within and Across Nations
• Part Five Social Change and Political Participation
• Index