Forging Asian American identity: Race, culture, and the Asian American movement, 1968--1975.

Abstract

This dissertation is a cultural and political history of the emergence of Asian American identity during the late 1960s and early 70s. In it, I trace shifting and competing paradigms by which Asian ethnic groups in the United States understood their relationship to each other, to Asia, and to the U.S. I contrast the multi-ethnic racial category of Asian American with prior modes of Asian American political organizing, including assimilationist Americanism, Asian nationalism, and leftist unionism and communism. In addition, I examine the extent to which Asian American identity arose as a response to the Black Power and anti-Vietnam War movements. The ideology of Black Power rejected the ethnic assimilation model and foregrounded race as a persistent category sustained by structural racism; confronting Black Power forced progressive Asian Americans to examine their own position as a racialized people. Opposition to the Vietnam War heightened Asian Americans' awareness that anti-Asian racism in the U.S. was an extension of U.S. imperialism in Asia and provided both the motivation and means for building a multi-ethnic movement and identity. The ideologies of Black Power and opposition to the war did not create Asian American identity de novo, but rather the Asian American movement adapted them to provide a coherent framework within which to organize Asian American identity. Methodologically, I investigate various conceptualizations of racial, ethnic, and national identity by examining the Japanese American Citizens League's assimilationist culture of performing Americanism during the 1930s, the liberalism of S. I. Hayakawa's general linguistics in the 1940s, and cultural productions of the Asian American movement, including plays by Frank Chin and Melvyn Escueta, poetry, journalism, and the music of A Grain of Sand from the 1960s and early 70s. I conclude that Asian American culture as articulated by the Asian American movement did not seek to eliminate ethnic distinctions, but instead built Asian American identity as a multi-ethnic racial category unified by opposition to both domestic racism and U.S. imperialism.