It is tempting to simply frame Asian American history as a chronology of immigration laws and their effects on the volume and composition of Asian immigrants. Specific Asian ethnic groups could be examined in a serial fashion with the Immigration Act of 1965 constituting the key legislative reform which neatly periodizes Asian American history into two broad eras. In the pre-1965 period, distinct groups (principally Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, and South Asians) were subjected to exclusionary laws which dramatically affected their location in the labor market, their political rights, and their prospects for the formation of stable communities. The post-1965 period, by contrast, is characterized by the lifting of prior restrictions and the dramatic influx of new Asian immigrants coming as refugees (Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian), as relatives under “family reunification,” and as professionals seeking better economic opportunities. Such diversity increasingly renders problematic any notion of a shared Asian American experience in the broader economy, polity, and culture.

The above framework and presentation is not “wrong,” but it elides a number of compelling themes and issues: ones which speak directly to how we relate specific “ethnic” histories to the larger American historical narrative; how we integrate concepts of class and gender in these histories; and how we respond to the growing transnational character of immigrant communities.

A Shifting Context

For over a decade, I have taught an introductory Asian American history course, with an enrollment of about 250 students, at the University of California at Berkeley. Every year it has become an increasingly difficult course to teach. Part of the problem stems from the shifting demographic composition of the students who take the class. When I started in the early-1980s, the class was overwhelmingly made up of freshman students, principally majoring in science, engineering, and math. Now all class levels are evenly represented and more humanities and social science majors are enrolled. This distribution has made it difficult to know where to “pitch” the class when students clearly display different, and uneven, levels of reading, writing, and analytic skills.

The diversity of Asian ethnic groups which the students represent has grown and correspondingly influenced the themes and issues presented. Initially the class was predominately composed of American-born Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipinos. Now the clear majority are foreign-born with South Asian and Southeast Asian students comprising a growing presence. This has shifted the interest of students from the pre-1965 to the post-1965 period, and focused attention on Asian ethnic groups which have been traditionally marginalized in Asian American Studies.

The relationship of the course to the broader curriculum of the university has changed over time, and with it my sense of what the course was about. Initially the course satisfied the university’s general requirement in American history. Meeting the guidelines of this requirement helped to structure the themes for the course. My syllabus reflected an attempt to situate Asian American history within the broader context of U.S. history. My topics and the periodization I deployed—the transformation of the West, the Great Depression, World War II—conveyed the contours of American history, and examined how large-scale economic, political, and cultural transformations affected Asian American immigration and community formation.

The American history requirement was subsequently revised, abolished in fact since and most students entering as freshman after 1983 could fulfill the requirement through high school courses. Freed from specifically addressing the requirement, I began to focus more on how Asian American individuals and collectivities responded to the conditions of their existence and how they challenged and coped with the dominant social order. This was a self-conscious reaction to how I had previously structured the course. I realized that I had focused almost exclusively on macro-level transformations and their impact on Asian Americans. The top-down framework emphasized what happened to Asian Americans, not how Asian Americans organized their lives and lived in dynamic engagement with the broader economy, polity, and culture. This change, however, did not involve as dramatic a break with my prior course outline as it would suggest. The extremely poor sense of history which undergraduate students possess still necessitates my describing broad periods in American history at length prior to locating how Asians have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped, this history.

The passage of Berkeley’s American Cultures breadth requirement provoked another “identity crisis” for the course, and with it a chance to rethink its focus. The requirement, which is fulfilled by taking an approved course on comparative race and ethnicity in the U.S., was passed by the Academic Senate in 1989 and took effect with the entering class of 1991. The courses are meant to be “integrative and comparative” in nature, and need to take “substantial account” of at least three of the following designated groups: “African Americans, indigenous peoples of the United States, Asian Americans, Chicano/Latino Americans, and European Americans.”

My course would not fulfill the requirement as stated, nor was it my intention to substantively transform the class to meet it. What the requirement did was make me think about how to integrate the experiences of other groups—particularly other racialized minorities—into the history of Asians in the United States. I realized that my presentation had been framed solely as a history of white/Asian encounters, omitting other relationships. Locating the experiences of other groups, in relation to the historical experiences of Asian Americans, allowed me to sharpen the current themes I utilize in the course.

Challenging Paradigms

My main intent in the course now is to situate the experience of Asian Americans within the broader historical context of race in the United States. I start out by challenging three prevailing paradigmatic assumptions which have severely limited an examination and interrogation of the history of Asian Americans. The first is the manner in which race relations in the United States are reduced to relations between “blacks and whites.” Historical narratives of racialized minorities in the United States are consequently cast in the shadows of the black/white encounter. Historian Gary Okihiro compellingly poses the question “Is Yellow Black or White?” (1). Implicit in this construction, Okihiro argues, is a bipolar perspective which locates Asians, depending on the historical period in question, to one side or the other of the racial equation. Tomás Almaguer, in his study of race in nineteenth-century California, breaks from the dominant mode of biracial theorizing by illustrating how Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese are racialized and positioned in relation to one another by the dominant Anglo elite (2). Drawing on this work, I argue that the Asian American historical experience is essential to understanding the racial dynamics which unfolded in the West.

My intent in critiquing the bipolar model of race is not to wholly decenter black/white relations. Certainly racial slavery inordinately shaped the subsequent history of U.S. race relations (as did the genocidal experiences of Native Americans). Rather, my intent is to question whether all racisms are alike in their origins and consequences. Etienne Balibar, in a discussion of racism and nationalism, makes a distinction between “an internal racism (directed against a population regarded as a ‘minority’ within the national space) and an external racism (considered as an extreme form of xenophobia)” (3). The hostilities directed against Asians, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and resulting in a series of exclusionary measures, can be read as an expression of the latter form of racism, one which is inextricably bound up with the creation, and definition, of the American West.

A second paradigmatic assumption I challenge is the conflation of race and culture. Groups we consider a “race” such as Asian Americans are made of distinct ethnic cultures which are by no means “internally” homogeneous. I take seriously historian David Hollinger’s claim that we have reified, to a great extent, what he terms the American ethno-racial pentagon (4). African American, Latina/o, Native American, Asian Americans, and European American are now seen as the five basic demographic blocs we treat as the subjects of multiculturalism. The problem is that these groups do not represent distinct and mutually exclusive “cultures.” Thus we need to present critically what we mean by “race” and “culture” and the manner in which we articulate the connection between the two.

Related to this is the manner in which “culture” is deployed, particularly in the social science literature, to explain the historical experiences and sensibilities of Asian Americans. Depending on the historical period in question, cultural arguments are used as proof that Asians are a distinct and inassimilable race, or to argue that a strong compatibility between Asian culture and a presumed white, middle-class “American culture” accounts for Asian American mobility and success. Such approaches are both reductionist and determinist, and fail to identity the range of political, economic, and social factors which help us “locate” Asian Americans in particular historical moments.

The third dominant conception which I critique is that of assimilation. A central race relations paradigm, it has influenced the popular discourse of immigrant incorporation. Many share in the belief that different racial/ethnic groups over time would lose their cultural distinctiveness, that structural boundaries would recede, and groups would cease to be segregated in various institutional arenas. The assimilationist framework has been the dominant paradigm in interpreting the historical experiences of Asian Americans. But the manner in which it was deployed, and the “political” implications of it, has varied dramatically. At the turn of the century, it was used as a justification for Asian exclusion; the rationale being that Asians were unassimilable and a significant racial threat to the white population on the West Coast (5). In the 1950s, assimilation was used as a gauge by which to measure the degree of “separateness” of Chinese Americans and as a plea for the shedding of “difference” (6). In the late 1960s, in the midst of ghetto rebellions and the emergence of Asian American consciousness, the assimilationist paradigm was used to illustrate the successful integration of Japanese Americans into the mainstream of American life (7).

There are significant problems with this perspective. Among other things, the assimilationist perspective has assumed a zero-sum relationship between assimilation and the retention of ethnicity. To become more “Americanized,” therefore, meant that one was less “Asian.” By contrast, recent scholarship on Japanese Americans has suggested that they have been able to maintain high levels of ethnic consciousness and ethnic community involvement, while simultaneously becoming structurally assimilated into the dominant society (8).

Another challenge to the assimilationist framework is the fact that the new wave of post-1965 Asian immigrants have had an unprecedented opportunity to develop “private cultures” within the broader American culture. In sharp contrast to the pre-1965 immigrants, they have been able to maintain more comprehensive links with their respective homelands. The dramatic growth of Asian American “majorities” in several urban and suburban settings also serves to challenge the easy incorporation of Asians into the “mainstream” of American life. In Monterey Park, California, for example, where Asians comprise over 60 percent of the city’s population, it is not clear who is assimilating into what.

I raise these issues in class to interrogate the assimilationist paradigm and to suggest its limits in comprehending and explaining the historical and contemporary experiences of Asian Americans. Building on this critique, I argue that an alternative perspective would have to account for distinct trajectories of incorporation, exclusion, and social/cultural autonomy, and not take assimilation as an inevitable outcome or desirable goal.

The Racialization of Asian Americans

I currently organize my course around the theory of racial formation (9). By racial formation, I mean the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed, a process in which race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation. Utilizing this paradigm, I look at the shifting construction of Asian Americans and how they have been racialized over time. The class explores how distinct Asian ethnic groups entered this country, where they ended up in the labor market, how they were viewed in popular culture, and how they were treated by legal and political institutions. It simultaneously looks at how Asian Americans viewed themselves, responded to the situations they encountered, and in so doing, challenged and transformed their structural location and their representations.

At the outset of the course, I present a number of related premises. First, I argue that the history of the United States is truly a multiracial, multicultural one—a history which has been shaped by a complex pattern of conflict and cooperation between, and within, groups. Unfortunately, most historical narratives have tended to marginalize non-white, non-European groups and/or minimize the dynamic manner in which we are all shaped by the prevailing pattern of social relations. Second, I note that the Asian American “experience” is neither a single nor a uniform one. Asian Americans are neither a homogeneous nor a monolithic group, and significant differences exist between, and among, different Asian ethnic groups. Third, I stress that the history of Asian Americans is one which reveals intriguing aspects of the broader patterns of race, class, and gender in the United States. Throughout the course, I try to highlight the meaning of these axes of stratification and difference in the Asian American experience.

Bringing Class and Gender Back In

Elizabeth Higginbotham has noted that scholars employ the concepts of race, gender, and class only when specifically looking at groups which are disadvantaged with regards to these axes of stratification: “Race only comes up when we talk about African American and other people of color, gender only comes up when we talk about women, and class only comes up when we talk about the poor and working class” (10). Analyses which grapple with more than one variable frequently reveal a crisis of imagination. Much of the race/class debate for example, inspired by the work of William Julius Wilson, suffers from the imposition of rigid categories and analyses which degenerate into dogmatic assertions of the primacy of one category over the other.

The experience of Asian Americans is not simply a “racial” one, but one which is structured by class divisions and inequalities. The anti-Chinese movement of the nineteenth century, for example, is inextricably bound to the intense conflict of the period between capital and labor (11). Contemporary Korean-African American conflict in Los Angeles and other urban settings cannot be neatly framed in either purely class or racial terms, but is over-determined by an ensemble of factors involving the ghetto economy, patterns of small entrepreneurship, access to resources, and racial ideology in the United States and South Korea (12). An appreciation of class dynamics is crucial to understanding the nature of race and racism. While racial discrimination in a number of institutional arenas continue to plague Asian Americans, its effects vary widely by class strata (13). The problems encountered by a rich entrepreneur from Hong Kong and a recently arrived Hmong refugee are obviously distinct. The sites and types of discriminatory acts each is likely to encounter, and the range of available responses to them, differ by class location.

With respect to gender, narratives focusing on the initial wave of Asian immigrants have tended to marginalize the significance of gender relations. While partially attributable to the predominantly male composition of the initial wave of Asian immigration, it also reflects a masculinist reading of Asian American history (14). An alternative account can be constructed which “recenters” gender. A survey of immigration laws and the practices surrounding their enforcement reveal the gender biases of exclusionary legislation. The Page Law of 1875 which forbade the entry of prostitutes, for example, was selectively enforced to reduce the influx of Asian women. Under the 1922 Cable Act, American-born Asian women forfeited their U.S. citizenship if they married Asian men “ineligible for citizenship” (15). The possibilities for economic mobility among early Asian immigrants was entirely dependent on the presence, and labor, of women who could help establish and maintain a small enterprise or family farm (16). And in the realm of ideology, the popular images of Asian gendered subjects reveal interesting dimensions about sexuality and race (17).

A useful corrective to rigid “categorization” is scholarship which emphasizes the “intersectionality” of race, gender, and class. Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s work on the historical and contemporary racialization of domestic and service work, for example, reveals that race is gendered and gender is racialized (18). Historically, and in contemporary life, any clear demarcation of specific forms of oppression and difference is constantly being disrupted. That said, it remains extremely difficult to weave a coherent historical narrative integrating race, class, and gender. I often find myself isolating one category as the subject for particular scrutiny (e.g., the phenomenon of Japanese “picture brides”) and failing to provide a way of integrating the various categories into a satisfying account.

Panethnicity and Transnational Consciousness

I currently organize the concluding part of the class around two themes. One is the nature of contemporary panethnic consciousness and organization among Asian Americans (19). It is indeed ironic that the term Asian Americans came into vogue, in the late-1960s, at precisely the moment when new Asian groups were entering the U.S. who would render the term problematic. Ethnicity, class, nativity, and generational differences have manifested themselves in distinct political agendas. Many foreign-born Asians desperately seek programs such as English-acquisition and job-training programs which can ease their transition into the mainstream of American life. By contrast, more “established” and resource-rich groups are less concerned with basic “survival issues” and instead emphasize mobility ones such as the “glass ceiling” in professional employment. Nonetheless, issues such as redistricting and reapportionment, Asian American admissions in higher education, and anti-Asian violence cut across different Asian American ethnic groups and offer the potential for panethnic organization and consciousness. What I suggest is that panethnicity is situationally defined, strategically deployed for political ends, and subject to competing influences. As such, the future viability of the term Asian American remains open.

The second concluding theme concerns the character of new Asian immigrant experiences and the conceptual frames we adopt to understand them. Trans-Pacific air travel is now quick and relatively affordable, making the borders and boundaries which separate Asia and the mainland U.S. more fluid. New Asian American immigrants frequently go back-and-forth to meet family obligations, vacation, or allow children a periodic immersion into their respective language and culture. Upper-class professionals who continually shuttle between residences and economic activities in Asia, Canada, and the United States are referred to in Chinese as “trapeze artists” or “astronauts.” These experiences pose an intriguing question to our presentation of Asian American history: How do we describe and represent the “new” Asian American immigrants in an era characterized by the increasing transnational flow and circulation of capital, labor, culture, and ideas?

One point of departure is to examine how capitalist restructuring and political transformations in the United States and Asia have contributed to a “dual stream” of Asian immigration—a professional and managerial stratum along with semi-skilled and unskilled labor (20). Another is to examine how the new Asian immigrants retain comprehensive links to the homeland through business transactions, the flow of cultural commodities (e.g., videotapes, CDs), remittances, and frequent trips back “home.” I encourage comparative analysis between these new immigrants and the waves of immigrants who came prior to 1965. The point is to assess the impact of transnationalism on economic activities, cultural flows, and group/individual identity—and, in so doing, speculate on the future fate of Asian American communities.

What these emergent themes suggest is that the teaching of Asian American history is always unfinished. The dramatic changes in Asian America that I have confronted, and attempted to integrate into the teaching of this introductory course, have made this perfectly clear.

Endnotes

1. Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1994), chapter 2.

2. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

3. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 38-9.

4. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

5. See Paul Takagi, “The Myth of ‘Assimilation in American Life,’” Amerasia Journal 2 (1973): 149-58.

6. Rose Hum Lee, The Chinese in the United States of America (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960).

7. Harry H.L. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

8. Stephen S. Fugita and David J. O’Brien, Japanese American Ethnicity: The Persistence of Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991),

9. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

10. Elizabeth Higginbotham, “Sociology and the Multicultural Curriculum: The Challenges of the 1990s and Beyond,” Race, Sex, and Class 1 (Fall 1993): 14.

11. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).

12. Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

13. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s (Washington, D.C., February 1992).

14. Sylvia Yanagisako, “Transforming Orientalism: Gender, Nationality, and Class in Asian American Studies” in Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, eds., Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1994).

15. Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991).

16. Edna Bonacich and John Modell, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1981).

17. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

18. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) and “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (Autumn 1992).

19. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

20. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, eds., The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

Michael Omi is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is co-author (with Howard Winant) of Racial Formation in the United States (2d. ed., 1994). In 1990, he was the recipient of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award.