On Loss: Anticipating a Future for Asian American Studies

Evelyn Hu-DeHart notes that despite the "fits and starts" from the late 1960s onward, ethnic studies programs are "definitely here to stay" because they have been "increasingly institutionalized" (696). Although she distances herself from the idea that institutional "trade-offs" are inherently necessary for university-wide "legitimacy," Hu-DeHart's contention that Asian American Studies (and ethnic studies in general) programs and departments "were insurgent programs with a subversive agenda from the outset" belies a central tension present from the early rumblings of the Asian American Studies movement: the often antagonistic relationship between critiques of the American racial order and the pedagogical mission of the university (700, 702; Wei 138). In the same vein, Wei's The Asian American Movement tells the story of the growth of Asian American Studies while emphasizing the need for "clear lines of authority" within the movement/departments so that "academic legitimacy" could be realized (146, 147). Over the course of his narrative, we witness, among other things, the takeover of the University of California-Berkeley's Asian American Studies program, a "coup" which many "considered ... illegal," by a group of academics seeking to "regularize the decision-making process" and "educate" the university on why Asian American studies was important for the school (147). Of course, this coup also banished the "insurgent" and "subversive" elements involved in the program's administration (the Wei Min She and I Wor Kuen, two anti-imperialist organizations) because they promoted an "anarchic system in which decisions ... were made in meetings attended by fifty to a hundred people," making "administrative paralysis inevitable" (146). (1) Which is to say: Asian American Studies only survives, at all moments, as a streamlined institutional structure which is obligated to exclude the more antagonistic elements of action/thought in order to "improve their chances of approval" and justify their existence (147). Certainly, the Berkeley situation is a formative example of how "loss," created by management decisions which determine who may and may not participate, constitutes the institutionalization of Asian American Studies--a reification that is a "voicing of racial consciousness" (Lowe 39). Yet this voicing is intentionally incomplete. On an individuated level, the Asian American subject is also characterized by a racialized loss or lack: of citizenship rights, legal protections, economic opportunities, and an unfettered "self." By looking at the compromises demanded by the forces of institutionalization alongside the losses which make up the subject (via emplacement in a hierarchy), we can more readily view the shape of the bind which Asian Americanist scholarship, and ethnic studies scholarship more generally, faces: it is obligated (and relegated) to work within the very racial system that produces inequality. At the same time, Asian American Studies' projects of recovery and identity do not attempt to fundamentally alter this systemic hitch as a main objective. (2) The primary purpose of this essay is to examine how Asian American Studies can more effectively inhabit this space of negation and double-determinedness by exploring how negotiating this space may help to develop the means to review the conditions which demand strategic exclusions from discussions concerning the future of the field. While claiming a self-generating, vital cultural/racial "agency" may be a symptom of the ever-lessening (financial and epistemological) security which comes with institutionalization, the reassessment of current thought and methods in Asian American Studies allows us to "question foundations" in order to "think a freedom" rather than inhabiting a space where racializations are loosened, concessions granted, grievances addressed, or institutionalization allowed (Nancy 3). As opposed to John M. Liu's characterization of Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies as fields which aim to "establish a more equitable social order" by "remold[ing] racial differences into an affirmation of life rather than being a stamp of oppression," I will analyze why Asian Americanist works tend to reclaim subjection in varying guises to generate theoretical equality (281). …