Introduction to Asian American Studies: Race and War
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While reading Partitioning the Pacific, I found it interesting how the use of racial concerns to justify the militarization of Hawaii evolved over time. In 1893, Mahan openly called for the military possession of Hawaii by appealing to racial fears of “Chinese barbarism” along with Japanese “overrunning and assimilation” into American society. The Oriental is cast as the enemy other while the United States must resist their “wave of barbaric invasion” to preserve the nation’s racial purity. This extensive history of racism and violence is totally erased by modern characterizations of Hawaii as a multicultural “racial paradise.” As a result, the militarization of Hawaii during the American quest for global hegemony is seen as being essentially harmless or even beneficial to the island’s residents, thus justifying further colonization and militarization.
I found this example of erasing racial histories to closely parallel our class discussion of the shapeshifting racism in America over time. Whereas before people could openly espouse their racist beliefs that were based purely off of physical characteristics, during the 19th century, there was a shift to blaming inherent cultural differences between races. This also amounts to an erasing of the racism that still pervades America, and cultural differences are still used today to justify racist public policy changes such as the dismantling of affirmative action.
I thought both readings for this week had interesting ways of relating to the concept of movement and immobility. Fanon observes how colonized intellectuals clung to cultural artifacts from ancient civilizations in order to counter characterizations of non-white cultures as barbaric and shrouded in darkness. Praising the greatness of ancient African cultures was a way for them to reclaim their pride and dignity, but in the end, led these intellectuals to a “dead end” (Fanon, 157). This is because tokens from the past, in the form of “sterile cliches” discovered through a “painful, forced search” that “seems but a banal quest for the exotic” would never be enough to galvanize the people and combat colonialism (Fanon, 158). The colonizer does not need to be afraid of fossilized tokens; fossils are only the remains of something that has died long ago. Rather, Fanon argues that culture can only become a real threat when it is living and dynamic, responding to and being built up by people’s daily experiences.
Just as colonization attempts to fossilize and immobilize the development of culture, militarism and carceral policies in Hawai’i and other Pacific islands attempts to control the movements of local people. There is an oppositional relationship between “partitioning” and “movement,” because the effect of partitions is to restrict movement. As a result, many of the forms of resistance in Hawai’i that Dr. L describes include some aspect of flow and connectedness, which combat the immobility and isolation that partitions attempt to impose. The ocean and the environment themselves are also forces of movement and dynamism that shape resistance and opposition on the islands. This is visible both physically, in the wearing down of constructed fences, and symbolically, as the “‘multidirectional flows of oceanic space’ give form and shape to the ‘archipelagraphy’ produced by territorial struggles” (20). The ideas from both these readings also tie in with what we talked about briefly in the beginning of class last week: the word “movement” as it’s used to describe both social and physical movement, especially in relation to the movement of Cambodian refugees.
I found this week’s readings particularly interesting because of the way that they related several themes in the course together. I enjoyed reading Dr. L’s Partitioning the Pacific, especially how it talked about the carceral continuum. I found it interesting to think of Hawaii positioned as the axis for US possession of the Pacific. In class, we’ve talked a lot about how the Western colonial state needs a ‘perpetual enemy’ and someone to constantly enact violence on, but I think that this introduction helped me realize some of the strategy and machinations that actually make that possible. I was upset about the conscious deliberation behind the US targeting Hawaii as the base or center of their expansion, purely because it was useful – it upset me that the humanity of the indigenous people was completely ignored.
I was a little confused about the description of partitions, specifically the discussion of roads and highways as partitions. I understand how prisons and borders are a large part of the carceral continuum and create a militarized colonialism, but I was unsure about the implications of including ‘mundane forms of partitions’ in this (p. 5) – is this something that is unique to Hawaii? Is it the existence of roads/highways/ports/parking lots that is problematic, or the choice of where to put them and the identity of who controls them? If it is their existence, then what is the alternative?
I also made some valuable connections while reading the chapter from Fanon. His statement on page 146 that “We now know that in the first phase of the national struggle colonialism attempts to defuse nationalist demands by manipulating economic doctrine.” This is another way of communicating neoliberalism – Fanon is describing the use of market capital and economic power to try and reinforce the colonial hegemony of capitalists.
In both Dr. L’s manuscript and Fanon’s “On National Culture,” I was interested in the question of methodology. Dr. L’s piece engages in scholar-activist research that acknowledges the experience of Wai’nae’s inhabitants and her own positionality as sources of knowledge production that are equal in legitimacy and power to archival and official documents. Fanon’s text is concerned with the making of a national culture for colonized/previously colonized countries. In the last section of “On National Culture” (Mutual foundations for national culture and liberation struggles), Fanon establishes a connection between the formation of culture and the struggle of the colonized against their colonizers. He argues that national culture emerges precisely from the collective struggle for national liberation by its people because the shared expectations and aspirations that are the basis of liberation movements will subsequently serve as the basis for national culture. In this way, national culture will actually derive from the people themselves rather than as a reproduction or continuation of the colonizer’s rhetoric and values. In the same way that Fanon recognizes that the production of culture is not static or solely situated in history, but rather that struggle is an active site of culture-making, Dr. L’s text similarly underscores that knowledge-making in regards to Wai’nae and Hawai’i at large is an ongoing process that is in part realized through engagement in the present material realities of the people who live there. I am interested in knowing more about how this method of conducting research and the approach of “accompaniment” makes possible a means of mutual learning/teaching in which coalition-building and solidarity are already implicit.
Reading Partitioning the Pacific in juxtaposition with On National Culture was interesting, especially in that the former touches on Fanon’s On Violence chapter as well as the latter in the section ‘The Military in Hawai’i’. Dr. L describes that the “combination of volatility and poverty contributes a warlike quality to daily life in Wai’anae”, which implicates the ever present atmospheric violence in the lives of those in Wai’anae. However, “grassroots communities in Wai’anae articulate opposing environmental paradigms based on their own Oceanic analytics”, harkening back to Fanon’s statement that “the existence of a nation is not proven by culture, but in the people’s struggle against the forces of occupation”. Though in this particular case the communities are not fighting for their culture per se but rather the environment (although perhaps the case could me made between the stronger connection between culture and the environment in this case, as the latter “itself holds incredible power” in terms of geospatial significance to a certain culture), a collective effort along with interconnected consciousness regarding the issue similarly exists. The critique on ‘allyship’ that we read about a few classes ago also comes to mind with Dr. L’s statement that “this book broadly aims to pave openings for solidarity between indigenous communities, people of color, and poor people confronting militarized violence”.
Dr. Laurel Mei Singh’s book introduction section titled “Scholar-activist research” had a part that particularly resonated with me in which she talked about her position as both an insider and an outsider in the community she was conducting research on. She spoke about how her cultural understanding of guest protocol, personal experiences, and political investment in Hawai’i’s people and environment positioned her as a kind of insider who was welcomed warmly into households and also someone community members could openly share stories with. Yet Dr. Mei Singh’s limited understanding of Wai’anae social protocol as well as US continental pronunciation and grammar marked her as a clear outsider. In this section, she argues that this dual-identity gave her both the ability to access rich conversation and knowledge as well as maintain critical distance to formulate ideas regarding race, indigeneity, class, and justice. This section made me ponder a conversation I had with a family member earlier this year who was trying to convince me not to study African American studies as my concentration. As an Asian American, he argued that not only would I never be able to fully understand the complexities of African American studies, but also that if I hope to pursue a career in African American studies, that I would not be taken seriously because of my identity as an Asian American. However, seeing the impact that Grace Lee Boggs was able to have in her predominantly African American community and Dr. Mei Singh’s ability to use her outsider status to better her research makes me rethink the conversation my brother and I had, asking once again: realistically, what kind of impact can I have in the African American scholarly circle and political movement as an Asian American women? How does the Asian-American to African American relationship compare to other affinity-based relationships we have seen in this class?
On an entirely separate note, while reading Fanon’s “On National Culture”, I had a moment of epiphany when I realized why the stereotypes of people I learned in America were so different than the ones I learned in Korea. In his writing, Fanon argues that colonialism uses strategic tactics to “inculcate the notion that the precolonial history of the… population has been steeped in barbarity” and shapes the group’s culture with that notion. Knowing this, the stereotypes of blacks as violent criminals, Native Americans as dirty thieves, and even the “model minority” of Asians as terrible drivers make a lot more sense especially in comparison to the stereotypes I heard in Korea. In Korea and for my Korean family members, there are no “Asian” stereotypes, the continent is not seen as one unit. There are separate stereotypes for each country within Asia. Fanon’s work helps make sense of how in Asian countries, there are different stereotypes for each Asian country and how in the United States there are different stereotypes for each country white people are from (Canada-nice and afraid of the dark, German and Russian-heaving drinkers, etc.) and how those same categorizations are not present in other countries.
I am curious about the ways that the Fanon essay further informs the idea of “accompaniment” in Dr. L’s book introduction. Accompaniment as a methodology requires recognizing shared stakes and collective responsibility in order to bridge the insider/outsider gap of researcher/subject. The way Dr. L puts it, accompaniment is “modeling the world we hope to live in together” (25). Fanon, then, writes that the colonized intellectual is not responsible to his national culture, but rather to his nation. He says, “One cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people’s struggle for liberation.” In this, he claims that national culture can be forged out of revolutionary struggle, and he calls the liberation of the nation “the tangible matrix from which culture can grow” (168). With Fanon’s logic, researchers practicing methods of “accompaniment” to study places of liberatory resistance can also become active participants in this forging of culture — the researcher becomes a part of the “tangible matrix,” sharing a stake in the new world being created. Culture, like many ideological concepts we’ve theorized in this class, is constantly in flux and highly dependent on historical systems and processes. I wonder more about the role of the researcher, and, when anthropologists/ethnographers study “national cultures,” should we consider their own impact on the cultures they study, and their responsibilities to participate in this “tangible matrix from which culture can grow”?
Two main ideas stuck out in my mind after reading Dr. L.’s introduction: the environmental impacts of militarization, and the idea that “people in highly segregated places define themselves based on their distance from poverty” (p.22). Although I was not surprised to read about the discrepancies between peoples’ perceptions of the Wai’anae area and the vast poverty and environmental deterioration found there, I was still saddened by this, but also felt more appreciative of this ethnographic work, especially in light of last week’s discussion around ethnography “versus” statistics and data. I also liked the term “security infrastructure,” used to describe the system of fences and divisions created to enforce militarization, and the idea that militarization is “perpetually incomplete.” I felt that these ideas are somewhat of the culmination of several concepts we’ve discussed in class, and that they help to begin to expose the weaknesses in the justification and maintenance of colonialism and militarization.
I had a few observations and questions while reading the manuscript this week. First, I wonder if there are other examples around the world of the partitioning that has happened in Hawaii. The situation in Hawaii seems to have been born out of martial law and the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, and so I can only imagine that other parts of the world have experienced similar phenomena, of indigenous peoples being contained or sectioned off arbitrarily in the name of safety and order. Perhaps it doesn’t directly relate to Hawaii, but I’d be curious to learn about the parallels to other parts of the world in order to learn more about Hawaii’s particular situation.
Second, I wanted to touch upon this idea of integration into an oppressive or controlling environment, as suggested on page 8 when “one interlocuter described the US military as “DNA,” woven into the lives and livelihoods of Hawaiians as well as Hawaii itself.” From the tone of the few interviews dicussed, there is a mixture of resignation and frustration, and I wonder why there doesn’t seem to be more anger instead. Is it due to the amount of time that has passed (and thus generational gaps between those who experienced the initial partitioning vs. those who inherited it as their way of life) or cultural differences/priorities between generations, or something else?
I love the ideas explored in Dr. L’s manuscript on “promoting a vision of conservation premised on relationality rather than partition.” The theory of life of the Hawaiians contrasts so directly with the “American way.” America has had such a long history of warfare, violence and incarceration—of defining the enemy other and building up walls to divide them. From segregation to internment to Trump and his supporters’ demands for a wall, American policy has always been about fighting and separating the population, our own unity and sense of American identity drawn from the exclusion of another group. By defining the enemy other, we come up with our own identity. But these definitions and theories of identity differ so greatly with this sense of relationality in Hawaii that the fences do not “impose unilateral hegemony… rather, Hawaiian paradigms premised on human-environment interconnectivity persist and thrive.” This provides a sense of hope, that the people who may suffer from American militarization and desire to create perpetual enemies do have their own agency, manifesting in activism and organizing.
Dr. L’s manuscript also really made me consider the interactions between the environment and people in a way I never did before. In a way, the confinement of nature through manmade fences directly impacts the lives of people and vice versa.