Introduction to Asian American Studies: Race and War
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Reading Reflection
The Crucible of War: The Spanish American War, and the Ngai and Gilmore readings for this class have complicated that question that Dr. L asked in the preceding class: What is War? The film continually displays War as a tool the government could use to unite the nation, showing how the plethora of divisions within the country were overshadowed by the support for the war. In fact, the young people in the nation needed no encouragement to volunteer for the draft, as they were all united in the excitement to serve in the war. However, the Ngai and Gilmore complicate this notion of War as a uniting mechanism. Logic would dictate that a war in which A is fighting B, A would be united the fight against A, and B would be united in the fight against B. However, Ngai and Gilmore highlight how this argument become complicate this logic by points out how the identity lines between A and B are not as straightforward as the logical argument dictates. This is seen by Japanese Americans in World War II (Ngai Reading) where they fit into both categories of American and Japanese, Citizen and Alien. This is also seen by African Americans in the United States in the War against Crime where they are the both the American citizens the police officers are hired to protect, and the group most targeted and sought out by those officers. Because of the prevalence of these groups that do not fall into a singular identity, A or B, we see War causing divisions within American society rather than unifying it, as the film argued.
In these readings and the movie, there were a lot of common themes that were extended from the previous readings. In particular, there is an idea of white superiority and paternalism that characterized the US government’s interactions with non-white ethnic groups. One incredibly revealing quote in the Ngai reading was that the “WRA seemed to believe that Japanese Americans would cooperate with, if not welcome, their reformation, unaware of its essentially coercive character. ” Somehow the American government truly believed that Japanese-Americans would gladly relocate themselves to internment camps. This blatant lack of self awareness is reminiscent of Rafael’s description of the Philippine-American war in which Filipinos were supposedly slaughtered with kindness in addition to the period of benevolent assimilation that followed. Officers in the US army simply could not understand why the Filipinos were rebelling against white cultural hegemony. Similarly, The Crucible of Empire talks about the Teller Amendment’s eventual replacement with the Platt Amendment that reneged on the previous agreement to give Cubans their full independence after the Spanish-American war. Instead, the US government retained its control over Cuba despite the fact that the war was waged to free Cuba from foreign influence in the first place. In each of these cases, the imperialist view of the United States is deeply rooted in the ideas of white superiority and paternalism. White is accepted as the norm while other cultures and ethnicities are viewed as deviant and pathological. Non-white ethnic groups are seen as unfit to govern themselves and require the presence of the United States to step in and manage their affairs for them.
In both the Gilmore and Ngai reading, as well as the documentary the Crucible of the Empire, the forced spatial segregation of people in the name of war and “well-being” of the American people was the most striking link that threaded the three narratives. The underlaying assumption that led this to become a possibility was the constant subhuman treatment of the wronged people, especially in the context of war. Among the readings, Gilmore was particularly hard to read – the gruesome details of how millions of people had (or rather, are in a different form) subjugated to constant fear from violent and inhumane death. The fact that “both press and posse elites encouraged ‘everybody-white’ to get in on the fun” highlights just how ubiquitous it was to consider anybody who was not white to be subhuman, inherently worth less and dispensable. This also shows in the Ngai reading, where she talks about the Japanese internment and how one justification for such spatial segregation as “‘planned communities’ and ‘Americanizing projects’ that would speed the assimilation of Japanese Americans through democratic self-government, schooling, work, and other rehabilitative activities”, which she states is a view that sees Japanese Americans as “racial children in need of democratic tutelage, infantilizing them in much the same way that the government constructed Filipino colonial subjects and Native American Indians as dependent wards not yet fit for democratic citizenship”. Indeed, the documentary touches on this exact point when it talks about the U.S.’s way of viewing Filipino people. What is most ironic and perhaps shows the extreme lack of self awareness is the U.S.’s villianization of Valeriano Weyler, who forcibly reconcentrated the rural population to prevent their services from reaching the Cuban rebels. The documentary also introduces the “immunes”, those with tropical ancestry who enlisted as volunteers, to which the horrors Gilmore showed before happened.
In Chapter 5 of Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects, she contextualizes American citizenship within the period of Japanese American internment during WWII. I am particularly interested in the valorization of citizenship in relation to nationalism and the nation-state in Ngai’s critique of the historical literature addressing the processes of citizenship renunciation and restoration experienced by Japanese Americans after WWII ended. Ngai discusses the shortcomings of a “collective memory” or narrative that asserts that Japanese American renunciants were loyal to the United States and only rejected their citizenships because they were intimidated, pressured, and coerced into doing so. Though this particular framework of approaching renunciation ultimately worked to recover the U.S. citizenships of many Japanese American renunciants, I believe that Ngai challenges this narrative of valorization: “the literature expresses incredulity that any American would renunciate citizenship unless he or she was in an abnormal state of mind.” The valorization of citizenship in turn reinforces and maintains the supposed power and validity of the nation-state. In this specific case of Japanese internment, valorization of citizenship falsely assumes that Japanese Americans who were confined to internment camps were highly susceptible to either American or Japanese nationalism, which entirely obscures the individual and familial self-interests that motivated many Japanese Americans to renunciate. I think Ngai grapples with the observation that even lawyers, scholars, and texts that attempt to address the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII continue to legitimize the authority of the nation-state in their critiques.
Returning to last week’s discussion about how sexuality can serve as a basis for racism, I think that Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s text illuminates the way in which “illegal sexuality” was criminalized and differentiated through violence. Gilmore, in discussing Ida B. Wells’ analysis of how the lynching of black men was justified by accusations that they had raped white women, underscores a “persistent weakness in the hierarchy of entitlements and exclusions organizing white supremacy.” Here, I think Gilmore argues that controlling and discriminating between “legitimate sexuality” and “illegitimate sexuality” is of critical interest and anxiety to the continuation of white supremacy precisely because sexuality threatens to transgress the binaries of difference necessitated by white supremacy. The violence committed against black men in the Jim Crow era must be founded on the basis of their accused exercising of “illegitimate” sexuality at the expense of white women, because the recognition of consensual, “legitimate” sexual relations between black men and white women would expose the logic of white supremacy as unnatural and precarious.
The place of race and war in the two of the readings is obvious to me – both Crucible of the Empire and Ngai’s Chapter 5 discuss racial divisions explicitly in the context of war. The former explains events during the Spanish-American war and how US superiority enforced much of the pro-war sentiment (i.e. rescuing Evangeline Cisneros, disregarding the advice of the Filipino rebels, etc.) In this period, race and war worked in tandem as racial divisions provided an excuse for war and war exacerbated racial divisions. The latter reading talks about Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II. The same conclusion can be reached here, as Ngai talks about how disillusionment with the value of their citizenship and resentment at the exhaustive doubts of their loyalty drove many Japanese-Americans to renounce their citizenship. Racial discrimination caused this conflict and disagreement, which in turn perpetuated more discrimination.
The connections are not as immediately evident in Race, Prisons, and War because it does not talk about a time occuring during a specific ‘war’. Instead, the article touches on many instances of racism in the history of the US, notably the central role of lynching during the Jim Crow era and the stark realizations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I was completely struck by Gilmore’s discussion on how closely war and violence is tied into US history – as Gilmore says, the American agenda has always included killing someone. This relates to a discussion of race and war because, in the numerous times when no foreign enemy appeared, the American public needed to isolate a group or demographic to turn against, and it was often easiest to do this on the lines of race.
As disturbing as these readings were to me, I appreciated that they touched on the physical aspects of race and war, specifically violence, that we haven’t really talked about yet. I thought it was very insightful of Gilmore to compare modern prisons and mass incarceration/over-policing to an extension of the plantation system, and that this connection was made clearer with the focus on violence, premature death, and the destruction/torture of the human body. I also thought it was valuable to read Gilmore’s thoughts on masculinity, and how war, racism, and violence are used to assert masculine dominance, i.e. control other peoples’ bodies, or destroy their ability to live/reproduce. I think this very clearly connects to “Crucible of Empire,” and the violent war atrocities against Filipinos committed by young, male American soldiers. This all made me consider Asian-American experience in a different light, especially in the context of Japanese internment. I wonder how violence plays into the model minority myth and other forms of racism against Asian-Americans. As far as internment goes, I can see how the physical containment of one racial group relates to what Gilmore described about mass incarceration of Black-Americans. However, “premature death” doesn’t seem as threatening for Asian-Americans. Gilmore even said that being Black in America is “difficult and dangerous.” The idea of “danger,” of premature death, seems to separate the experience of Black-Americans from those of any other racial minority group. How then can we relate Asian-American experience to violence and control of bodies? Is it simply a different kind of control, perhaps described by the doctrine of Orientalism, where Asian culture and people are thought of as exotic “goods” to be consumed, as opposed to an enemy to be destroyed?
While I had read a lot about Japanese internment previously, I never really considered it in tandem with war and the rise of modern imprisonment, especially of black bodies. Gilmore discusses how “war and incarceration are supposed to bring good things to the places destroyed in the name of being saved.” The term “benevolent assimilation” is used to describe both Japanese Americans and the Filipinos, suggesting how the US thought that it was helping them with its influence, teaching them democratic ideals, like the WRA tried to do in the internment camps. Similarly, in “correctional” facilities, the US claims to be helping the people locked in cages, but all it is doing is finding a unescapable holding place for unused labor, typically black, in the system of racial capitalism. In order to justify this “torture,” the US consigns the tortured to a category of alien and otherness. It dehumanizes them so that for example, the Japanese Americans were not viewed as people but as enemies, as nothing but their ethnicity and loyalties. They were not humans who cared about their safety, their families, and their communities. This allowed the US to be unforgiving and unsympathetic when it came to the internment of Japanese Americans. Similarly, formations of racism that depict black people as inferior, immoral, and deserving of their punishments allow mass imprisonment to continue today. When capitalism and war look for reasons to justify boundaries and differences, they turn to racism.
The turn of the Twentieth century was an important historical time period in which the United States have made lasting geopolitical decisions. The decision for expansion into the Pacific via attacks against Spanish imperial rule of Cuba and the Philippines underscores how resilient white supremacy is beyond geographic and imagined borders. Throughout the Crucible of Empire there was mention of whites cognizance of the racial tensions between them and the Black-American infantry in Tampa, Cuban resistance in Santiago, and the Filipino peoples in Manila. According to the historical documentary, once Americans were able to win battles against Spain, they resulted in occupying the land for themselves, instead of letting native resistance take independence. It was said that both in Cuba and the Philippines, the native military commanders and political leaders were not privy to the debates around the treaty deciding the fate of the archipelagos, systems of governance, and most importantly, peoples. This insidious flip, from supposed aiding of native resistance forces to independence to claiming imperial colonies underscores the capitalist nature in the constructions of race. Land, production, and access to global markets become proxies for imperialism, pacific expansion, and false forms of paternalistic benevolent assimilation.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s text on the continuum of policing and surveillance to war correctly points to violence and force as reproduced phenomena that upholds racist ideologies of white supremacy and power. From slave patrols and lynch mobs to the increasing carceral state, the United States has manufactured what she calls the “military-industrial complex,” which effectively produces violence in the name of capitalist, economic, and political gain for those in positions of power. Gilmore’s historicization of the American narrative of violence underscores that the underlying structures of racist capitalism are not being overcome, but are actually being reproduced under different systematic regimes.
This week’s readings, in conjunction with the Crucible of Empire movie, seemed to indicate to me not only that the United States is constantly in a state of (racially-driven) war, but even that this state of war works to maintain the US’s national identity. Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that violence has been integral to upholding white supremacy and maintaining whiteness as the sovereign American race when she writes, “killing *somebody* has always been on the American agenda.” She lays out the processes by which the United States sanctions and reproduces violence against black people and means of violence against people of color/non-Americans in general. One of her most enlightening points is the historical connection between a rise in state violence (international war) and a rise in civilian violence (murder, crime, lynching). Both of these types of violence are forms of war, and as we see from Chapter 5 of the Ngai reading and the Crucible of Empire movie, both are deeply knit into the fabric of American identity. Ngai contextualizes the Japanese internment using the histories of citizenship, renunciation, and loyalty tests; as Annabelle noted above, the way these anxieties over citizenship are often represented by scholars reinforces the power of the U.S. nation-state over the individual anxieties, violence, and coercion (acts of internal war-making) that Japanese experienced in the US. It’s clear that through struggles to renounce and un-renounce citizenship, these racially-motivated acts of war against Japanese Americans became also inextricable from questions of national identity.
I found Ngai’s idea of the “cultural content of citizenship” very helpful, especially in the context of the concept of cultural hegemony that Tess brought up last class. Like Jacy pointed out, it was interesting that the U.S. tried to apply “benevolent assimilation” to both Filipinos and Japanese Americans. In both cases, the goal of the assimilation was supposedly to help groups of people self-govern. Instead of being a purely political project, however, assimilation inevitably becomes tied up with culture, especially in times of war. Ngai uses the example of anti-German sentiment in World War I, which led to the shutting down of German language schools and publications, and the rebranding of saurkraut as “liberty cabbage,” to illustrate how political loyalty is conflated with cultural practices during war (172). When it came to World War II, Japanese Americans were essentially asked to “prove their Americanness” in the internment camps, and through proving their cultural Americanness, to be absolved of suspicions of disloyalty (179). Ngai acknowledges that it is difficult to disentangle “political” loyalty from “cultural” nationalism; for example, Japanese cultural nationalism might lead to reverence for the Emperor, which has political implications. Ultimately, throughout the period of Japanese internment, the U.S. government tried to use cultural assimilation as a marker for political loyalty, implying that there exists, as Ngai calls it, a “normative cultural citizenship,” which I think is akin to the existence of a cultural hegemony (201). The idea of citizenship having cultural content helps explain the existence of the “alien citizen” as someone who may be legally/politically a citizen, but who violates some of the normative, cultural components of citizenship (perhaps in the area of sexuality, family structure, race, etc.) and thus remains an outsider. The malleability and ill-defined nature of “normative cultural citizenship” also relates to Gilmore’s idea that all of U.S. history can be understood as repetitions of a pattern involving violence against an Other, even though the identity of the Other may change depending on the time period.
I wanted to touch on one topic we considered last week, and that we have brought up through the semester as well, namely how Asian Americans can be considered fully assimilated while and still separate. This can be broken down into two viewpoints, that of the American herself and that of the government, and furthermore can also be divided into physical separation and emotional/mental separation.
To the Asian American, there has always existed the goal of being considered American, which historically has meant to be considered white, and there exist plenty of examples of people who feel culturally American, yet walk the fine line of if they are willing to move further away from their ethnic heritage in the name of being considered truly American. The internment camps, and subsequent issues of proving loyalty to the U.S., that Ngai describes show just how uneasy this topic made Japanese Americans feel. To them, there was no need such a strict distinction between who was American/loyal and who was not, since the vast majority of people simply wanted to keep their families safe and their lives intact. To the government though, there was, for whatever reason, a clear need to label Japanese Americans either within the box of truly American or outside of it.
The Loyalty Questionnaire, in particular, shows just how much this idea of Asian Americans feeling “assimilated yet separate” may be attributed not to their own actions or feelings, but to those by the government which forced them to question just what it meant to be “American” in a satisfactory way as to not be deported.
Reflection:
In addition to our discussion about the position of gender/sexuality in relation to warfare, something that I am still thinking about is the role of patriarchy as it relates to race, war, and power, which plays out in the way in which countries are discussed using gendered terms. The assignation of gender to nations appears in Rafael’s “White Love” (the nationalist dramas in the Philippines where the nation is configured as a woman threatened by a male foreign intruder, who then must be defended by the male lover-patriot), Crucible of Empire (portrayal of Cuba as the damsel in distress, Spain as the male antagonist, and America as the masculine hero), and W.E.B. Du Bois’ representation of China vs. the U.S. (Chinese communism as composed sexuality vs. Western capitalism as unrestrained lust). In the Frazier text, I was surprised to read that Du Bois discussed China using a framework of manhood. Because the trope of gendering a colony or territory or imagining a nation as woman repeats itself everywhere – in popular media produced by the colonizer, plays produced by nationalist resistance, and radical political writing – I am still grappling with why it is so indiscriminately pervasive and frequently applied.
Regarding gender and sexuality as the main focus of this class’ discussion, I was really struck by the idea that sex can destabilize ways of distinction and racism. We brought up the idea that there cannot be “insiders without outsiders” in war, and so it makes sense that war and violence can be subverted by “mixing” those on the inside with those on the outside. This also relates to the idea of creating a war against one’s own people to “save” those people, through incarceration or other violent means. If there are “outsiders” even among the “insiders,” this distinction can still be destroyed through sex, since new racial categories and justifications must be made to call someone of mixed race an “outsider.” I think these ideas can also be seen within a more class-focused context. An example of this would be the Indian caste system, or Medieval class systems, wherein members of different class were forbidden from marrying each other. I think this all goes to show, as we’ve seen time and time again, how fluid racial categories and distinctions can be, and how “stacking and sorting” of people into categories of “insider and outsider,” “deserving and undeserving,” “citizen and non-citizen,” etc., is used to mobilize people around and maintain the interests of an elite few.
In reflecting on our most recent class, I was interested in the connections between our continued discussion about “what is war” and Carol Smith’s presentation about student activism in CCNY. On one level, early student activists supported the anti-war movement, in addition to other social and economic ideas. Later, this sentiment was complicated by question of anti-fascism, and several students and faculty fought in the Spanish Civil War and WWII. In addition to the surface connections between the student movements and “War” (as in, “named” wars that are acknowledged by history), though, there were also connections between the suppression of the activists’ efforts and the more broad conception of war as a carceral project. Carol Smith recounted several times when police forces were called to break up students or faculty demonstrations, and protesters faced incarceration and accusations of crime. The university administration’s solution of suspending or expelling students, thus removing them from the student body, mirrors the way in which incarceration attempts to block off those deemed undesirable from the rest of the citizens. Even more strikingly, Carol Smith’s description of the trials that faculty activists faced, in which they were accused of “anti-American activity,” illustrated how the nation constructs a “perpetual enemy.” I was surprised that the automatic equating of “communist” with “anti-American enemy” started so early on, in the 30s even, and I think this idea of a perpetual enemy will be especially useful in our upcoming discussions about Cold War politics.
Reflection:
In our discussions about gender/sex in relationship to violence and war, I was particularly interested in this idea of masculinity as being performative, particularly in discussions about the ways of dress. Can we also consider different aspects of war with this lens of gender as performance and display? In thinking about prostitution, men’s desire to dominate women and demonstrate their power could also be an act of performance, in establishing their masculine power to themselves and others during war, a time when they are feeling victimized. In addition, I wonder when considering this idea of dress as a form of masculine display, how does this play into the idea of guerrilla warfare? When one side of the army is extremely well-dressed, well-trained, and strong, demonstrating extreme masculinity, but the other side has no uniforms, is dressed as civilians (often women), and exhibit no real training, how does the fluidity of gender come into play? What does it mean when those guerrilla fighters still win?