A Critical Historiography of Asian Diaspora Experiences in the United States: Up Against Exclusion, Disposability, and Dehumanization

• In Event: Asian Diaspora Inquiries: Decolonizing and Deimperializing Theoretical and Methodological Traditions

Abstract

In this historical moment, the United States witnesses a rising anti-Asian racism exacerbated by the politics of the Covid-19 pandemic with implications for how disciplinary knowledge about Asia, Asians, Asian Americans and Asian diasporas is produced and operationalized. In response to the historical moment, scholars who identify with the Asian Diaspora Experience (ADE) are compelled to revisit disciplinary knowledge, study contemporary events, and interrogate educational research in pursuit of truth to ask the following: How has knowledge about Asians been produced and represented at different points in education? Whose interest is served or silenced? How might Asian Diasporas interrogate received knowledge and create cultural, theoretical, and research spaces for multiplicity of experiences and voices?

With the above questions in mind, this study uses critical historiography as a theoretical and analytical framework to trace the history of the concept ‘Asian’ and ‘Asian American’ and present radical revisioning of the Asian Diaspora Experience. Critical historiography is the interplay of data of the history being constructed, the historical process and situatedness of knowledge being constructed, and the problematics and silences that were previously obscured. Accordingly, first, I deconstruct historical policy documents such as the Chinese Immigrant Act of 1982 to interrogate the philosophical and discursive production of ‘Asian’ as an ontological construct of immigrants who do not conform to dominant norms of Western European traditions. Second, I use this ontological history to contextualize contemporary social and political events that continue to gender, racialize, normalize, and systematically exclude Asians, Asian Americans, and Asian diasporas from the production of knowledge valued in education. Third, bearing witness to ADE, I highlight how scholars have moved beyond conventional frameworks to problematize the cultural exclusion and invisibility of ADE and to develop radical theories and disruptive methodologies such as Asian Crit (Museus & Iftikar, 2014), counter-storytelling (An, 2017) and geo-colonial historical materialism (Chen, 2010) offering multifaceted complex understandings of ADE as knowledges that counts in education.

Data analyzed were predominantly documentary and included primary sources such as government policy and reports; contemporary texts such as news articles and media reports, and academic scholarship on and by voices constituting ADE. Results confirm a history of political disenfranchisement and exclusion of Asians from civic life that endures as reflected in the contemporary subjection of Asian diasporas to ongoing violence, hate crimes, and discrimination. Results also affirm that ADE is not a static epistemological notion, or an ontological given; rather, it constitutes the voices and knowledges of diverse peoples from multiple locations signifying movements, collectivities, divergences, and changes.

This historiography highlights scholarship by Asian diasporas on multiple registers. First, the scholarship validates voices of ADE as educational knowledge historically excluded. Second, ADE scholarship open research spaces that go beyond conventional frameworks to radical methodologies that generate multifaceted understandings of ADE as knowledges valued in education. Finally, the study raises questions for future research that further complicate and advance how the educational field engages with the Asian Diaspora Experience.

Author

• Suniti Sharma, Saint Joseph's University