Merging Empire and AsianCrit to Examine Chinese American Teachers’ Diasporic Lives

• In Event: Dismantling Colonization: Reclaiming Asian Diaspora Experience as Curriculum Knowledge

Abstract

With about 1.5 billion people worldwide, among Asians, the Chinese have formed one of the most enduring diasporas in human history over the past five centuries (Miles, 2020). Likewise, the Chinese are the largest Asian ethnic group in the United States (over 5 million) and continue to enrich the diasporic history of the nation (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021). Despite their growing presence, Chinese (and other Asian) American teachers remain underrepresented in U.S. K–12 classrooms and research. Although recent studies such as Kim and Hsieh (2021) examined Asian American teachers’ racialization and (anti)essentialization, they do not clarify how the history of empires shapes Asian American teachers’ diasporic journey and professional trajectory. This gap in the literature indicates there is an urgent need for research that sheds light on how and why histories of diasporas help us understand how the past affects the present and the conditions that shape classroom dynamics in the field of education. Similarly, there is a growing need for developing new frameworks that attend to specific diasporic histories and experiences.
Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest, I propose how to merge tenets of empire and AsianCrit to examine Chinese American teachers’ diasporic lives. Coloma (2013) theorized empire as an analytical lens for educational research with three tenets: transnationalism, intersectionality, and “the hybrid use of theoretical frameworks to address pressing problems and questions related to empire and education” (p. 651). Building on the scholarly lineage of critical race theory, Iftikar and Museus (2018) outlined seven tenets of AsianCrit in education: Asianization, transnational contexts, (re)constructive history, strategic (anti)essentialism, intersectionality, story, theory, and praxis, and commitment to social justice.
In this presentation, I bring theory, research, and praxis together to show how tenets of theorizing empire and AsianCrit intersect with empirical research. Specifically, I bring together the tenets of theorizing empire and AsianCrit as a research methodology to shed light on how the legacy of colliding empires (China v. the United States) has influenced three Chinese American teachers’ diasporic journey from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Taiwan to the United States and how they leveraged their intersectional identities (race, gender, academic discipline) to embrace yet resist essentialization in their professional lives.
Implications include how scholars can merge tenets of theorizing empire and AsianCrit to enrich Asian Diasporas as theories and methodologies. Implications also include the charting of new research directions for Asian American teachers to counter the anti-Asian xenophobia escalated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Author

• Lin Wu, Western Oregon University