On Asian American Anti-Imperialist Critique

• In Event: Asian American Formations and the Literature of Late-Stage American Empire

Abstract

As a critical rejoinder to anti-immigrant rhetoric and a crucial reminder of U.S. imperial intervention abroad, the slogan “We are here because you were there” offers a powerful rebuttal to white nativists who confuse and conflate migrant and refugee displacements with racial invasions. When it comes to Asian Americans, however, the phrase cannot merely be understood as an unalloyed expression of anti-imperialist politics. As many scholars have pointed out, the “we” who are here may have been uprooted by U.S. military violence and occupation in Asia, but we/they have also been subject to U.S. empire’s seductive promises of rescue, rehabilitation, and conditional belonging. This presentation considers some of the affective and political complexities of Asian American engagements with U.S. imperialism and exceptionalism by focusing on Cathy Park Hong’s acclaimed collection of essays, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020). Serendipitously published the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic—which gave rise to both mass movements for Black liberation in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (among too many others) and the increased visibility of anti-Asian racism (especially after the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings)—Hong’s book evokes the array of ambivalent feelings that suffuse Asian American positionality shaped by the legacies of U.S. imperial interventions in Asia, on the one hand, and domestic comparative racializations, on the other. While Hong delivers trenchant critiques of U.S. military violence overseas (e.g., the Korean and Vietnam wars) and gendered anti-Asian racism in the U.S. (e.g., Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Prageeta Sharma, David Dao, autobiographical incidents in L.A., Oberlin, Iowa, and Brooklyn), she also acknowledges both the economic and ethnic differences among Asian/Americans and the relative privileges Asian Americans enjoy vis-à-vis Black Americans that undermine any attempt to articulate a unified theory of Asian American anti-imperialism. Hong’s roving, concatenated essays that oscillate among shifting genres—memoir, family history, biography, journalism, social history, literary and cultural criticism—formally register the indignant impulses toward anti-imperialist critique tempered by the reflexive reckonings with model minority complicity. And it is this mix of “noncathartic” feelings made manifest through diverse linguistic modes that may index Asian Americans’ complicated relation to late-stage U.S. empire.

Author

• Martin J Ponce, The Ohio State University