Asian American and Pacific Islander as Political Formation

“Adopting Asian American was a statement about my politics.” - Kristin, Technologist and Digital Storyteller

In better understanding how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AA/PI) navigate politics online, we first examined how people identified with AA/PI as categories of racial and ethnic identity. In the survey, participants were able to choose from 36 racial and ethnic identity categories and apply multiple categories. Beyond identifying with specific identities, we asked the degree of identification with ‘Asian American’, ‘Pacific Islander’, and specific diasporic and ethnic communities.

76.9% identified with Asian American

9.3% identified with Pacific Islander

68.3% identified with diasporic & ethnic identities

We also found that 85% of participants who strongly agreed and agreed that they identified as Asian American, Pacific Islander, and/or with their diasporic and ethnic identities use the Internet to learn more about their identity. 88% of these same participants use the Internet to learn more about social movements and 97% of locally participate in movements in their communities (62% participate always or frequently participate and 35% occasionally participate). 

Categories of racial and ethnic identity function as political formations. AA/PI offers a political home and way for people to come together around issues. Digital media-based organizing can offer political education opportunities for people to connect personal experiences around identity to broader issues and also mobilize within their local communities. However, how people find political meaning within AA/PI constantly changes and evolves.

We are interested in how digital culture plays a role in these shifts, particularly as communications and information practices continue to shift and modulate Asian America as a construct.

We found that 46.7% of participants identified ‘Asian’ as at least one of their ethnic/racial identities (only 7 people identified Asian as their only race/ethnic identity). 33.3% of participants identified as Chinese, making up the largest percentage of participants. Our survey was circulated under the title, ’ARE YOU AN AAPI ACTIVIST?’ In this vein, results seem to reflect observations and criticisms that ‘Asian America’ as a category has a tendency to be overrepresented by East Asians, particularly people with Chinese ethnic backgrounds. The erasure of South and Southeast Asians as well as the specific needs of Pacific Islanders in dominant discourses around Asian American and Pacific Islander politics may contribute to the degree of how different people identify with ‘AA/PI’ and shape how people find meaning (or lack thereof) within this category. 

Future studies of interest may be further examining the significance of identity categories without simplifying or obscuring complex intergenerational and transnational geopolitics of different Asian diasporic communities. 

Media Culture and Political Histories:

“Asian America is an evolving construct and idea…It provides us with an anchor to unify together and offers a mobilizing home politically. Asian America can’t hold all of our different identities and experiences in and of itself. It’s important for different Asian communities to organize themselves.” - Jackie, Anti-Gentrification Cultural Organizer

Asian America has been created through a process in which people understand, circulate, and express ideas to articulate politics. Asian America as a political and ideological formation comes from its relative position, or rather, negotiating and using points of connection across difference to stage new social and political positions. Stuart Hall (1986) describes this political articulation as “a movement of people”. For example, Karen Ishizuka (2016) describes how Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinx Americans came together as ‘Asian Americans’ during the Civil Rights movement and against the Vietnam War by linking together the histories of Chinese railroad workers, Filipino cannery and farm workers, and interned Japanese Americans. 

Asian America is socially produced—including from government policies, mainstream media outlets, and Asian American grassroots media. Laura Hyun Yi Kang (2002) troubles the politics and problematics of naming, identifying, representing, and categorizing the subject of ‘Asian/American’ to demonstrate the instability and inadequacy of generic delineations of individuality and collectivity. Forms of ‘naming’ legitimized institutional, economic, and state investments in Asian America that have both demanded and imposed a coherent identity and legibility. 

Discursively forged, Asian America is what Kandice Chuh (2003) describes as a “deliberate and self-reflexive term [that] calls attention to the workings of language, to its structures and functions.” Lisa Lowe (1996) draws upon Hall to discuss how identity is both a matter of ‘becoming’—Asian American cultural, political, and social practices produce identity, and the processes that produce identity are always incomplete and constituted relationally. Lowe characterizes Asian America as “heterogeneous, hybrid, and multiple”—her understanding of “differential relationships within a bounded category” and “social relations multiply determined by the contradictions of capitalism” provide a useful way to map out Asian America as a political formation grounded in a material history about migration and labor.

The history of Asian America as a political formation insists upon both racial and class consciousness in progressive politics. Asian American political identity faces the tension between homogenizing pan-ethnicity and navigating the diversity of nationally defined ethnic self-perceptions. In thinking through Asian America as a political formation, three things should be taken into account. First, we must consider differences within Asian America in terms of national origin, generational status, class background, gender, sexuality, and more. Second, we have to think through how these differences are shaped by asymmetrical and uneven histories and encounters with the violences of racial capitalism and imperialism. And finally, we have to consider how these differences, as social relations, are determined and experienced along multiple axes of power (also known as ‘intersectionality’).

Asian America has also often been imagined for its coalitional possibilities, useful as bridge or as wedge. Activists and organizers formed Asian America as a concept during the political ferment of the 1960s, imagining Asian America through political alignments, alongside Black liberation and anti-war movements.  During the 1960s, racial groups began to also create terms to define themselves, producing language that reflected social changes. 

In developing language to challenge labels such as ‘Oriental’ and ‘model minority’, progressive Asian activists negotiated the positioning of Asian-ness between ‘black and white’. A 1969 student newspaper announced the formation of an Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at the University of California-Berkeley. The first uses of Asian America as a ‘we’ articulated a political ideology in opposition to white supremacy and U.S. imperialism, in the wake of the Korean War and the midst of the war in Vietnam. AAPA’s newspapers later circulated to different college campuses.

As an analog form, movement newspapers articulated language and ideas about Asian America as a means of political alignment with other racialized groups. The first issue of Gidra, a monthly newapaper published by students the University of California-Los Angeles, included the manifesto “Yellow Power!” as a call for “all Asian Americans to…unite with our black, brown, and red brothers of the Third World for survival.” At this time, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino American activists primarily made up the core of Asian American movement building. However, attempts to organize under the call ‘yellow’ in earlier stages alienated Filipino activists, where histories of colonization and military occupation under Spain, the U.S., and later Japan created different encounters with systems of immigration. Filipino activists built coalitions with activists from Samoa, Tonga, and Guam, who also experienced U.S. occupation. In the late 1970s, Asian American movement language shifted into including ‘Asian Pacific Islanders’.

What it means to be Asian American has changed over time—looking to Asian American digital movement media and the process of creating these media continues to showcase the production of Asian America as a political formation. Digital organizers and activists negotiate the meaning and racial positioning of Asian America and ‘make’ politics through digital media projects, from hashtags, Tweetchats, comics, videos, and other forms. Asian Americans continue reflexively reconstruct understandings of collective identity in relation to social movements and political pursuits of solidarities across difference.

References:

1. Kandice Chuh (2003) Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique

2. Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” 

3. Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg (1986) “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” 

4.  Karen Ishizuka (2016) Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties. 

5. Laura Hyun Yi Kang (2002) Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women

6. Lori Kido Lopez (2016) Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship

7. Lisa Lowe (1996) Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

8. Mari Matsuda (1996) “We We Will Not Be Used: Are Asian-Americans the Racial Bourgeoisie?”

9. Jennifer Nash (2018) Black Feminism (Re)Imagined: After Intersectionality. 

10.   Gary Y. Okihiro (1994) “When and Where I Enter.”