ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES: A CRITIQUE

ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES: A CRITIQUE

 Originally published 18 December 2009 at The Philippines Matrix Project

 

IJAPS Vol. 6, No. 1, 47–75, 2010 47
FROM GENEALOGY TO INVENTORY: THE SITUATION OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE AGE OF THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL FINANCE CAPITAL
E. San Juan, Jr.*
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.
e-mail: philcsc@gmail.com
The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory, therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.
–ANTONIO GRAMSCI, Prison Notebooks
ABSTRACT
The onset of global capitalism’s crisis has exposed the fragile theoretical underpinnings of Asian American Studies as an academic discipline. Spellbound by deconstructive, rhetorical assumptions, all symptomatic of commodity-fetishism and alienation, mainstream Asian American critics continue to validate neoliberal pluralism while claiming to value difference and singularity. While rejecting American Exceptionalism, they ignore historical specificities and endorse individualist norms, affects, genealogical plurality, and performative discourses uncritical of free-market reification. What is needed is a return to a mode of critical inventory that takes account of historical capitalism, imperialist geopolitics, and the notion of collective agency necessary to destroy racialised ideological practices and institutions that maintain the exploitative capitalist
* E. San Juan, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies at various universities in the U.S. He was recently a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium. Currently he directs the Philippines Cultural Studies Center at Storrs, Connecticut, USA. His recent books are US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines Palgrave), Toward Filipino Self-Determination (SUNY Press), From Globalization to National Liberation (University of the Philippines Press), and Critique and Social Transformation (The Edwin Mellen Press). He is completing a book on the Abu Sayyaf Phenomenon and the Global War of Terror.  IJAPS Vol. 6, No. 1, 47–75, 2010 E. San Juan Jr.
division of labor, social injustice, and inequality of peoples based on private appropriation of social wealth..... MORE