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Afro-Asian Inquiry and the Problematics of Comparative Critique Author(s): Antonio T. Tiongson Jr. Source: Critical Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 33-58 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.2.0033 Accessed: 07-08-2017 18:56 UTC

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Afro-Asian Inquiry and the Problematics of Comparative Critique

A N T O N I O T. T I O N G S O N J R .

This article represents a critical engagement with the “comparative turn” in ethnic studies; that is, an interrogation of the broader implications of the ascendancy and valorization of comparative critique as a central cate- gory of analysis and an index of contemporary ethnic studies scholarship through a critical consideration of a select body of writing predicated on a comparative approach. Spurred by the perceived inadequacies of a biracial framing and theorizing of race and racialization (i.e., the so-called black/ white paradigm), thinking comparatively has become an imperative to the project of ethnic studies, heralding a paradigmatic and analytic shift and inaugurating what one cultural analyst describes as a new stage in the evo- lution of ethnic studies, “one long postponed by a standoff between a mul- tiracial model limited by a national horizon and a diasporic model that lacked historical ground for conducting cross-racial analysis.”1

As a number of race and ethnic studies scholars posit, comparative anal- ysis is increasingly viewed as indispensable to the project of ethnic studies. In an edited volume titled Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Con- flict and Coalition, for example, Josh Kun and Laura Pulido make the point that comparative ethnic studies has emerged “as a substantive field within the discipline of ethnic studies itself,” generating a fairly robust and rapidly expanding archive of comparative scholarship.2 Echoing these remarks, Marta E. Sanchez speaks of “the renaissance of comparative studies of race and ethnicity” that foregrounds the intertwined and interconnected his- tories of racialized groups.3 The purchase accorded this kind of work is reflected in the spate of publications that can be described as fundamen- tally comparative in their scope.4 It is reflected in the way this approach has become incorporated into mission statements of prominent ethnic studies programs across the nation.5 “Conventional” approaches, in other words, have given way to comparative approaches that, on the surface, seem to

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provide a more textured analysis of the dynamics of race and the intricacies of the racialization process.

In this article, I delineate and call into question the core assumptions and claims made in the name of comparative critique within the context of eth- nic studies and ethnic studies scholarship. I focus specifically on Afro-Asian literature, a burgeoning body of writing that is instructive in terms of speak- ing to and shedding light on the promises and perils of comparative critique. While it is not the only body of writing engaged in comparative critique, it is arguably the most prominent strand of this literature, accruing a great deal of purchase and prestige as evidenced by the profound growth of this field of inquiry. Accordingly, Afro-Asian inquiry provides an ideal starting point from which to interrogate what is to be gained by engaging in comparative critique but also what are the limitations of performing this kind of critique. I argue that notwithstanding the currency of Afro-Asian literature, this body of writing has yet to grapple substantively with the complications and chal- lenges attendant to comparative critique. In short, Afro-Asian inquiry has given rise to a set of issues and concerns pertaining to the contours and trajectory of comparative critique that has yet to be adequately addressed and rigorously explored, issues and concerns that drive this article.

To illustrate, relatively scant or no attention has been paid to currents and concerns that serve to trouble the underlying assumptions and core claims of much of this body of writing. For example, Afro-Asian inquiry has largely been framed in terms of what Helen H. Jun has described in another con- text as “a teleological investment in ‘interracial solidarity’”6—the sort of investment that delimits the terrain from which to engage in comparative critique. Moreover, much of the literature is predicated on the need to tran- scend the black-white binary, a premise problematized by a cohort of criti- cal race and ethnic studies scholars who take Afro-Asian inquiry to task for misconstruing the broader significance and relevance of the paradigm. Another critique I take up in this article is the manner in which Afro-Asian inquiry invokes Indigeneity in ways that ultimately serve to obscure the specificities of the status of Native peoples and perpetuate the sanctioned ignorance surrounding Native issues and concerns.

Rather than take for granted the value of thinking comparatively, then, this article strives to spotlight and problematize the theoretical and politi- cal investments of Afro-Asian studies. Turning to Afro-Asian inquiry as an occasion to think about what constitutes comparative critique, I will argue that the comparative turn in ethnic studies has not necessarily given way to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of race and the intricacies of

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P Afro-Asian Inquir y and the Problematics of Comparative Critique • 3 5 O

the racialization process. Instead, it has given rise to a distinct set of provo- cations that has yet to be adequately addressed. To put the matter somewhat differently, I question the proposition that a comparative frame or lens rep- resents an unquestioned and unqualified advance over previous approaches in the field. Ultimately, my concern in this article is to articulate points of departure for more rigorously and profoundly engaging in comparative cri- tique through a critical consideration of emergent intellectual currents that pose challenges and complications to Afro-Asian inquiry. I will proceed, first, by delineating what constitutes comparative critique and then estab- lishing the scope of Afro-Asian inquiry via a consideration of recurrent strands of inquiry that comprise this body of writing. I then spell out the problematics of comparative critique through a consideration of currents and concerns emanating from various fields of study and raised by a num- ber of scholars, currents and concerns that unsettle the underlying assump- tions and core claims of this body of writing.

S P E C I F Y I N G T H E S C O P E O F C O M PA R AT I V E S C H O L A R S H I P

As a number of critical race and ethnic studies scholars point out, the com- parative turn in the study of race and ethnicity marks a departure for eth- nic studies in terms of its scope of inquiry, centering on relations among minoritized groups rather than on relations between whites and minori- tized groups. In the words of Laura Pulido: “Although comparative research within ethnic studies is hardly new, scholars have only recently begun seri- ously theorizing differences and relationships between various racial/ethnic groups.”7 Pulido goes on to make the point that there is a growing reali- zation among contemporary critical race and ethnic studies scholars “that individual groups could not be understood in isolation,”8 paving the way for scholarship that attempts to capture what Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh describe as “the wide-ranging social and political relations between margin and margin.”9 Traise Yamamoto endorses such a move because of the way it provides a corrective to what she describes as a dearth of vocabu- lary that does justice to the intricacies of relations among groups of color: “And the trauma of American race relations, as with all trauma, is that there is really no language for talking about what happens between communi- ties of color, for talking about how racialization happens between people of color.”10 Covering similar ground, John D. Márquez speaks of a critical ethnic studies paradigm that foregrounds how racial injustice exceeds the bounds of a particular minoritized group experience.11 For these scholars, a

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comparative analytic is seen as crucial to sorting out complex racial dynam- ics not just between whites and minoritized groups of color but also among minoritized groups of color, and how these groups are positioned relative to each other in a mutually constitutive manner.

In terms of the impetus for comparative critique, Susan Koshy looks to the current moment as necessitating a shift in the lens we deploy in our analysis of race. In her view, the comparative turn is a necessary develop- ment because of the imperatives of what she describes as the “new conjunc- ture” that is no longer predicated “on a structural divide between racial minorities and whites.” Instead, it is now marked by an “axis of stratification [that] has multiplied and shifted so that it runs within and between margin- alized and dominant identities, reconfiguring them in unprecedented ways.”12 Accordingly, we have seen calls to engage in comparative work as a way to disrupt what Koshy describes as “the axiomatic status of whiteness as the referent against which minority subjects define themselves and others,” paving the way for scholarship that decenters whiteness as the analytical referent for the study of race and ethnicity. For Koshy, the implications of this shift demand a move toward an analytic of interracialism that, in turn, “necessitates a comparative turn, a move from specifying the boundaries and internal heterogeneity of particular groups to an understanding of their interarticulation.”13 Recalling Stuart Hall’s notion of conjuncture, Koshy makes a case for coming up with paradigms that can account for the par- ticularities of the current era marked by the reshaping of the racial land- scape and the ascendancy of neoliberalism.14

What, exactly, constitutes comparative scholarship remains an open ques- tion yet attempts to define the bounds of this kind of work revolved around a particular set of theoretical concerns and investments. At its core, com- parative critique aims to broaden the ground from which to consider the dynamics of the racialization process, accentuating the ways in which racial- ization operates in a relational manner. An underlying premise of contem- porary ethnic studies scholarship is that a critical engagement with race necessitates comparative thinking and that racialization is an inherently comparative process and a relational term. Scholars engaged in this kind of work, however, make a concerted effort to veer away from simply delin- eating “similarities and differences” among racialized groups and instead emphasize the interconstitutive nature of the racialization process that, in turn, necessitates comparative critique. In the following, Grace Kyungwon Hong provides a definition of comparative racialization, which encapsulates this aspect of the racialization process.

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“Comparative racialization” in its most basic definition refers to scholarship that addresses African American, Asian American, Native/indigenous and Chicana/o racializations as occurring in relation to each other. Yet this work does not merely articulate commonalities between communities of color but poses a more complex question about how a focus on differences between and within racialized groups might enable us to imagine alterna- tive modes of coalition.15

For Hong, viable comparative approaches “do not merely take ‘African American,’ ‘Asian American,’ ‘Chicano,’ and so on as knowable and inter- nally coherent, nationally based categories that can be compared.” Instead, Hong considers these racial formations as “internally contradictory and uneven.”16

Similarly, for Shu-mei Shih, the meaning of comparison does not simply reside in “the arbitrary juxtaposition of two terms in difference and simi- larity” but rather in the foregrounding and bringing forth of “submerged or displaced relationalities into view” to reveal “these relationalities as the starting point for a fuller understanding of racialization as a comparative process.”17 In making a distinction between the different modes of com- parison, Shih stresses the importance of grappling with “the conjuncture of time and place” in any sort of viable comparative project.18 In her view,

Because instances of racialization are situated in specific times and places, comparison between these instances may seem random or unrelated, but the colonial turn reveals potential and concrete relations among them. To think comparatively therefore is to think about the world where the colonial turn has left indelible marks—that is, to think the worldliness of race.19

Here Shih situates her analysis of the racialization process within the con- text of colonialism, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s work to tease out her think- ing on what a project of comparison entails. Shih is particularly interested in how Fanon conceptualized comparison as an inherent feature of colonial society that is fundamental to the dynamics of racialization in both the colony and the metropole.20

In How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the His- torical Power of Racial Scripts, Natalia Molina makes a case for relational analysis because of the way such an approach attends to the ways race oper- ates in a mutually constitutive manner. In Molina’s words:

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By relational, I do not mean comparative. A comparative treatment of race compares and contrasts groups, treating them as independent of one another; a relational treatment recognizes that race is a mutually constitu- tive process and thus attends to how, when, where, and to what extent groups intersect. It recognizes that there are limits to examining racialized groups in isolation.21

Drawing on and extending Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s work on racial formation, Molina advances the idea of studying the interconnec- tions among different racialized groups and racial projects.22 In the case of the racialization of Mexicans, this process unfolded in a matrix that also ensnared the racialization of other groups across time and space.

Similar to Molina, David Theo Goldberg makes a distinction between different modes of comparative analysis, what he describes as a comparativ- ist account and a relational account. Goldberg is particularly interested in the capacity of each mode of analysis to shed light on the workings of race and racism.

A comparativist account undertakes to reveal through analogy; a relational account reveals through indicating how effects are brought about as a result of historical, political or economic, legal or cultural links, the one acting upon another. A comparativist account may choose to contrast racially conceived or ordered relations of production in one place and another. A relational analysis will stress the (re-)production of relational ties and their mutually effecting and reinforcing impacts. A comparativist account con- trasts and compares. A relational account connects.23

For Goldberg, a comparativist frame is problematic given how this mode of analysis has been bracketed and delimited by a focus on national contexts and dynamics and, therefore, cannot account for the full complexity of race and racism. Echoing Shih’s assertion about the importance of grappling with “the conjuncture of time and place,” Goldberg asserts that claims ema- nating from comparativist accounts are necessarily limited because these claims cannot account for how race and racisms are mutually constituted across time and space.

In contradistinction, Goldberg finds a relational approach more illumi- nating and revealing because of the way it provides a fuller and more com- prehensive account of the workings of race and racism. In Goldberg’s view,

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P Afro-Asian Inquir y and the Problematics of Comparative Critique • 3 9 O

“a relational account accordingly reveals something not otherwise com- prehensible.” He goes on to make the point that such an approach “signals how state formations or histories, logics of oppression and exploitation are linked, whether causally or symbolically, ideationally or semantically.”24 Unlike comparative approaches, then, relational approaches do not operate from the presumption of boundaries or what Goldberg describes as the “supposed discreteness of the compared elements” but rather from the con- nectedness of seemingly discrete cases.25 For Goldberg, relational accounts are particularly useful because they offer an optics that throws into sharp relief the ways racial dynamics in one place are constitutive of racial dynam- ics in other places.26

The editors of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization also make a distinction between differ- ent modes of comparative analysis in endeavoring to proffer an alternative genealogy of ethnic studies rooted in a women of color feminism and queer of color critique. Alluding to the comparative and internationalist origins of ethnic studies, Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson identify the stakes for thinking through an alternative comparative analytic suited to the contemporary moment, noting that

the stakes for identifying new comparative models are immensely high, for the changing configurations of power in the era after the decolonizing move- ments and new social movements of the mid-twentieth century demand that we understand how particular populations are rendered vulnerable to processes of death and devaluation over and against other populations, in ways that palimpsestically register older modalities of racialized death but also exceed them.27

For Hong and Ferguson, there is much at stake in generating alternative analytics that do not reproduce the problematic tendencies and logic of various modes of comparison including dominant and nationalist modes of comparison. For example, they take issue with minority nationalisms for recapitulating the logic of discreteness undergirding the dominant mode of comparison. In their critique of normative models, Hong and Ferguson look to women of color feminism and queer of color critique as providing an alternative model for realizing the potential of a critical comparative race scholarship that is attentive and attuned to the material conditions of racial and colonial violence. They look to these critical formations “as comparative

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analytics rather than descriptions of identity categories” that serve to illu- minate contemporary processes of valuations and the interrelatedness of race, gender, and sexuality.28 Ultimately, Hong and Ferguson also endorse a relational comparative analytic that centers difference, contradictions, and heterogeneities and forges a language that captures “what cannot be known, what escapes articulation.”29 For these aforementioned authors, relational- ity constitutes an advance over comparativity in the way it sheds light on processes of valuation in the current conjuncture, processes that exceed the bounds and logic of nation.

T H E E M E R G E N T F I E L D O F A F R O - A S I A N I N Q U I R Y

The field of Afro-Asian studies constitutes a rapidly growing field as evi- denced by the proliferation of works on Afro-Asian interconnections as well as a number of special issues of journals such as positions and Journal of Asian American Studies centering on different facets of Afro-Asian rela- tions.30 For scholars pursuing this kind of work, the aim is to uncover hith- erto buried or obscured historical convergences between people of African and Asian descent on a global scale in order to do justice to the intricacies of this relationship. For example, the editors of the anthology Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans strive to render intelligible “the full range of impor- tant historical, political, and cultural connections between Asian Americans and African Americans,” connections that are not assimilable into conven- tional narratives of African diasporic history or Asian diasporic history.31

Scholars engaged in this kind of work look to the history of encounters between the two groups as a largely underexplored and undertheorized archive that serves as an important vehicle for imagining and cultivating an anti-imperialist political outlook and vision. Afro-Asian scholars, in other words, are engaged in an intellectual and political project of recuperation centered on the recovery of an archive of solidarity between the two groups. Carolyn Rody describes the archive this way:

This archive is the history of social, cultural, and literary relations between Asian and African Americans, framed by “AfroAsianist” scholars as two peoples who share not only the fact of (differing) racialized, minoritized, American experiences and the mutual possession of long, rich, and sophis- ticated cultural and expressive traditions, but also a history of productive interaction.32

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P Afro-Asian Inquir y and the Problematics of Comparative Critique • 4 1 O

In essence, Afro-Asian encounters constitute an archive that speaks to a “tra- dition of cross-cultural unity” that has largely been expunged from stan- dard historical accounts.33 For Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, “Afro-Asia” serves as “a strategic intersection for thinking through an internationalist, global paradigm that joins the world’s two largest continents and populations, as well as an anti-imperialist, insurgent identity that is no longer majority white in orientation.” For these scholars, Afro Asia constitutes “the impera- tive to imagine a ‘new world’ grounded upon two great ancient worlds as well as a radical and revolutionary anti-imperialist tradition.”34

Afro-Asian literature looks specifically to culture and politics as impor- tant sites of shared practices and traditions between the two groups. As Ho and Mullen put it, “African Americans and Asian Americans have mutu- ally influenced, borrowed from, and jointly innovated new forms in culture (from music to cuisine to clothing) and politics (from shared movement ideologies to organizations).”35 In uncovering this archive, scholars aim to trouble the way relations between the two groups have been historically configured as inherently antagonistic. The editors of AfroAsian Encounters, for example, make the point that “across the Americas, these two groups have often been thought of as occupying radically incommensurable cul- tural and political positions.”36 Afro-Asian studies scholars are particularly leery of the preoccupation with the so-called black-Asian conflict because of the way it deflects attention away from the culpability of white suprem- acy. Accordingly, Afro-Asian literature is motivated by the need to recast and reconfigure this relationship and, in the process, bring to light an alter- native genealogy of Afro-Asian relations and the necessity of engaging in comparative critique: “At the least, the coalitional imperative of today’s vari- ant of Afro-Asianism is making ever more explicit the degree to which the Asian as a racial concept requires comparative thinking. The Asian Ameri- can, which is surely the premier example of a racial concept of the Asian, has always been a comparative identity.”37

The primary catalyst for this kind of work is disenchantment with exist- ing racial paradigms—specifically the black/white paradigm—predicated on biracial theorizing and logic. Edward J. W. Park and John S. W. Park, for example, make the point that existing racial paradigms cannot begin to account for shifting demographics in the United States.

Yet, while American society confronts multiracial realities, much of recent American race theory either dismisses the significance of these groups alto- gether, or subsumes them into traditional biracial models. The newcomers

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are neither “Black” nor “White,” but they are still characterized in those terms, and this tendency impedes the development of new and compelling ways to examine current race relations. We live in a multiracial society, but we seem stuck in biracial thinking.38

For Park and Park, then, race theory in the guise of the black/white para- digm has not kept up with complex racial dynamics and realities and, in particular, the centrality of Asian Americans and Latin@s in terms of shaping the racial landscape of the United States. Instead, extant race the- ory obscures the specificities of these groups, rendering the experiences of Asian Americans interchangeable with that of whites and Latin@s with that of blacks. In the view of Park and Park, race theorists need to bridge the “gap between how race is theorized and how race is lived” and come up with a more exhaustive theory of race and ethnicity not wedded to a biracial framing.39

This has become a fairly standard critique among a cohort of race and ethnic studies scholars especially concerned with the way the paradigm fails to account for the complexities of the contemporary racial landscape as well as the intricacies of interethnic and interracial relations. LeiLani Nishime explains:

Race in America has largely been understood as a matter of black and white. Even academic conceptual frames tend to emphasize the dichotomies between the colonizer and the colonized, the center and the periphery. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that these binaries cannot encompass the experience of many Americans, particularly Asian Americans, who have always occupied the spaces between white and black America.40

Shirley Hune speaks of the black/white paradigm as “the predominant racial model” that has been rendered obsolete by shifting racial dynamics. In the following, Hune makes the case for a reconfiguration of the dominant race relations paradigm in a way that can address the realities and needs of non- white, nonblack groups from a public policy perspective. In her view, a para- digm shift entails attending “to the reality of the nation’s racial complexity.” Such a paradigm shift “will include Asian Pacific Americans, Latinos/Latinas, American Indians and other groups in American public policy.”41 She goes on to make the point that the black/white paradigm detracts focus away from “minority-minority” relations that has served to undermine efforts to build alliances among communities of color. Instead, Hune calls for what

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P Afro-Asian Inquir y and the Problematics of Comparative Critique • 4 3 O

she describes as a “multiplicity paradigm” that is more suited to account for racial dynamics within a multiracial context.42

Michael Omi makes a similar point about the limitations of the black/ white paradigm; namely, its failure to account for the nuances of racial ten- sions: “And what is increasingly evident is that such racial tensions are no longer intelligible, if indeed they ever were, within the framework of a ‘black/white’ paradigm of race relations.” He goes on to assert, “Such bira- cial theorizing misses the complex nature of race relations in the post-civil rights era and is unable to grasp the patterns of conflict and accommodation among several increasingly large racial/ethnic groups.”43 For scholars engaged in Afro-Asian scholarship, then, an imperative is to generate language that exceeds the bounds of the black/white paradigm because of the way it ob- scures the specificities of Asian American racial formations. In this line of analysis, therefore, a nuanced accounting of contemporary racial dynamics is predicated on the transcendence of the black/white paradigm.

Gary Y. Okihiro’s work is significant in this regard because it would prove to be generative to the emergence of Afro-Asian literature, initially framing and continuing to frame the field’s scope of inquiry. His work provides an engagement with the black/white paradigm “that locates Asians (and Ameri- can Indians and Latinos) somewhere along the divide between black and white. Asians, thus, are ‘nearly whites’ or ‘just like blacks.’”44 Okihiro is par- ticularly interested in uncovering and foregrounding the shared experiences between Asians and blacks and the broader implications of uncovering his- torical convergences between the two groups: “We are a kindred people, forged in the fire of white supremacy and struggle, but how can we recall that kinship when our memories have been massaged by white hands, and how can we remember the past when our storytellers have been whispering amid the din of Western civilization and Anglo-conformity?”45 For Okihiro, then, it is imperative to render what he describes as “kinship” intelligible, a kinship that has been compromised by the machinations of white suprem- acy. In his work, Okihiro accentuates moments of cooperation between the two groups and the need to render these moments in a readily comprehen- sible way, what he describes as “acts of antiracialism and solidarity between Asian and African Americans.”46 At the same time, Okihiro attempts to grap- ple with the complexities of Afro-Asian interconnections.

By seeing only black and white, the presence and absence of all color, whites render Asians, American Indians, and Latinos invisible, ignoring the gra- dations and complexities of the full spectrum between racial poles. At the

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same time, Asians share with Africans the status and repression of non- whites—as the Other—and therein lies the debilitating aspect of Asian– African antipathy and the liberating nature of African–Asian unity.47

What Okihiro speaks to here is the intricacies of black–Asian American relations rooted in their shared marginalized status without glossing over the differences and distinctions between the two groups. Nonetheless, in much of his work, the point of emphasis is on the links between the two groups and the broader historiographic and political implications of com- ing to terms with the shared status between the two groups.48

T H E VA R I O U S S T R A N D S O F A F R O - A S I A N L I T E R AT U R E

Within Afro-Asian literature, two moments in particular—the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the Los Angeles riots in 1992—constitute founda- tional and consequential moments in terms of delimiting the field’s scope of inquiry in an overdetermined manner. The Los Angeles riots constitute a particularly vexed moment that has generated a body of work aimed at pro- viding a corrective to extant popular and media accounts of the uprising that conceive of Afro-Asian relations in terms of conflicts and tensions and specifically position African Americans and Asian Americans as inherently antagonistic. As Amy Abugo Ongiri phrases it:

Images of the “Black-Korean conflict,” debates around affirmative action, and “model minority” mythmaking create African Americans and Asian Americans as polar opposites ever doomed to conflict in America’s racial ideological landscape. These cultural imaginings disavow even the possibil- ity of cultural exchange occurring at or within the margins of dominant society.49

Scholars are especially critical of the deployment of the rubric of “racial conflict” or more specifically “black-Korean conflict” as the dominant in- terpretive framework to construe Afro-Asian relations because of the way it pits one group against the other and precludes consideration of exchanges and encounters that exceed the bounds of this rubric. For Afro-Asian schol- ars, the Los Angeles riots acutely reveal the inadequacy of the black/white paradigm because the multicultural nature of the riots cannot be reduced to simple black-Korean encounters.

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As a corrective to such popular and media accounts of the Los Angeles riots, a strand of literature has emerged that aims to resignify “Afro-Asian,” rendering it alternatively as a term that denotes an “anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperialist” stance.50 In this strand of Afro-Asian literature, the Bandung Conference occupies a prominent place, conventionally config- ured as the apogee of expressions and instances of solidarity between blacks and Asians. In the words of Nami Kim: “To many, the Bandung era of Afro- Asian solidarity represented a high point of the anti-imperialist and anti- racist struggles of people of Asian and African descent.”51 For Vijay Prashad, Bandung serves as a “major inspiration as well as an epistemological frame- work” to cultivate an anti-colonialist politics global in scope.52 The promi- nence of Bandung speaks to how “‘AfroAsian’ studies have always been energized by a coalitional spirit, a reparative, antiracist urge.”53 In the follow- ing, Ho and Mullen underscore the import and indispensability of Bandung in any efforts to engage in Afro-Asian inquiry: “Bandung informs and haunts any and all efforts to theorize Afro Asia. It is both the watershed and high- water mark of black-Asian affiliation and the unfinished and imperfect dream of a road still being pursued and paved by the authors represented in this book.”54 For these scholars, Bandung looms large in terms of serving as a potentially generative site that speaks to the (unfulfilled) promise and potential of Afro-Asian solidarity, casting Afro-Asian relations in the lan- guage of racial solidarity.55

Another strand of this literature aims to render intelligible the ways the racialization history of African Americans bears on the racialization history of Asian Americans. The underlying assumption is that “Asian American” and “African American” are mutually constitutive categories of analysis and that the racialization of Asian Americans is mediated and refracted by the racialization of African Americans. Najia Aarim-Heriot’s work is instructive in this regard, namely her focus on how the “Negro” problem is inextricably linked to the Chinese question. She grounds her analysis of the Chinese exclusion movement in nineteenth-century America race relations, specifi- cally black/white relations, arguing that anti-Chinese sentiment was rooted in antiblack sentiment. In other words, antiblackness served as a precursor and precedent for antipathy directed at the Chinese during this period.56

In Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937, Julia H. Lee strives to intervene in the dominant framing of Afro-Asian relations “as irrevocably antagonistic or romanticized as intrinsically linked by a shared history of racism” through a

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consideration of representations of Afro-Asian relations in a variety of Afri- can American and Asian American texts.57 For Lee, either claim is prob- lematic because of the way it operates according to the same essentializing logic and speaks to the necessity of a comparative approach because “it can deepen and enrich our notions of what makes up American literature as well as present us with an array of compelling and significant alternative literary histories that do not fit easily or at all into the norms or the canoni- cal narrative.”58

In the case of Helen Heran Jun, she is concerned with how the construc- tion of Asian Americans was contingent on the construction of African Americans “in relation to the shifting terrains of citizenship, the labor mar- ket, and U.S. national culture.”59 Utilizing what she describes as a relational framework, her objective is to unveil how “Asian Americans and African Americans have been unevenly defined in relation to each other and that in their respective struggles for inclusion, they both have had to negotiate the terms by which the other has been racially excluded.”60 Jun examines the contradictions that mark the institution of citizenship and how these con- tradictions are negotiated in a wide array of African American and Asian American cultural texts as well as the ways Asian American and African American claims to citizenship are mutually constitutive.61

Attention has also been directed at cultural exchanges between African Americans and Asian Americans particularly in the realm of music, film, and theater. According to this body of work, culture serves as one of the most compelling sites for the examination of black-Asian dynamics. A point of emphasis is not just the influence of African American culture on Asian American cultural practices but also the influence of Asian culture on black cultural practices.62 Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, for instance, examines how African Americans are engaged in some form of Orientalism within the context of hip hop. In her words, “Given the subjugation of Black Ameri- cans within hegemonic power relations and the assumption of our identity as always-already stable and fixed, what does it mean when Black hip-hop musicians seek to obscure their Black skin with yellow masks?”63 Whaley examines how this dynamic plays out in the realm of visual culture and the implications of this kind of performance for forging Afro-Asian solidarity.

For Deborah Wong, performance constitutes a compelling site for the interrogation of the permutations of African American/Asian American relations. She suggests that the performative is a particularly vexed site, opening up possibilities for cross-identification between the two groups but also serving to bolster power relations. According to Wong, “While these

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performative meeting grounds between Asian American and African Amer- ican performers are potential sites for new social realities and new political sensibilities, other intersections suggest daring and problematic experiments with ventriloquism.”64 Also published in the same special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amy Abugo Ongiri raises the question of what it means for African Americans to draw on signifiers of Asian and Asian American culture. She is particularly interested in African American recep- tion of and identification with the kung fu film genre as a potentially produc- tive site for the examination of the intricacies that mark relations between the two groups but also “instances of slippage and indeterminacy in which notions of the totalitarian nature of power and western notions of aesthet- ics, culture, and dominance are undone.”65

A F R O - A S I A N L I T E R AT U R E A N D T H E P O S S I B I L I T I E S O F C O M PA R AT I V E C R I T I Q U E

Afro-Asian inquiry seems to embody the potential and promise of compar- ative critique, performing a number of critical interventions. Specifically, this body of literature has mounted what appear to be powerful critiques against approaches wedded to a biracial framing, seemingly offering a more nuanced frame for making sense of complex racial dynamics that exceed the bounds of this kind of framing. Additionally, Afro-Asian inquiry’s cen- tering of relations between groups of color serves to undermine the norma- tive status of whiteness as the analytical referent for the study of race. At the same time, it brings to the fore a largely ignored or overlooked history of Afro-Asian encounters and exchanges that serves as a powerful counter to white supremacy predicated on pitting minoritized groups against one another. In doing so, Afro-Asian inquiry has wielded new ways of imag- ining relations between groups previously viewed as having mutually exclu- sive histories, making a compelling case that Afro-Asian relations cannot be construed in terms of a zero sum game or under the rubric of “racial conflict.”

Nami Kim directs our attention to another potential payoff of Afro-Asian inquiry, making the case that a consideration of Afro-Asian relations may very well pave the way for serious consideration of other relational dynam- ics such as “Asian-Latino/a, Asian-Native, Afro-Asian-Latino/a, and Afro- Asian-Native connections” that can generate “similar critiques of racism, imperialism, and American nationalism.”66 Moreover, this body of writing seems ideally suited to place disciplinary formations with distinct histo- ries, imperatives, and concerns in critical dialogue with one another, thus

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challenging the parochialisms and conventions of fields like African Amer- ican studies and Asian American studies. In short, Afro-Asian literature constitutes a significant intervention in the way it gestures toward further areas of inquiry that are potentially transformative theoretically, politically, and disciplinarily. But while it is certainly important to pay attention to the lines of inquiry opened up by this body of writing, it is also important to not lose sight of the set of issues raised by this body of writing, issues that have yet to be addressed in a sustained and critical manner.

O N T H E P R O B L E M AT I C S O F C O M PA R AT I V E C R I T I Q U E

One such issue raised by Afro-Asian literature revolves around the in- vestment in documenting and establishing moments of Afro-Asian cross- identification that could then serve as a basis of multiracial solidarity between the two groups. Most of these efforts are predicated on what Lye describes as “Asian American analogical dependency,” a notion of Afro-Asian analogy that hinges on the assumption that Asian Americans and African Ameri- cans occupy analogous historical and political positions.67 Cultural critics like Traise Yamamoto, however, caution that “within this framework, cross- identification of Asian Americans can work not to undermine existing racial structures but rather to reinforce them.”68 In the foregoing, Yamamoto alludes to the way cross-racial identification in and of itself cannot guaran- tee the undercutting of racial hierarchies. Instead, what constitutes the nature of cross-racial identification—its terms and basis—must be specified.

The field’s investment in a narrative of cross-racial solidarity is very much evident in the way it valorizes the Bandung Conference as an originary moment in Afro-Asian solidarity in terms of establishing the grounds for cultivating a vision of anticolonial politics. This sort of investment, however, is contingent on a rather narrow and idealized reading of the significance of Bandung that informs popular understandings of the 1955 confer ence. As Antoinette Burton describes it: “If North Americans know about Bandung at all, they most often apprehend it through the lens of histories of racial solidarity and cross-racial possibility of the kind that Richard Wright cap- tured in his eyewitness account of the conference.”69As Burton alludes to, however, this reading of Bandung serves to uphold what she describes as “the romance of racialism that haunts many accounts of Banding and its after- math,” a romance that I argue haunts Afro-Asian inquiry in the way Bandung is embedded in a triumphalist and teleological narrative even as a number of Afro-Asian scholars voice their concerns about the dangers of idealizing

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Afro-Asian relations.70 Along similar lines, Colleen Lye raises the question of “whether the retrieval of Third Worldist genealogies accomplishes some- thing more than a nostalgic response to the rise of Asian capitalism on a world scale and to the thinning claim of Asian American intellectuals to any representative function.”71

As Helen Heran Jun posits, there are analytical constraints to scholar- ship organized around a frame and discourse of cross-racial solidarity. In making the point that a significant strand of comparative ethnic studies projects are wedded to an analysis predicated on a narrow frame (i.e., an axis of identification-disidentification, resistance-complicity, or hegemonic- counterhegemonic), Jun directs our attention to what is obscured in this kind of analysis; namely, the complex entanglements of Asian American and African American racial formations that exceed the bounds of cross- racial solidarity. Rather than emphasize the resistant or the oppositional, Jun instead endeavors to provide an alternative comparative analytic, one that can better account for “how historically specific contradictions inher- ent in the institution of citizenship take shape and are negotiated in Asian American and African American cultural production.”72 She goes against the grain of the trajectory of much of Afro-Asian scholarship that is predi- cated on the recovery of instances of interracial solidarity between African Americans and Asians and employs an interpretive strategy that evaluates a text for its reproduction (“complicity”) or rupture (“resistance”) of exist- ing social relations. In so doing, Jun broadens the scope of inquiry of Afri- can American and Asian American racial formations.73

Another issue revolves around what has become a matter of course in Afro-Asian inquiry, the presumption of the need to transcend the black/ white paradigm given its purported obsolescence. According to Lye:

Racial, racialized, but lacking the certainty of a racial formation, the Asian American’s attenuated relation to racial conceptualization can be seen in the extent to which critical focus on the Asian American is so often couched in terms of “needing to move beyond race as a matter of black and white.” The Asian American is more easily evoked as a third term to trouble binary habits of racial classification and analysis than to illustrate the genuine mul- tiplicity of racial logics and racisms.74

Accordingly, much of the literature is driven by the need to displace the black/white paradigm because of its apparent lack of sophistication and inability to provide a nuanced account of contemporary racial dynamics

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precipitated by shifting racial dynamics in which African Americans are no longer the majority group of color. Critics also take issue with the way the black/white paradigm serves to undermine efforts at coalition-building in its privileging of antiblackness as the basis for coalition. For these critics, the black/white paradigm is especially detrimental to Asian Americans and Latin@s because of the way it obscures their distinct experiences with rac- ism. In other words, antiblack racism serves as the paradigmatic form of racism, distorting how other communities of color experience racism as well as expressions of racism between communities of color. Any sort of invo- cation of the black/white paradigm, therefore, is seen as necessarily suspect and problematic.75

A cohort of critical race and ethnic studies scholars, however, take issue with exhortations to go beyond black and white because of the way these calls summarily misconstrue the broader significance and relevance of the black/white paradigm. Jared Sexton, for instance, views critiques of the black/ white paradigm as based on a profound misconceptualization of the para- digm itself.

However, the notion of an “endemic” black-white model of racial thought is something of a social fiction—one might say a misreading—that depends upon a reduction of the sophistication of the paradigm in question. Once that reduction is performed, the fiction can be deployed for a range of polit- ical and intellectual purposes.76

For Katerina Deliovsky and Tamari Kitossa, calls to abandon the black/ white paradigm are predicated on a failure to grapple with the way anti- blackness “gives shape and context to the oppression of other racially marginalized groups, while creating a qualitatively distinct oppression for African-descended peoples.”77 Along similar lines, Janine Young Kim notes how the paradigm serves as a context for the marginalization of nonblack people of color, asserting that “the black/white paradigm is not one that we can escape through our own will.”78 John D. Márquez also subscribes to a broad understanding of blackness, what he terms foundational blackness, as a way to accentuate how blackness has profoundly shaped and continues to shape Latin@ politics and subjectivities. In his view, then, blackness (and for that matter antiblackness) has relevance beyond black bodies in terms of anchoring Latin@ subject and oppositional formations.79

For this cohort of scholars, efforts to displace the black/white paradigm are problematic because they are predicated on a particular reading of the

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black/white paradigm that serves to blur the foundational status of black- ness. Put another way, these efforts are marred by reductive notions of blackness, obscuring the specificity of blackness in terms of its enduring significance that extends beyond black people or black bodies and shifting demographics.80 Moreover, these scholars take issue with how conventional critiques of the black/white paradigm pathologize and position blackness as an anathema to effective multiracial solidarity building, something to be overcome because of its political obsolescence. These critics raise criti- cally important questions that Afro-Asian inquiry has yet to engage with in a sustained and substantive manner, a lack of engagement that includes a questioning of what it means to dispense with the black/white paradigm, what the repercussions of such a move might be and what, exactly, consti- tutes an alternative paradigm, and how this paradigm might represent an advance over the black/white paradigm. For these scholars, the challenge is not dispensing with but grappling with the broader significance and rele- vance of the paradigm and the pervasiveness of antiblackness.

A third issue has to do with the way Afro-Asian inquiry invokes Indigene- ity to accentuate the purported limits of the black-white binary and bolster its critique of the paradigm. Specifically, in what have become conventional exhortations against the black/white paradigm within the field, Native peo- ples are invoked as yet another group overlooked by the paradigm along with Asian Pacific Americans and Latin@s with the effect of collapsing Indige- nous peoples with these other groups. Native peoples, in other words, are positioned as yet another “minority” group subsumed under the category of “people of color,” predicated on what Enakshi Dua has described in another context as a politics of commonality that serves to flatten substantive and incommensurable differences among colonized and racialized groups.81 In the case of Park and Park, their lack of acknowledgment of Native peoples evacuates Indigenous subjects of contemporaneity and occludes their ongo- ing struggles for self-determination.82

As Indigenous studies scholars have endeavored to point out, however, Native peoples are more appropriately construed as a colonized group who are also members of sovereign nations. These scholars assert that the cate- gorization of Native peoples as “ethnic minorities” is tantamount to a form of colonialism because of the way it obscures fundamental differences between Native peoples and people of color including their distinct rela- tionship to the land. Winona Stevenson writes, “Given the current political climate surrounding Aboriginal self-government and land rights, the con- tinued act of ‘naming’ us ‘ethnic’ can only be understood as colonialist.”83

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For Stevenson, a viable comparative project needs to situate Native peoples in relation to other Native peoples around the globe rather than with non- Native people of color in order to avoid collapsing the overlapping yet dis- tinct processes of racialization and colonization.

This lack of critical engagement is symptomatic of the neglect of settler colonialism as an analytic frame within Afro-Asian inquiry and, more gen- erally, Asian American studies. It speaks to the field’s inability to grapple with the settler state and the embrace of raced frameworks that ultimately serves to minoritize Native peoples, raced frameworks that “depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous peoples.”84 More broadly, it speaks to the field’s lack of critical engagement with Native American and Indigenous studies, including what are considered core claims in the proj- ect of critical Native American and Indigenous studies. In other words, in this body of writing, there is no space for a serious and substantive engage- ment with Indigenous critiques of the logics of genocide and colonialism and the complicity of Afro-Asian inquiry with settler colonialist logics and assumptions.

Shu-mei Shih frames this myopia as a function of how calls to go beyond the black-white binary have resulted in new insights on particular groups but not on others. More specifically, she posits that the emergent scholarship on comparative racialization has not brought the case of Native peoples into sustained focus compared to other groups. To quote from Shih, “a sanctioned ignorance persists regarding how issues of Native American rights, land, and cultural preservation must unsettle the framing and articulation of minor- ity issues.”85 Shih proceeds to make the point that “lest comparative racial- ization end up displacing yet another marginalized group and constructing yet another implicit hierarchy in a contradiction of insight and blindness, empowerment and disempowerment, it must at each instance be critical of its own assumptions and conclusions.”86 To put it another way, calls to go beyond black and white may very well reinforce another kind of binary, with African Americans and Asian Americans becoming the de facto taken-for- granted frame of comparison.

C R I T I C A L E T H N I C S T U D I E S A N D C O M PA R AT I V E C R I T I Q U E

In this article, I have endeavored to provide a reappraisal of the comparative turn in ethnic and race studies through a critical consideration of the scope of Afro-Asian inquiry. I assert that at this critical moment, it is important for Afro-Asian inquiry to think through the challenges and complications

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of a comparative mode of analysis, to take up the questions that might at once seem far removed, coming from hitherto “extraneous” fields such as black studies and Native American and Indigenous studies. It is important for this body of writing to take up currents and concerns drawing attention to strains of antiblackness undergirding critiques of the black-white binary and claims of the conflation of Indigenous status with the racial minority status of non-Indigenous peoples.

Accordingly, Afro-Asian inquiry stands to profit from a critical engage- ment with these emergent currents and concerns in a way that fully places questions of power at the center of its political and theoretical inquiry. By the same token, a critical ethnic studies project stands to benefit from a sustained engagement with the aforementioned currents that serve to expand the terrain from which comparative analysis can be undertaken. The chal- lenge is to critically address questions and complications that revolve around the uneven terrain underlying this kind of work, to resist the sort of ideal- ization or facile analogy that has come to mark a significant strand of Afro- Asian inquiry.

A N T O N I O T. T I O N G S O N J R . is assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. He is author of Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-hop Nation (2013) and coeditor of the anthology Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse (2006).

N OT E S

1. Colleen Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1732. 2. Josh Kun and Laura Pulido, eds., Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 18. 3. Marta E. Sanchez, “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 16. 4. See note 2 in the introduction for a list of representative texts. 5. In their mission statement, for example, the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, “encourages the comparative study of racial- ization in the Americas, with a focus on the histories, literatures, and politics of Asian Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, Native American Indians, and African Ameri- cans” (emphasis mine). See Department of Ethnic Studies, Mission Statement, Uni- versity of California, Berkeley, http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/ethnicstudies.php. 6. Helen H. Jun’s focus is nineteenth-century black press engagement with Ori- entalist discourse as a means to grapple with the complications attached to African

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American citizenship. See Helen H. Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship,” American Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2006): 1051. 7. Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 20. 8. Ibid., 21. 9. Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, “Guest Editors’ Introduction,” posi- tions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 5. 10. Traise Yamamoto, “An Apology to Althea Connor: Private Memory, Public Racialization, and Making a Language,” Journal of Asian American Studies 5, no. 1 (2002): 15. 11. John D. Márquez, Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). 12. Susan Koshy, “Why the Humanities Matter for Race Studies Today,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1547. 13. Ibid., 1548. 14. See Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1996), 163–72. See also Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Michelle Wallace and Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21–33. 15. Grace Kyungwon Hong, “Strange Affinities: The Sexual and Gender Politics of Comparative Racialization,” CSW Update Newsletter (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for the Study of Women, 2007), 7. 16. Ibid. 17. Shu-mei Shih, “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1350. 18. Ibid., 1349. 19. Ibid. 20. In particular, Shih draws on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967) and The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968). 21. Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 3. 22. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994). 23. David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms: Some Thoughts on Method,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 7 (2009): 1275–76. 24. Ibid., 1275. 25. Ibid., 1279. 26. In a similar vein, Alexander G. Weheliye is wary of comparative approaches because of the way these approaches tend to calcify the nation and re-entrench hierarchies. In Weheliye’s view, comparative work presupposes the discreteness of its object of study, fuels competition (for resources, legitimacy, and recognition), and exacerbates tensions among subjugated groups. See Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

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27. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–2. 28. Ibid., 2. 29. Ibid., 16. 30. See, for example, the special issue of positions edited by Jones and Singh pub- lished in the spring of 2003 and the special issue of Journal for Asian American Studies published in February 2002. 31. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cul- tural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–2. 32. Carolyn Rody, The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contempo- rary Asian American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 48. 33. Ho and Mullen, Afro Asia, 16. 34. Ibid., 2–3. 35. Ibid., 3. 36. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, “Introduction,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1. 37. Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” 1732. 38. Edward J. W. Park and John S. W. Park, “A New American Dilemma? Asian Americans and Latinos in Race Theorizing,” Journal of Asian American Studies 2, no. 3 (October 1999): 289–90. 39. Ibid., 305. 40. LeiLani Nishime, “‘I’m Blackanese’: Buddy-Cop Films, Rush Hour, and Asian American and African American Cross-racial Identification,” in Asian North Amer- ican Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, ed. Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 43. 41. Shirley Hune, “An Overview of Asian Pacific American Futures: Shifting Paradigms,” in The State of Asian Pacific America: Policy Issues to the Year 2020 (Los Angeles: Leap Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993), 5. See also Hune’s article “Rethinking Race: Para- digms and Policy Formation,” Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1–2 (1995): 29–40. 42. Hune, “Rethinking Race,” 31. 43. Michael Omi, “Out of the Melting Pot and into the Fire: Race Relations Pol- icy,” in The State of Asian Pacific America, 199. 44. Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 33. 45. Ibid., 34. 46. Ibid., 58. 47. Ibid., 62. 48. Also often cited are the works of Vijay Prashad and Bill V. Mullen. Prashad is regularly referenced as providing a frame and piquing interest in the importance of recuperating and reaffirming the buried history of historical, political, and cultural convergences between the two groups. Prashad relies on the notion of polycultural- ism to underscore the porousness of culture and the interconnectedness of politics.

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He looks to the Bandung Conference as a pivotal moment in terms of cultivating a vision of anticolonial solidarity. Mullen is also an often-cited scholar in this body of work, relying on the notion of Afro-Orientalism to tease out the ways African American and Asian American writers and activists have engaged each other through the prism of Orientalism. Like Prashad, Mullen looks to the Bandung Conference as a consequential moment in terms of serving as an originary moment in the cul- tivation of Afro-Asian unity. See Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); and Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 49. Amy Abugo Ongiri, “‘He Wanted to Be Just like Bruce Lee’: African Ameri- cans, Kung Fu Theater and Cultural Exchange at the Margins,” Journal of Asian American Studies 5, no. 1 (February 2002): 31. 50. Nami Kim, “Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism: A Proposal,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 1, no. 7 (June 2010): 2. 51. Ibid., 13. 52. Vijay Prashad, “Foreword: ‘Bandung Is Done’—Passages in AfroAsian Epis- temology,” in Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounters, xiii. 53. Rody, The Interethnic Imagination, 48. 54. Ho and Mullen, Afro Asia, 5. 55. In the field, Bandung is situated within a larger narrative in which certain figures are referenced for embodying the “spirit” of Bandung. W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, is an often-cited figure for his embrace of Afro-Asian solidarity, namely how his interest in Asia shaped his political outlook and vision. In particular, Du Bois looked to Asia to work through his anticolonialist vision and politics predicated on a solidarity encompassing the world’s majority people of color. Michael T. Martin and Lamont H. Yeakey, for example, underscore how Du Bois’s identification with China loomed large in his vision of decolonization. See Michael T. Martin and Lamont H. Yeakey, “Pan-American Asian Solidarity: A Central Theme in DuBois’ Conception of Racial Stratification and Struggle,” Phylon 43, no. 3 (1982): 202–17. For someone like Mullen, a full accounting of Du Bois’s political thought and phi- losophy entails a careful consideration of his musings on Asia, and how Asia always loomed large in his thinking and writing. See Mullen, Afro-Orientalism. 56. Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 57. Julia H. Lee, Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 3. 58. Ibid., 13–14. 59. Helen Heran Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 149. 60. Ibid., 4. 61. For works along similar lines, see also Eddie Wong, “Comparative Racial- ization, Immigration Law, and James Williams’s Life and Adventures,” American

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Literature 84, no. 4 (December 2012): 797–826; and Hsuan L. Hsu, “Sitting in Dark- ness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia,” American Literary History 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 69–84. 62. See, for example, the chapters in Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounters. 63. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, “Black Bodies/Yellow Masks: The Orientalist Aesthetic in Hip-Hop and Black Visual Culture,” in AfroAsian Encounters, 190. 64. Deborah Wong, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: A/A: African American-Asian American Cross-Identifications,” Journal of Asian American Studies 5, no. 1 (Febru- ary 2002): 8. 65. Ongiri, “‘He Wanted to Be Just like Bruce Lee,’” 39. 66. N. Kim, “Engaging Afro/black-Orientalism,” 4. 67. Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” 1735. 68. Yamamoto, “An Apology to Althea Connor,” 22. 69. Antoinette Burton, “The Sodalities of Bandung: Toward a Critical 21st- century History,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 351. 70. Ibid., 352–53. 71. Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” 1732. Even someone like Prashad, a major figure who espoused Bandung as a highpoint in the actualization of Afro-Asian solidarity, has expressed reservations about the lasting legacy of the conference in terms of establishing solidarity. See his foreword in AfroAsian Encounters. 72. Jun, Race for Citizenship, 5. 73. Along similar lines, Viet Thanh Nguyen spotlights Asian American studies’ investments in and preoccupations with what he describes as “signs of resistance or accommodation” that have served to delimit the field’s purview. Specifically, Nguyen is alluding to a tendency within Asian American literary criticism to engage in a certain kind of reading strategy that ultimately serves to flatten Asian American heterogeneity. See Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 6. 74. Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” 1733. 75. Linda Martín Alcoff, for example, notes that the black/white paradigm priv- ileges a particular form of racial subordination predicated on color, obscuring how racial oppression operates along multiple axes such as nativism. See Linda Martín Alcoff, “Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary,” The Journal of Ethics 7, no. 1 (2003): 5–27. 76. Jared Sexton, “Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing,” Critical Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 90. See also Sexton’s monograph Amal- gamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 77. Katerina Deliovsky and Tamari Kitossa, “Beyond Black and White: When Going Beyond May Take Us Out of Bounds,” Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 2 (2013): 173. 78. Janine Young Kim, “Are Asians Black? The Asian-American Civil Rights Agenda and the Contemporary Significance of the Black/White Paradigm,” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998–99): 2402.

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79. Márquez, Black-Brown Solidarity. 80. Ibid. 81. Enakshi Dua, “Thinking through Anti-Racism and Indigeneity in Canada,” The Ardent Review 1, no. 1 (April 2008): 31–35. 82. Park and Park, “A New American Dilemma?” 83. Winona Stevenson, “‘Ethnic’ Assimilates ‘Indigenous’: A Study in Intellec- tual Neocolonialism,” Wicazo Sa Review 13, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 44. 84. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxvi. For a discussion of the problematic deployment of raced frameworks, see also D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark and Norman R. Yetman, “‘To Feel the Drumming Earth Come Upward’: Indigeniz- ing the American Studies Discipline, Field, Movement,” American Studies 46, nos. 3/4 (Fall–Winter 2005): 7–21. 85. Shih, “Comparative Racialization,” 1351. 86. Ibid., 1351–52.

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