Transcript “Foreign-ness” & Asian American Identities

Celebrating and Remembering
Keith Aoki: Musician,
Professor, Artist
Keith Aoki: The Musician
Keith Aoki: The Law Professor
“Orientalism” is that process with which Eurocentric nation
states have, for at least the past five centuries, defined
themselves in opposition to “Oriental” others. The subject
position occupied by Asian Americans reflects this tension
between global “Orientalism” and American understandings of
“race.” In addition to being “race-ed” as “non-whites,” Asian
Americans are also “race-ed” as “foreign”--the palimpsest of
Asian origin is never fully erased in the United States; instead
it acquires a racialized charge.
“Foreign-ness” & Asian American Identities: Yellowface, World War II
Propaganda, and Bifurcated Racial Stereotypes, 4 Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 1
(1996).
By realizing and engaging in such negotiated
dialogism, in which stereotypical images are destabilized,
socio-cultural and legal space is created for transformational
restructuring of the very institutional and structural nets that
have too often ensnared us in their interpretive loops.
“Foreign-ness” & Asian American Identities: Yellowface, World War II
Propaganda, and Bifurcated Racial Stereotypes, 4 Asian Pac. Am. L.J. 1
(1996).
California Alien Land Law
The salient point of these laws was their strongly
racialist basis —“aliens ineligible to citizenship” was a
disingenuous euphemism designed to disguise the fact that the
targets of such laws were first-generation Japanese immigrants,
or “Issei.” The objective of these laws was to prevent racialized
“others,” (who were also foreigners)—non-white Japanese
barred from naturalized U.S. citizenship—from asserting the
“right to own,” a fundamental stick in the proverbial “bundle of
sticks” U.S. property regime, and related sticks such as the
“right to rent” and the “right to devise” property by bequest.
No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth Century “Alien Land Laws” as a
Prelude to Internment, 40 B.C. L. Rev. 37 (1998).
Fred Korematsu
To Derrick Bell, perhaps all law and commentaries on law have
an inescapable science fictional component. Law is, after all is
said and done, the crystallization of a society's power relations,
however rigid or fluid members of that society may choose to
allow such crystallization to occur.
One Hundred Light Years of Solitude: The Alternate Futures of Latcrit
Theory, 54 Rutgers L. Rev. 1031 (2002).
When I look back on both my legal education and my own path
to a position within that same hierarchy, I feel a sense of déjà
vu when reading work that rages against the machine. I am
heartened to see that there are thoughtful, eloquent, and angry
voices being raised to engage in skirmishes on one of the
myriad fronts where formations of illegitimate hierarchy persist
. . . By searching for and finding a voice, they act. By openly
engaging with the hierarchical law review bureaucracy, they
act. And by finding the means to broadcast their message in the
face of institutional hostility, they act. The pieces in this
symposium are “verbs.”
Does Nothing Ever Change; Is Everything New?: Comments on the “To Do
Feminist Legal Theory” Symposium, 9 Cardozo Women's L.J. 415 (2003).
The second troubling aspect of the film is the way Snow
Falling on Cedars unabashedly fails to interrogate the
interracial obsession, indeed fetish, Ishmael has for Hatsue. In
films involving relationships between exotic “Oriental” women
and their white lovers (a theme that has been the basis of many
U.S. films for decades), the Oriental woman is inevitably
objectified problematically as either a menacing “dragon lady”
or a chaste “lotus blossom. This objectification springs from a
white male fetish for Asian women. While the film does
condemn the intolerance the community demonstrates for
Ishmael and Hatsue, there is very little critical examination of
the internal interracial dynamics of such a relationship.
Is Chan Still Missing? An Essay About the Film Snow Falling on Cedars
and Representations of Asian Americans in U.S. Films, 7 Asian Pac. Am.
L.J. 30 (2001).
What happens when the threatening “others” are no longer
“there”? That is, because of globalization and communication
technology, what happens when the “others” are either virtually
or actually “here,” and “we” (i.e. the West) are virtually or
actually “there”? Furthermore, what happens when “we” have
met the “others” and find that the “others” are “us”? A
diaspora analysis in the context of the Asian Century may help
us understand this complex set of questions. The current use of
the term the Asian Century does not make sense if “Asia,”
“Asians,” and the “West” are dispersed. An examination of
Asian diaspora provides a theoretical lens from which the term
the Asian Century can be unpackaged.
The Yellow Pacific: Transnational Identities, Diasporic Racialization, and
Myths(s) of the “Asian Century”, 44 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 897 (2011).
Professor Steven Bender
Trustee for the Aoki Education Trust
Seattle University School of Law
901 12th Avenue, Sullivan Hall
Seattle, WA 98122