Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective.
Rachel Lee
Note:this article originally appeared in boundary 2 26.2 (Summer 1999)
One of the most—if not the most—pressing social concerns informing Asian American cultural critique in the 1990s is that of globalization and the prospects of an Asian/Pacific community amidst increasing transnational traffic.1 While most critics in the field of Asian American Studies agree on this point, they differ radically on the implications of such border-defying migrations to Asian American political identity. To take two contrastive cases, Sau-ling Wong and Susan Koshy, in their (re)mappings of the field of Asian American Studies, both underscore the demographic changes in Asian America's population following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.2 Koshy uses this data to suggest the inadequacy of Asian American rubrics—such as, the U.S.-based, Asian pan-ethnicity model3 —to speak to the "deterritorialization of ethnic identity" that characterizes this more recently arrived, emigrant population.4 By contrast, Wong suggests that this same constituency will reinvigorate the "older" issues of citizenship, voting rights, access to education, and pressures to assimilate that—though set into motion by populations flowing across national borders—are still very much questions of national consciousness and consequence.5 Both of these positions are part of an ongoing critical debate in which Asian American Studies' past and future directions are being hotly contested.
Concurrent with this reassessment of the field by Asian American scholars in response to the pressures of globalization, theorists of "the Asia/Pacific" have also been speculating on the meanings of Asian American cultural production to the formation of alternative imagined communities "created by travel and trade, and...mobilized in dispersion" rather than primarily through settlement within individual nation-states.6 In the groundbreaking volume, What Is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (1993), Arif Dirlik, for instance, frames an Asian American literary tradition—defined by cultural nationalists Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan—as the embodiment of a cultural tradition corresponding to the "Asia-Pacific" idea.7 By proposing a cultural dimension to the Pacific Rim, Dirlik intervenes into the economic determinism that haunts discussions of the Asia Pacific region; and though I appreciate his motives in this respect, I take issue with his dated account of Asian American studies which is reduced to a past formation of hegemonic cultural nationalism intent on claiming America. My point is not to fault Dirlik's essay in particular but to regard its misapprehension of Asian American Studies as symptomatic of the hierarchical field positionings of Asia/Pacific theory versus Asian American literary studies. In essence, the Asia/Pacific paradigm is framed as the heuristic device of the future with old-fashioned Asian American Studies imagined as a mere subset of a more expansive and timely area of study. Whether deliberate or not, this privileging move requires that Asia/Pacific critics overlook Asian American literary texts that, far from lagging behind, actually anticipate global frameworks, enunciating precisely the formation of hybrid Asian cultures in scattered sites across the Pacific due to labor migrations, colonial invasions, the flow of transnational capital, and the hyperlinks of satellite communications.
Three years prior to the appearance of Dirlik's volume, Karen Yamashita published Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, a novel concerned more with border-defying "finance-scapes," "media-scapes," and eco-scapes than with U.S. multiculturalism and the struggle of Asians against domestic racism.8 Granted, many Asian American literary critics did not know how to characterize this novel's fabulistic subject matter and style. This essay represents an effort at rapprochement between spokespersons of critical regionalism who take a narrow view of Asian American culture and Asian American culture specialists who, though knowledgeable on a wealth of border-crossing cultural artifacts, haven't yet articulated these texts in terms of the transpacific and global frameworks theorized by historians, sociologists, economists, and anthropologists.
In this essay, I examine Yamashita's novel in relation to both theories of the "Asia-Pacific" and Asian American cultural nationalist paradigms. By examining this one particular novel's relationship to these overlapping yet also contestatory interpretive rubrics, I hope to shed light not only on two salient notions of community formation that continually vie for hegemony in the field of Asian American Studies, but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the way in which that struggle for hegemony has been narrated as a paradigm shift that has its telos (and paradoxically its origin) across the Pacific.9 To my mind, there are several dangers in Asian American discourse standing in as a foil for the expansiveness of the Asia/Pacific, not least of which is the evacuation of a sustainable space of Asian American Studies that is neither a subset of American Studies nor of Asian Studies but a third (tactical) space from which to critique both fields and to reflect scrupulously upon its own (potentially oppressive) institutional conventions.
I. The Asia-Pacific
To begin with a broad definition, one might describe the Asia-Pacific region as one of several ways to represent organizations of capital in the late twentieth century.10 According to Dirlik, the modern incarnation of "the Pacific Rim" began as a parallel initiative to the European economic community and anticipated the formalization of the North American Free Trade area (NAFTA).11 From one aspect, the Asia-Pacific idea appears the subset of a particular type of global discourse: transnational economism—as distinct from internationalism or humanism, for instance.From another aspect, however, visions of the Pacific Rim have a particular American cast—a means by which U.S. corporations responded to the economic successes of East Asian nations after W.W.II—Japan, in particular. Posing the U.S. as part of an Asian-Pacific region or Pacific Rim was to take part in those "miraculous" growth scenarios in the "Newly Industrialized Countries" of the East (i.e., Taiwan, S. Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore), even if that meant the ambivalent recognition that capitalism had been de-Westernized. 12 To quote Christopher Connery, "the [Pacific Rim] discourse of equality and connectedness reflects, in part, a reaction to East Asian 'success': When Japan is number one, the only way not to be number two is to transcend the nation."13 A primary reason for evoking a post-national community, then, is to deny the waning of U.S. superiority by incorporating "outsider" threats into a new transnational coalition.
As a pre-emptory strike at the economic potentiality of Asian-based entrepreneurs, the Asia-Pacific, on the one hand, merely extends the U.S.'s discourse of Manifest Destiny. On the other hand, by evoking a region defined by an economic logic specifically designed to transgress national borders, the Pacific Rim undermines the persuasiveness of territorial nationalism, U.S. or otherwise. A tension, therefore, develops between the general boundaryless capacities of capital flows—which the concept of the Asia-Pacific tries to capture—and the territorial conceptual order suggested in the term "Pacific Rim." To illustrate, Dirlik argues that the relationships comprising the Pacific Rim cannot "be understood without reference to global forces that transcend the Pacific."14 Claiming that the "Pacific Region idea" is not about spatial fixity though it is named after a geographical marker, he proposes "that the terms [of the Pacific Rim] represent ideational constructs that, although they refer to a physical location on the globe, are themselves informed by conceptualizations that owe little to geography understood physically or positivistically."15 Instead they are distinguished by human activity and networks that are nonetheless associated with the grand expanse of the Pacific:
There is indeed a Pacific region in a different (and more meaningful) sense than the physically geographic. Motions of people, commodities, and capital over the last few centuries have created relationships that traverse the Pacific in different directions.... Such motions continue to this day and account for the gap between the Pacific area (conceived physically) and a Pacific region conceived in terms of human activity. Emphasis on human activity shifts attention from physical area to the construction of geography through human interactions; it also underlines the historicity of the region's formation(s).16
The emphasis on human interactions becomes crucial to Dirlik's argument that the Asia-Pacific—generated by economists and military strategists—might be converted to culturalist ends. In other words, what was intended as a trope to catalyze financial partnerships and increase corporate profits might be diverted for other purposes, namely to describe the human labor, suffering, and ecological fall-out blithely covered over in allusions to a co-prosperity sphere. Thus, Asia-Pacific theorists search for cultural forms that might speak to an alternative "Asia-Pacific" consciousness produced out of the "human networks that endow the region with a social reality."17
In his early mapping of the Asia-Pacific, Dirlik turns to the cultural nationalist writings of Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan as possible proto-expressions of the "Asia-Pacific" ethos: equal partnership in a Pacific region rather than assimilation into an anglicized U.S.18 In this way, "claiming America" is rehabilitated under the Asia-Pacific rubric as an effort to claim America for Asia or for the Pacific region. In other words, if "America," like China or Japan or Korea is part of a vast Asian-Pacific network, then claiming America is not necessarily a denial of Asia but rather a disclaiming of the U.S. as an Anglo-Saxon preserve. Replacing or vying with the notion of America as an extension of European civilization is the idea of an Asia-Pacific that extends into America.19
In a more recent culturalist project, Dirlik along with co-editor Rob Wilson attempt to rectify the absence of Pacific Basin cultures in prior definitions of the Pacific Rim. The editors include creative works by Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans in order to highlight "indigenous traditions as alternatives to construct social identity."20 Orthographically, "Asia-Pacific" with a hyphen refers to the capitalist utopia while "Asia/Pacific," with a slash, indicates a "counter-hegemonic 'space of cultural production'" derivative of the local memories of Pacific Basin peoples.21 Interestingly, both of these attempts to refine and develop the Asia-Pacific as a cultural category fail to comprehend a text like Through the Arc, which neither claims America for Asia nor represents the local memories of Pacific Basin peoples.
It is my argument, then, that both definitions of the "Asia-/Pacific" as well as the fictional work, Through the Arc,, can all be viewed as responses to the unsettling effects of globalization or time-space compression. To quote Doreen Massey, time-space compression refers to "movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching-out of social relations, and to our experience of all this,"22 in other words, to a spreading out onto a global terrain of the social relations that determine the meanings and specificities of local places. In the same way that theories of the Asia-/Pacific study social identities and cultural artifacts through spatial, regional, and emplaced languages, so does Yamashita's novel provide a new, perhaps provisional, conceptual container for prospective communities.23 However, the semi-fictional place that unites the "imagined community" of Yamashita's novel is neither an island in the Pacific nor a nation that rests on its Rim but the Matacão, "an enormous impenetrable field" located in "the southern region of the Amazon basin" (TAR, 16). Though situated outside the "Asia-Pacific," this fictional site conceptually resembles the former geographic zone. As in the case of the Pacific Rim, the Matacão describes not a fixed and singular territory established by political claims but a shape-shifting region (later regions) defined by the presence of a "miracle" substance—in the Matacão's case, a highly moldable, magnetic plastic. Like the Pacific Rim, the Matacão is a quasi-geographical place-name, somewhat contiguous with the Amazon Forest yet also marked by indeterminate boundaries.
Throughout the narrative, Yamashita confronts her reader with both the geographic specificity of the Matacão—its Brazilian distinctiveness—and its formation through global flows that belie such locational limits. The Matacão comes to light as a phenomenon caused by external forces—garbage of the most populace and polluting nations sunk down into the Earth's molten layers and redistributed to the "virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon Forest, being one of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty" (TAR, 202). The local specificity of the former Amazon—its "virginal," isolable qualities— paradoxically, contributes to the undoing of its "local" determination. At the same time, the narrative suggests that the notion of place boundaries is, itself, a fiction, yet one necessary to comprehend the increasing compression of the world, signaled in the violation of such boundaries. Limning the effects of global financial flows, media networks, and migration routes requires the construction of a border to trespass, to mark the infiltration of local (native) identities by global (alien) influences and vice versa.
Whereas theorists of the Asia-Pacific grapple with the effects of global capital by highlighting the trespass of East-West dichotomies, Yamashita's novel highlights globalization as a multi-noded cultural intermingling that is not relayed through the merging of two "opposites"—e.g., Asia and the U.S.—but through the compilation of heterogeneous national, racial, and cultural components all in one site—the Matacão. Thus, an Amazonian native, a Japanese immigrant, a New York entrepreneur, a São Paulo denizen, and a pilgrim from Ceará all converge in this mystical place. Moreover, several of these characters are themselves embodiments of racial, regional, and cultural cross-fertilization: the narrative attributes Chico Paco's blond hair to "the old Dutch conquerors of [the northeastern] part of the country" (TAR, 25) and describes the São Paulan protagonist, Batista Djapan, as "a mellow and handsome mixture of African, Indian and Portuguese" (TAR, 12).
The novel especially highlights the global constitution of local identities in its portrait of the Amazonian denizen, Mané Pena. Though Mané has never traveled beyond his native stomping grounds, he remains greatly affected by the increased mobility of others: tourists "from every corner of the world" flow into Mané's unbounded locality—a veritable "wonder of the world" (TAR, 16-17, emphasis mine). When a national network comes to tape a documentary on the altered Amazon, Mané Pena appears contradictorily as "a poor, barefoot regional type" yet dressed in a "faded Hawaiian shirt splattered with Aloha" (TAR, 18 and 23). The Hawaiian shirt that Mané wears—imported from another tourist site—represents the spread of a Hawaiian artifact that is, paradoxically, a localized item that sheds some of its ethnic specificity as it makes its way around the world on the body of tourists. Thus, both Mané and the Hawaiian shirt he sports are somewhat like "the primeval forest that is not primeval" (TAR, 16), underscoring the already hybridized, global-local cultural milieu of not only the Matacão but also the Pacific Basin. The revelation toward the end of the novel that the Matacão, itself, is a conglomeration of waste from industrialized, high-polluting countries only confirms the sense of globalized localities and localized globalization (TAR, 202).
Because Mané lives in a region of particular international interest, the restriction of his life to this singular place actually intensifies his connections to people from other locations and to global culture. In this respect, he seems to exemplify what Massey describes as those who are affected by "time-space compression" but are not in control of it; in fact, they might be imprisoned in it.
Different social groups have distinct relationships to... mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don't; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.
...there are the people who live in the favelas of Rio, who know global football like the back of their hand, and have produced some of its players; who have contributed massively to global music, who gave us the samba and produced lambada that everyone was dancing to last year in the clubs of Paris and London; and who have never, or hardly ever, been to downtown Rio. At one level they have been tremendous contributors to what we call time-space compression; and at another level they are imprisoned in it.24
In drawing out the distinct positions of various peoples with respect to these global flows—what she calls "the power geometry of time-space compression"—Massey importantly distinguishes the jet-setters, media moguls, and organizers of international capital from both the undocumented migrant workers and those who physically do not travel yet whose immobility is greatly affected by the mobility of others.25 Thus, while relatively immobile with respect to the businessmen, tourists, scientists, and government officials who flock to the Matacão, Mané paradoxically finds himself displaced and transformed by their movements and flows.
Through its portraits of Mané and the Matacão, Through the Arc broaches themes of globalization that similarly preoccupy theorists of the Asia-Pacific; however, where these latter critics to a large degree rehabilitate a focus on Asia and the U.S. (though redefined in a relationship of partnership rather than hierarchy), Yamashita's novel attempts to displace both these optics by focusing on the fantastical site of the Matacão and on local native identity not necessarily derivative of the Pacific Basin but possibly affected by it (e.g., Mané dressed in an "Aloha" shirt).26 However, by illustrating globalization as a multiform, rather than East-West, convergence, Yamashita also attenuates her novel's connections to both Asian American and Asian-Pacific critical contexts. In not stressing the East-West cultural distinction (but preferring a First World-Third World distinction), Yamashita defies the methodological convention of both these scholarly fields. The question that immediately arises is whether Through the Arc is, indeed, relevant to Asian American literary traditions and an Asian American political project. Is the novel's particular outlook on globalization inherently at odds with an ethnic-specific reading? Does Yamashita's exploration of polyglot cultural influences require a revisioning of an implicit communal structure based on pan-Asian racial identity? These questions hint at a fundamental tension involved in interweaving a global thematic with a specific focus on Asian-Pacific and Asian American political concerns. While theories of the Asia-Pacific attempt to resolve that tension through a heavy reliance on geographic and spatial moorings (in essence, to recontain the spread of border-crossing effects), Yamashita's novel negotiates the disjuncture of her global and specific interests by way of literary allusion, narrative voice, word-play, and discursive details. In the following section, I trace the Asian American specificity of Yamashita's novel that plays counterpoint to its Brazilian and global focus.
II. The Karaoke-singing Railroad Worker: Shattering the Space-Time of Asian American Literature
When reviewers broadly characterize Yamashita's novel, they do not label it Asian American fiction; instead, they describe Through the Arc as "a parable of ecological devastation" (NY Times), a "wise first novel of global dimension" (Booklist), and "a mixture of magic realism, satire, and futuristic fiction" (SF Chronicle). Though the novel features a Japanese immigrant protagonist, this character is sufficiently altered from the expected Asian immigrant profile—e.g., the plantation worker, gold miner, laborer in the guano pits, war refugee—that his presence does not seem an obvious link to other Asian American literary works. Yet, for readers familiar with Asian American historical contexts, Yamashita's protagonist—Kazumasa Ishimaru—seems a subtle parody of a familiar archetype, the Chinese American railroad worker.This historical figure has provided grist for the mill in Asian American Studies for nearly three decades. In the late '70s and throughout the '80s, Asian American historians, playwrights, and novelists recalled the labor of Chinese immigrants on the Central Pacific to make a case for national belonging.27 The grandfather in Maxine Hong Kingston's best-selling novel China Men (1980) exemplifies the type of heroic portraiture surrounding the Chinese railroad worker:
[Grandfather] spent the rest of his time on the railroad laying and bending and hammering the ties and rails [until] the engine from the West and the one from the East rolled toward one another and touched. The transcontinental railroad was finished.... "Only Americans could have done it," they said.... [Ah Goong] was an American for having built the railroad.28
Kingston portrays her forebear not as part of an international workforce but as an "American" by virtue of his toil on the rails. Great national works such as the Central Pacific thus attest to both the part of America that is the inheritance of the Chinese and their remembered labor in the U.S. that made these immigrants "American."
Playfully riffing on this archetype of Asian American history, Yamashita anticipates those critics who comment on the pressing need for Asian American Studies to go "beyond railroads and internment" which for so long have been the focal points of scholarship.29 Yamashita both resuscitates this familiar communal "hero" and brings him beyond his original meanings by updating him for her twenty-first century setting. Rather than building a national infrastructure, Kazumasa is a maintenance worker on a fully developed system that is breaking down both literally and financially—into privatized sub-units. After being down-sized out of his job, this Japanese—rather than Chinese—worker travels from Sado Island, via Tokyo, to Brazil to find work as a highly specialized technician on the railways.30 Instead of doing back-breaking work laying rails, Kazumasa—by virtue of his technical gifts (his having a supernatural ball that can sense railway deterioration)—renders travel more efficient by proleptically remedying breakdowns before they occur.31 Because he is technologically advanced, he has an easy time relocating to South America rather than North America, 32 where his job consists of his riding the rails and waiting for his ball to jerk uncontrollable (TAR, 8-9).
By evoking this icon of Asian American heroism, Yamashita invites comparisons not only between the lives of her protagonist and an earlier generation of pioneers but also between the function that these icons may perform in their respective interpretive contexts. When Elaine Kim calls for scholars to go "beyond railroads and the internment," she may be more importantly urging them to reconsider the nationalist basis of these topics. If the Chinese railroad worker (and for that matter the interned Japanese family) represents an ideal symbol to press Asian American claims upon a national legacy—a move that tacitly accepts myths of American exceptionalism even as the larger project may be to question the "whites-only" basis of that exceptionalism—then Yamashita redeploys that archetype for post-national purposes. Kazumasa—although called upon by "[Japan's] national headquarters [to inspect] the entire national system" (7)—finds his past service for the country no match for the corporate bottom line that now favors an "electronic gadget" to take over his functions at reduced cost (8). Precisely by resuscitating this familiar figure whom Asian American scholars are conditioned to admire as a hard-working contributor to the American nation, Yamashita underscores the limitations of this type of centering move. In other words, it is not the case that Kazumasa doesn't have the makings of a national hero; he clearly does. It is rather that in a time when national utilities are fragmenting into competing capitalist units, when building infrastructure is less important than downsizing to maximize profits, when railways signify less as patriotic achievements and more as "a lucrative travel business," then crafting a national hero is to create a deliberate anachronism—a figure who, despite having saved "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives" (10)—is outplaced.33
By calling the construction of this national hero a deliberate anachronism, I want to stress that Yamashita is framing this archetype of Asian American identity as one among many other possible hero(ine)s and not necessarily arguing for the transcendence of his significance. In other words, Yamashita redesigns rather than abandons this archetype of Asian American cultural nationalism and, in doing so, does not so much endorse an end to the romance with the "railroads and the internment"34 as much as she encourages a reasoned exploration of what connections could be made between these traditional topics (and the terms of nationalism upon which they presume) and her thematic concerns—e.g., development in the "Third World," time-space compression—and the global grounds upon which they are imagined. Thus, while acknowledging the railroad worker's importance to twentieth-century Asian American politics, the narrative proposes that his twenty-first-century counterpart, Kazumasa Ishimaru, may be less heroically and singularly imagined in a prospective future of cross-national, multiracial political coalitions. In addition to an Asian immigrant protagonist, then, the novel features five other main characters.
The novel negotiates the tension between keeping focused on its Asian immigrant character and diminishing his importance respective of other racial, gendered, and classed subjects by constructing a first-person narrator that has both a localized perspective and yet can panoramically detail five other "lives" set in disparate regions. This narrator, a baseball-sized globe hovering inches from Kazumasa's forehead at first identifies closely with the Japanese protagonist: "Of me you will learn by and by. First I must tell you of a certain Kazumasa Ishimaru to whom I was attached for many years. It might be said that we were friends, but...we were much closer..." (TAR, 3). The initial chapter of the book concentrates solely on Kazumasa's life in Japan. Once "the ball" travels to Brazil, however, s/he becomes a fully omniscient voice:
While I could not, of course, control the events that were to come, I could see all the innocent people we would eventually meet.... There was old Mané Pena, the feather guru, and the American, Jonathan B. Tweep. There was the man they called the angel, Chico Paco, and there was the pigeon couple, Batista and Tania Aparecida.
....
These things I knew with simple clairvoyance. I also knew that strange events far to our north and deep in the Amazon Basin, events as insignificant as those in a tiny northeastern coastal town wedged tightly between multicolored dunes, and events as prestigious as those of the great economic capital of the world, New York, would each cast forth an invisible line, shall I say, leading us to a place they would all call the Matacão. (TAR, 8-9, 15).
It is as if, in choosing to limn a specific globalized locale in the twenty-first century, Yamashita cannot keep her focus solely on the Japanese but must spatially displace the point of view from an individual body to a number of scattered, multi-ethnic, multi-national and regional perspectives.
By crafting five non-Asian protagonists, the author somewhat disarticulates narrative focus from Asian or Asian American identity. In this respect, Through the Arc once again strays from the cultural nationalist project of searching for the origins of an Asian American collective identity through rehearsals of the past labors, migration patterns, conditions of colonization, and cultural artifacts of Asians in the U.S. Rather, Yamashita's text grapples with both new and old imaginative formations of community and coalition enabled and transformed by spatial convergences particular to postmodernity or late capitalism.35 These alternative communities are composed of nationally and racially heterogeneous social actors who are globally interrelated by virtue of worldwide media links, touristic travel across borders, international financial networks, transnational trade, and a shared ecology. Yet significantly, in the novel, they are also connected via a satellite who is associated, at least initially, with an Asian immigrant character.
Another means by which the author balances her global thematic and ethnic-local preoccupations is to make the two projects homologous by giving globalization an Asian cast. Whereas many theorists who explore the spread of social relations across space tend to equate globalization with the dissemination of Western culture,36 Yamashita makes clear that the widening of Japan's influence is also her concern. The North American and later multinational firm, GGG, incorporates "old courses in Japanese corporate business sense" into its operating model (TAR, 53). Likewise, the three-armed New Yorker, J.B. Tweep, describes himself as an East-West hybrid, a man who has "the security of a Japanese businessman" but the mobility and instability of "an American worker" (TAR, 125). Playing with signs and acronyms, Yamashita colors her narrative with other references to Japan, for instance, in J.B.'s initials which might stand for "Japanese Brazilian" and in Batista and Tania's last name—a homonym for "Japan." Such word-play, along with other overt references, build to a cumulative effect hinting at the Japanification of Brazil and the U.S.
I have characterized such references as part of the author's attempt to resolve the tension between her global and ethnic-specific interests, by making globalization a synonym—not for Americanization—but for the spread of Japanese culture. Yet, some perhaps unintended consequences result from this particular type of negotiation. Firstly, in a somewhat utopian vein, Yamashita imagines an Asiatic globalization that occurs seemingly without violence. For instance, in her chapter entitled "Karaoke," the author details the expansion of this "style of nightclub invented by the Japanese" until "almost every town in South American had one" (TAR, 88). The narrative portrays both the immigrant Kazumasa "singing with abandon in his specially built karaoke shower at home" and the local São Paulan, Batista Djapan, expressing all of his pent-up saudades (a particular form of Brazilian longing) at Hiro's Karaoke on the Matacão (TAR 149, 128). Here, Japanification is envisioned as a relatively harmless cultural invasion where individual (and local Brazilian) expression is mediated—perhaps even facilitated—but certainly not annulled by Japanese technology. In other words, the author seems to suggest that Japanese in-flows ought not to be viewed with orientalist anxieties about another "yellow peril."37 Such perceptions have resuscitated a racist and institutionally sanctioned backlash that affects all Asian Americans, as the Vincent Chin case well illustrates.38 By the same token, by portraying these Japanese influences as detached from a world-wide complex of uneven development, Yamashita understates the power asymmetries between Japan—an economic superpower—and Brazil—a country in virtual bondage to the International Monetary Fund and to "First World" lender nations. According to Swasti Mitter, this debt crisis has led to "20 million abandoned and undernourished children in Brazil, a country that has the resources to feed not only all its own children but also millions in other countries."39 Though the novel does not comment on Japan's role in Brazil's debt crisis, it does underscore the extraction of Brazil's wealth to enrich the coffers of other nations. The fictional run on Brazil's newest "miracle" resource—the Matacão—mimics past expropriations of the country's assets:
Brazil had once before emptied its wealthy gold mines into the coffers of the Portuguese Crown and consequently financed the Industrial Revolution in England. This time, if there was any wealth to be had, it had better remain in Brazil. Some scoffed... saying that the treasure of the Matacão might, at best, make a small dent in their continuing interest payments to the International Monetary Fund. (TAR, 96)
Japan's cultural infusions are relativized respective of other cultural "invasions" and exchanges involving Portugal, Britain, the Netherlands, Africa, and the U.S.
Secondly, Yamashita suggests that as the configuration of world power shifts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries,40 it may be impossible or only nostalgic for Asian Americans to see themselves innocently as part of the Third World oppressed—the ones being invaded by cultural influences from elsewhere. Recent reassertions of Asian Americans "origins" in the Third World Strikes might be viewed as precipitate responses to this crisis of identification.41 That is, progressive Asian American activists find it all the more urgent to reassert their anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist commitments at precisely a time when "Asian America" is no longer homologous—if it ever was—with a critique of development and modernity, as the examples of Hong Kong entrepreneurs in Vancouver and San Francisco make manifest. The futuristic portrait of Through the Arc suggests that, rather than identifying first and foremost with the nineteenth century railroad worker and rallying behind his exclusion from national belonging, Asian Americans might widen the scope of their struggles and de-ethnicize their communal fidelities in order to fight for the poor and oppressed regardless of national origins.42 At the same time, Through the Arc stresses the unevenness of Asian-Pacific nationalities and regions, as suggested by the different meanings attached to the spread of karaoke and the global travel of "Aloha" tee-shirts. In effect, Yamashita underscores the need not for a complacent reiteration of Asian America's past nor for an uninformed reorientation toward Asian America's vexing and prospective subjects but rather for a stereoscopic view of both, incarnate in her railroad worker who sings karaoke.
Conclusion: On Laughter, Forgetting and Rapprochement
"The Asia/Pacific is an imagined community that tries to forget the trauma, war, and power inequities of the Cold War."
—Rob Wilson
I began this examination of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by noting a particular crisis moment, or, more precisely, a crisis space between Asian America and the Asia/Pacific, informing both Yamashita's thematic preoccupations as well as our (politically-invested) interpretive choices in reading this novel. It is my argument that underlying the gap between these two fields and the reluctance to overlap them completely is a barely articulated class cleavage that has too often been misapprehended as a geographic narrowness in the service of (cultural) nationalism. One of the primary stakes of my project, then, is to reveal class cleavages as the more important ground of Asian America's struggle with Asia/Pacific theories and their alternative imagined communities. Asian American critics do not simply resist globalization but decry a particular form of global-Pacific studies—one that triumphally heralds the entrepreneurial Asian transnational class, their alternative imagined communities mobilized in dispersion but also formed through travel and the ownership of trade. Until the Asia/Pacific is reformulated as speaking to marginalized even disenfranchised subjects in the basin, Asian Americanists will continually resist its overtures, and it would be a mistake to read this resistance as mere stubbornness toward internationalist frameworks.43
Yamashita's work44 emerges precisely at the moment when heralding Asians and Asian Americans is likely to be viewed in overtly conflicting ways: as both a "rescuing" of subaltern subjects from Western domination and as a more ambiguous advocacy of an economically stratified, though racially named, community.45 As triumphal accounts of the Pacific Rim suggest, contemporary Asians both in the Americas and across the Rim do not correspond unambiguously to the politically and economically persecuted, even as recitations of U.S. national laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the Alien Land Law (1913), or the Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934) remind us of historically traumatized Asian being. Asians and Asian Americans in the new millennium are as likely to conjure up an image of entrepreneurial success and transnationally amassed wealth as to evoke sympathetic portraits of Thai sewing workers sequestered in Los Angeles' sweatshops. The struggle over whether Asian American Studies can, should, or must globalize its outlook seems to eclipse or misdirect our attention from the more onerous class issues underlying the field's reluctance—at least in some quarters—to do so. In other words, such a debate over Asian American Studies' globalization cannot be meaningful without consideration of the context of class and the reluctance of Asian Americanists to be framed as experts or apologists for the new "model minority"—the transnational Asian capitalist. Pacific Rim discourse is particularly invested in obscuring distinctions of class and power between, on the one hand, Asian heads-of-state and Confucian entrepreneurs and, on the other, the disenfranchised Asian factory or agricultural worker. What is resisted—yet also tentatively embraced—in Asian American circles, then, is this blurring of class lines that, though not homologous with an international or critical regionalist focus, remains a prominent feature in mainstream imaginings of the Pacific Rim.
At present, Asian America contains within its "imagined community" the "professional-managerial" economic stratum symbolized by Yamashita's protagonist, Kazumasa, as well as the Pacific Basin working poor, most closely approximated in the figure of Mané Pena. However, increasingly, Asian American Studies is zeroing in on the economic disjunctions of its own membership—disjunctions that are certainly co-articulated with geographic and ethnic disjunction46 —yet which seem to be the more troublesome points of resistance in thinking about Asian American culture in Asian/Pacific perspective. 47
It is precisely through raising these matters that Through the Arc plays a significant role—pressuring the limits of Asian America as a nationally bounded entity and challenging the assumption that Asian American cultural texts offer testament to a strictly downtrodden racial-economic subject largely defined by his/her victimization in the West. Readers may enter this novel expecting to cheer for its Japanese protagonist, Kazumasa, but by the end (s)he must also consider the subaltern figure of Mané Pena and wonder why his fate is not to survive in this transnational, tri-continental expanse of limitless interchange. By revealing that the Asian protagonist and the economic subaltern are not self-identical, Through the Arc both reflects upon and intensifies the crisis in Asian America's foundational subaltern identity politics, a crisis primarily generated by the disarticulation of Asian racial profiles with subaltern economic profiles. All of this is to suggest that Yamashita—rather than giving us easy answers to whether we must trade "claiming America" for globalizing Asian American Studies—serves notice that even as the terrain of Asian America already exceeds national boundaries, the maps, paradigms and reconfigured regions of global study are themselves multiple (and that Asian Americanists have a choice amongst them). Asian American critics can select those that favor a celebration of the bourgeois transnational class, or those that champion the subaltern laboring class, or even those that favor ethnic markers as a way of bringing both those classes under one communal roof (e.g., studies of Chinese diaspora). The pathways to the study of Asian American culture and society in global contexts are themselves multiple and ought not be flattened out into an either/or game between nationalism and internationalism.
By way of conclusion, I want to return to the notion of rapprochement with which I began my analysis. In the epigraph cited at the beginning of this section, Rob Wilson characterizes the Asia/Pacific as a community encouraging a type of active forgetfulness that would help move both the East and West beyond Cold War binaries. Asian American cultural artifacts, by contrast, have long been in the business of memorializing trauma, of not forgetting specific acts of exclusion, imprisonment, and dispossession. In fact, Asian Americanists would likely supplement Wilson's observation to highlight the way in which forgetfulness might extend rather than diminish hierarchical relations within the Pacific that do not necessarily end with the Cold War. In other words, the Asia/Pacific might be viewed as an imagined community that "tries to forget the trauma, war, and power inequities of the Cold War" precisely in order to solidify power inequities established in the Cold War. Remembering trauma becomes the key to undoing those inequities (hence, the highlighting of Asian American injury as memorialized in the straining, toiling, or imprisoned bodies in literary works such as Kingston's China Men , Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, or Wakako Yamauchi's 12-1-B).
Yet, Yamashita's Asian American protagonist, her railroad worker who sings karaoke, is a ludic figure, and as with most ludic figures, Kazumasa is split by his twoness—his resonance in past and future temporalities and his dual positions as racially marginalized yet economically privileged. Kazumasa holds these two "moments" and "spaces" together as he also makes sense (or is made sensible) through both national and global-regionalist models of interpretation. Trauma might be thought of, then, as the renarration of division and of separation—either between East and West or even between subaltern multiracial migrant classes and emergent entrepreneurial transnationals. Yamashita's novel partakes of a particularly untraumatic narration: the author crafts a humorous, giddy and playful text best serving her purposes of marking a moment of connection—of the simultaneity of local and global, and the self-sameness of Asian American national heroes transfigured by global capital yet still intelligible through Asian America's evolving paradigms. Clearly a figure of rapprochement rather than of moral imperative, Yamashita's comic text also advocates a forgetfulness of traumatic mono-racial politics in order to enable the imagining of hybrid —and even pleasurable—spatial, racial, and cross-class convergences.
NOTES
A version of this paper was presented in Honolulu, HI at the MELUS conference, "Multi-ethnic Literatures Across the Americas and the Pacific: Exchanges, Contestations, & Alliances," April 19, 1997. My thanks to Christopher Connery and Rob Wilson for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.1 Registering an early 1990s interest in questions of globalization are Sucheta Mazumdar's influential essay, "Asian American Studies and Asian Studies: Rethinking Roots" and the volume in which it was printed, the official proceedings of the annual meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies, entitled Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives. Eds. Shirley Hune, Hyung-chan Kim, Stephen S. Fugita, and Amy Ling (Pullman, WA: Washington State UP, 1991). See also Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng's The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1994); and Amerasia Journal's special issue on "Transnationalism" (volume 22:3 1996).
2 Wong, Sau-ling. "Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads," Amerasia Journal 21.1 and 2 (1995): 1-27; Koshy, Susan. "The Fiction of Asian American Literature," Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (Fall 1996): 315-46.
3 Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992).
4 Koshy, 334-5.
5 Wong, 16-7, 19.
6 Ong, Aihwa and Donald Nonini, eds. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.
7 Dirlik, Arif, ed. What is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993). In a subsequent article, Dirlik persists in identifying cultural nationalism as the hegemonic reference point of Asian American Studies ("Asians on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local Community in the Making of Contemporary Asian America," Amerasia Journal 22.3 (1996), 17).
8 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1990). This work is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TAR. Arjun Appadurai coined the terms "finance-scapes" and "media-scapes" in "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2.2 (Spring 1990): 1-24.
9 For recent narrations of the field that imply the eschatology of Asian American Studies across the Pacific, see Dirlik's "Asians on the Rim" and Koshy's "The Fiction of Asian American Literature." For an alternative mapping, see Sau-ling Wong's "Denationalization Reconsidered." Christopher Connery makes the point that the globe's circularity renders the journey Westward and forward (and into the future) simultaneously the journey backward to the past—to origins in the East; he further argues that this circularity is implicated in a capitalist imaginary ("The Oceanic Feeling and Regional Imaginary," Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, Durham: Duke UP, 1996, 298-99).
10 Connery describes Pacific Rim Discourse as "an imagining of U.S. multinational capitalism in an era when the 'socialist' bloc still existed, and it is the socialist bloc that is the principle discursive and strategic Other" ("Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years." Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, eds. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995, 32); while Bruce Cumings claims that the "Pacific Rim" is a "class-based definition of Asia. The 'community' is a capitalist archipelago, based on indigenous labor power and purchasing power—although mainly labor power until recently" ("Rimspeak; or, The Discourse of the 'Pacific Rim,'" What's in a Rim, 33). To my mind, Donald Nonini offers one of the most persuasive accounts of the Asia-Pacific: "the 'Asia-Pacific' or 'Pacific Rim' can best be understood as the trope for a set of economic, political, and cultural processes creating relationships within a supraregion of Asian and the United States that have been under way since approximately the mid-1970s—processes arising from what the Marxist geographer David Harvey has called the 'spatial displacements' or 'spatial fixes' of contemporary capitalism" (What's in Rim, 163). See also Ong and Nonini's characterization of modern Chinese transnationalism as a parallel, yet ethnic-specific (Chinese) rather than pan-Pacific, social formation likewise associated with late capitalism and arising "out of the new transnational economic processes that transcend the porous political boundaries of nation-states" (Ungrounded Empires, 11).
11 Dirlik, What's in a Rim, 8. According to Dirlik, the Asia-Pacific idea was invented by Europeans somewhat haphazardly from their discovery of it in the sixteenth century and more formally since the nineteenth century onwards (What's in a Rim, 5-6). However, he and the other contributors to his volume are concerned with "the discourse of the Pacific as part of a global discourse...the product of a discourse of capitalism" which "began to emerge sometimes in the 1960s" (What's in a Rim, 7-8). See M. Consuelo León W.'s "Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific" in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, 17-29, for a genealogy of the Pacific image in American minds since the eighteenth century.
12 Alexander Woodside, "The Asia-Pacific Idea as Mobilization Myth," What's in a Rim, 24.
13 Connery, "Pacific Rim Discourse," 6.
14 Dirlik, What's in a Rim, 4.
15 Dirlik, What's in a Rim, 3. Despite its incongruency with a geographic region, many critics specify the Pacific Rim through geographical lists. Connery notes that "by 1973 or 1974, it appears to mean the United States and East Asia;" however, "the most extensive geographical definition of the term has been: peninsular and island Southeast Asia; China, Northeast Asia, including the Soviet Pacific region; Australia; New Zealand; Papua New Guinea, the islands of the south Pacific; and the Pacific Coast of South, Central, and North America. For practical discursive purposes, the Pacific Rim consists of the United States, Canada, Mexico (tenuously though...), Japan, China, the Four Tigers...—Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore—and the up-and-coming, or minor-league players: Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The psychic center of the Pacific Rim is the United States-Japan relationship" (Connery, "Pacific Rim Discourse," 32). Relying less on a geopolitical catalogue and more on a geoeconomic one, Bruce Cumings argues that "Rimspeak" ropes in the miracle economics of Latin American, "post-Allende Chile, maquiladora Mexico, even Atlantic Rim Brazil (but only in its pre-debt-crisis phase of 'miracle growth')" (Cumings, "Rimspeak," 31).
16 Dirlik, What's in a Rim, 4.
17 Dirlik, What's in a Rim, 307.
18 Dirlik, What's in a Rim, 320-25.
19 Interestingly, Dirlik—a specialist in modern Chinese history—has little difficulty embracing the idea of an Asia-Pacific that extends into America. By contrast, Gary Okihiro—a central figure in Asian American Studies —stresses an American invasive desire that ultimately brought forth Asian American history: "Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to America; Americans went to Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to take the wealth of America; Americans went to take the wealth of Asia. Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans went to conquer and colonize Asia. And the matter of the 'when and the where' of Asian American history is located therein, in Europe's eastward and westward thrusts, engendered, transformative, expansive" (Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 1994, 28-9).
20 Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, eds. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995, 13.
21 Wilson and Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, 6.
22 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994), 147.
23 It is my argument, then, that theories of the Asia-Pacific comes in a variety of forms (e.g., fictional, ethnographic) that are not necessarily under the express banner of the "Asia-Pacific." For instance, Ong and Nonini do not examine their subject—modern Chinese transnationalism—under the express banner of Asia/Pacific theory. However, by Asia/-Pacific theory, I mean to evoke institutionally and generically distinct studies (e.g., under the rubric of diaspora studies, area studies, East Asian studies, Pacific Basin studies, and Asian American cultural criticism) that delve into questions of globalization in relation to contemporary Asian ethnogenesis across various sites. Ong and Nonini , though focusing specifically on Chinese transnationals, make clear their affinity with the post-Orientalist and critical regionalist approach of the explicit Asia/Pacific theorists, Dirlik and Wilson: "We agree with Dirlik's position and seek in our essays to go beyond the analyses of written texts in his two edited volumes...by providing ethnographic detail.... We, with Wilson and Dirlik (1994), call for the humanization—and transformation—of the so-called global system of late capitalism, in Asia and elsewhere" (Ong & Nonini, 12-13). Yamashita's novel—though characterized as a magical-realist text about Brazil—also has affinities with the critical regionalist approach even as it significantly intervenes and revises many of its premises.
24 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 149-50.
25 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 149.
26 Furthermore, by moving focus away from the miracle economies of the Pacific Rim and scrutinizing a former export-driven "miracle" economy now in a state of tremendous debt crisis— ostensibly located outside "the Asia-Pacific" region— the narrative encourages speculation over the financially determinate, changeable borders of the "Asia-Pacific" region. As noted earlier, Bruce Cumings claims that "sometimes Rimspeak ropes in the Latin American countries [such as] Atlantic Rim Brazil (but only in its pre-debt-crisis phase of 'miracle growth')" (Cumings, "Rimspeak," 31). If Brazil can only be a part of the Rim in its miracle phase, then is Through the Arc's portrait of post-miraculous Brazil a harbinger of "the endpoint of Pacific Rim discourse," for which Christopher Connery give the date of February 1990—the same year of Through the Arc's publication (Connery, "Pacific Rim Discourse," 46). While for some "free marketeers" the end of Pacific Rim discourse merely marks the expansion of their economic formulae onto a "global rim" (Connery, "Pacific Rim Discourse," 55), in Through the Arc's case, going beyond Pacific Rim discourse is part of a larger critique of the fiction of co-prosperity. The novel wedges apart the seamless portrait of miraculous "development" by underscoring the diversity of social actors participating in co-prosperous growth.
27 See Ronald Takaki's Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (NY: Oxford UP, 1979, 1990) and Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (NY: Penguin, 1989, 1990); Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men. (New York: Vintage International, 1980, 1989); Frank Chin's The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. (Minneapolis: Coffee House P, 1988); David Henry Hwang's "The Dance and the Railroad." (Broken Promises: Four Plays. New York: Avon Books, 1982, 1983), 59-99; Bill Ong Hing's Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1993), 20; and Sau-ling Wong's Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 124-5.
28 Kingston, China Men, 145.
29 Elaine Kim, "Beyond Railroads and Internment: Comments on the Past, Present, and Future of Asian American Studies." Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies. Eds. Gary Y. Okihiro, Marilyn Alquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and K. Scott Wong. (Pullman, WA: Washington State UP, 1995) 12-13.
30 A combination of Japanese technological innovation and Chinese-American history, Kazumasa is a truly pan-Asian American invention, a figure whose founding identity myths cross ethnic and national borders. Also, in referring to the Chinese railroad worker as an archetypal figure in Asian American history, I am not suggesting that this figure will or ought to remain at the center of Asian American founding myths. Rather, I wish to emphasize Yamashita's "signifying" (repeating with a difference) on traditional tropes of Asian American literature.
31 While Kingston emphasizes the back-breaking work of her Chinese ancestors on the railroads, Ronald Takaki wishes to dispel the notion that this immigrant population provided only unskilled labor: "The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad line was a Chinese achievement. Not only did they perform the physical labor required to clear trees and lay tracks; they also provided important technical labor by operating power drills and handling explosives" (Takaki, "Iron Cages," 230; Strangers from a Different Shore, 85).
32 Many Asians in the nineteenth century did emigrate to South America, for instance the Chinese in Peru and Mexico and the Japanese in Brazil. See Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru (1849-1930)," Amerasia Journal 15:2 (1989): 91-116; Nobuya Tsuchida, "The Japanese in Brazil, 1908-1941." Diss. UCLA, 1978; Christopher A. Reichl, "Stages in the Historical Process of Ethnicity: The Japanese in Brazil, 1908-1988." Ethnohistory 42:1 (Winter 1995): 31-62; Takashi Maeyama, "Ethnicity, Secret Societies, and Associations: the Japanese in Brazil." Comparative Study of Society and History (1979): 589-610.
33 To be perfectly clear, I am not pronouncing the fight for national inclusion anachronistic. Sau-ling Wong compellingly argues that making claims vis-´-vis the U.S. nation-state is as legitimate and ongoing a critical practice for Asian Americans as mining the economic, social, and cultural links between Asians in the U.S. and Asians elsewhere (e.g., Brazil, Japan, the "Pacific Rim"). Wong stresses that Asian American scholars ought to configure these foci not in a time-line of progression and succession but as simultaneously occurring modes of redefinition and struggle (Wong, "Denationalization Reconsidered," 17), a position with which I wholeheartedly agree. I use the term "anachronism," then, in a literary-critical sense: to highlight Yamashita's use of a particular icon, object, or technology associated with a particular time and displacing it into another setting to jarring effect.
34 Yamashita's early 90's novel, thus, foreshadows reformulations of Japanese identity in the Americas that have been aired in this latter half of the decade, for instance in the most recent issue of Amerasia Journal 23.3 (Winter 1997-98), entitled Beyond National Boundaries: The Complexity of Japanese-American History, where guest editor Yuji Ichioka's introduction clearly enunciates a narrative of Japanese and Japanese American perspectives, on the one hand, linked to the historical watershed of W.W.II (alternatively the "Pacific War") yet, on the other, moving beyond the internment as the singular meaning of the War for Japanese on both sides of the Pacific.
35 David Harvey's "The Condition of Postmodernity" (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990); Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53- 92.
36 Exemplary of this approach are critics of media imperialism who "concern themselves with the structural and institutional aspects of the global media...focusing on such issues as the 'dumping' of cheap television programmes in the Third World or the market dominance of Western news agencies" (John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins UP, 1991, 22). See also Tomlinson's critique of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 34-67).
37 See Ching, "Imaginings in the Empires of the Sun," Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, 268 and 270, which details the resurgence of Japan-bashing; also see Meredith Woo-Cumings who traces a renewed Orientalism in Pacific Rim discourse that portrays "East Asian countries [as]...predatory in economics...sapping U.S. strength" ("Market Dependency in U.S.-East Asian Relations," What's in a Rim, 137).
38 Vincent Chin was a Chinese-American draftsman in Detroit who was clubbed to death by two recently laid-off American autoworkers who blamed Japanese imports for the loss of their jobs. Chin's killers were sentenced to three years of probation and a fine of $3,780. See Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991): 176-8; and William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993): 193-6, for an account of how the Chin case galvanized the Asian American community.
39 Swasti Mitter, Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy. London: Pluto P, 1986, 73). Mitter dwells specifically on the World Bank's role in the debt crisis of Brazil (70-4). See also James Schwoch's "Manaus: Television from the Borderless," Public Culture 7 (1995): 455-64 for details on the extraction economy of Brazil.
40 As a brief economic historicization of that shift, Masao Miyoshi notes that "in the late 1960s, the global domination of U.S. multinational corporations was unchallengeable" but that "around 1970, European and Japanese transnational corporations (TNCs) emerged rapidly to compete with their U.S. counterparts" ("A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State." Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993), 734-5.
41 Glenn Omatsu, "The 'Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s," The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan. Boston, MA: South End P, 1994, 19-69.
42 In her 1991 essay, "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences," Diaspora 1.1 (Spring 1991): 24-44; and in her more recent book, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996), Lisa Lowe precisely urges Asian Americans to "affiliate with other groups whose cohesions may be based on other valences of oppression [i.e., valences other than Asian American ethnicity]" ("Heterogeneity...," 32).
43 Interestingly, work such as Wilson and Dirlik's recent volume may be crucial to the project of bringing the two fields together, though Asian Americanists might question why Hawaiian and local cultures needs Asian/Pacific sponsorship as prerequisite to their engagement by Asian American critics.
44 Yamashita's latest book-length work of fiction, Tropic of Orange (1997), is likewise set across the Americas, though the focal locality of this novel is Los Angeles. Despite their superficial differences in setting (Brazil vs. U.S. and Mexico), the two books are quite similar in their preoccupation with the compression of the world, and— I would argue— they similarly manage a 1990s crisis in the Asian American studies field imaginary. Both novels suggest newly configured "Asian American" protagonists as cross-racial coalitions whose members are connected by their efforts to counter, expose, or merely survive transcontinental market and media forces (however, in Tropic those forces are more gruesomely embodied in drug and biological organ traffickers).
45 Ong, Bonacich and Cheng remark precisely upon the class fracturing of Asian America's population, intensified by the post-1965 waves of immigration: "Many Asian immigrants to the United States are helping to renew capitalism...they embrace capitalism with enthusiasm. This trend poses a challenge to those political forces in the United States that are more critical of capitalism, as well as to older Asian Americans, some of whom have developed a 'progressive' politics" (Ong, et al, 29).
46 Yen Le Espiritu and Paul Ong trace the rise in the (visibility of) class differences in pan-Asian organizations as a function of a decline of overt racial oppression (297): "the weakening of artificial racial barriers in the economic and political sectors has deepened the class polarization in minority communities, as those who were able to do so took advantage of new job and educational opportunities while the majority remained locked in poverty.... These class divisions fragment the population, undermining racial solidarity" (298). They also read the ethnic fragmentation in Asian American communities as a disarticulation of underlying class differences: "much of ethnic conflict is in fact based on group differences in resources and class position" (Espiritu, Yen and Paul Ong. "Class Constraints on Racial Solidarity among Asian Americans." The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, 309).
47 Moreover, as Yen Le Espiritu and Paul Ong have argued, class stratification cannot be thought of as having a strictly centripetal effect on Asian American unity: "In the Asian American case, class divisions play contradictory roles, both fragmenting the population and creating a class of professional social activists interested in uniting Asian Americans into a common racial category" (Espiritu, et al, 295). As a cultural artifact both commenting upon and emerging from within this professional-managerial class perspective, Through the Arc negotiates the various gaps and economic incommensurabilities that both threaten and enliven pan-Asian unity; furthermore, the novel, rather than framing class disjunction as a force against a strictly racial unity, highlights class stratification as it also impinges upon cross-racial coalitions.
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