Boundary (2): International Literature and Culture

Author: Wang Fengzhen / Country:
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2005-03-01
Features: This paper explores how the presence of Asian Americans at certain critical junctures in the last century became a form of dialectical relationship between the meanings of whiteness, blackness, and Asian American identity. Whiteness responds to this presence through a critical transformation. This analysis requires a complex theoreticalization of mediation: it can record the conspiracies formed by various Asian American groups in the process of aligning with different forms of whiteness and their claims. At the same time, this analysis must emphasize that such subordination is produced by dominant groups through the rights to define survival conditions and opportunities from a racial selection perspective. Furthermore, it must be emphasized that the pressure to "pull up and push down," to "aim high and not low," arises within a social structure where a racial group's mobility requires another race to pay a price. In James Baldwin's concise and incisive words, this is: "The American Dream is at the expense of the Black American." At the same time, I argue that although whiteness has become a dynamic constitutive category of national belonging, white privilege has always been condemned, forcing it to renegotiate its forms to maintain its hegemony. I believe that such renegotiation has a crucial effect: it designs racial forms and integrates them into ethnic identity in public discourse on national belonging, social differences, economic inequality, and global competitiveness. U.S. belonging has recently shifted from a racial meaning to an ethnic meaning. This transformation has been reinforced by culturalist tendencies such as institutionalized multiculturalism, the settlement of new immigrants, and the revival of white ethnic identity. This shift reveals how, in a transnational context, the new discourse of ethnicity blurs the activities of race and class. A dialectical analysis of the role of Asian Americans in the new racial political economy is decisive for understanding the transformed field of political struggles in the post-civil rights era and for developing strategies to challenge the enduring rights of whiteness. This paper, linking the discourse of whiteness to the presence of Asian Americans, focuses on three historical events to analyze the development of this discourse. To reconstruct the boundaries of race and simultaneously determine how to define whiteness and place various Asian American and Black identities in a relational context, active negotiations will emerge in the process of each historical event. P4-5