 Since the change in U.S.
immigration policies in the 1960s and as a result of many geopolitical
developments — including American military involvement and
foreign policy in Asia, global economic transformations, and the
end of the Cold War — the number of people of Asian and Pacific
Islander ancestry in the United States has increased dramatically.
According to the Census, the number of “Asian/Pacific
Islanders” (or “A/PIs”)
has more than doubled every decade since the 1970s. Not only have
the number of A/PIs increased, the diversity of their experience
and background — in
ethnic/national affiliation, religious background, class and professional
standing aspiriation, political ideologies, and more
— has increased as well. The term, “Asian/Pacific Islander,” (or
“Asian Americans” and “Pacific Islander Americans” to
use current Census categories) has become so broad and applied
to so many different people that some claim it has lost usefulness
and purpose.
At the same time, academic research and study about the history
— or more properly, the histories — of “Asian/Pacific
Islanders” has also been transformed tremendously. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, influential and seminal texts as Ronald Takaki’s Strangers
From A Different Shore and Sucheng
Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive
History presented what became an apparent
consensus view of Asian American history: while Asian Americans have
always considered themselves fully “American,”
historically they had been excluded from full political, social,
and cultural citizenship because of their racial difference. New
scholarship challenged this paradigm on a number of fronts. Members
of various ethnic/national groups — Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese,
Cambodian, Laotian, and other Southeast Asian Americans, South Asians,
largely Indian Americans — argued their marginalization within
Asian American histories that were largely narratives of Chinese
and Japanese American immigration. Pacific Islanders argued the fundamental
difference of their largely non-immigrant experiences and their virtual
exclusion from texts, much less organizations, claiming to be inclusive
under the pan-ethnic banner of “Asian/Pacific Islander.” Other
scholars argued that an inclusive nationalist paradigm ignored significant
issues of ethnic diaspora and economic transnationalism and glossed
over the political implications of U.S. overseas colonialism and
global capitalism. Still other scholars borrowed and adapted new
methods, theories, and ideas — from cultural studies, women’s
studies, gender studies, queer studies among others — to question,
transform and re-orient the Asian American “subject” within
the practice, presentation (and representation), and structuring
of culture and society. And a revised Asian American subject, by
extension, required a re-visioning of Asian American history. Collectively,
these critiques raise the question: is it possible to write an “Asian
American” —
much less an “Asian/Pacific Islander” — history?
While these critiques and challenges for Asian Pacific American
history — and indeed to the idea of Asian/Pacific Islander American
— are formidable, they are not unsurmountable. This web site represents
the efforts of the Asian Pacific American (A|P|A) History Collective
to address and answer these critiques and to begin the process and
project of reconceptualizing a new Asian Pacific American history.
Such a project may not yield a new master narrative
or synthesis of Asian Pacific American history or other projects
of such finality. Nevertheless the aim and hope of the Collective
is that the process of self-conscious and self-reflective reconceptualization
will foster the emergence of new ideas, theories, methods, texts,
and yes, possibly, syntheses that will prove practical and useful,
not only for teaching and research, but for the continued political
utility and efficacy of the idea and rubrics of “Asian American” and “Pacific
Islander.”
Additionally, in taking a collective and collaborative — and not
individual — approach the large task at hand, members of the Collective
sought to infuse the project with a sense of intellectual
community and common purpose.
Multiple Histories from Many Perspectives
Why Asia | Pacific | America ?
One large consideration for the project was the inclusion, and where
possible, integration of the work of Asian American Studies and
Pacific Islander Studies. There is a complicated and contested
history of relations between the two demographic groups/racial categories
as well as the professional institutionalization of scholars who
study, research, and write about them. It
is fair to say that the issues and differences concerning Pacific
Islanders have largely been overlooked and ignored by Asian
Americans, the much larger group, even while the U.S. Census combined
the two groups to create the aggregate idea of Asian/Pacific Islander
in the 1970s. This marginalization was pronounced enough that Pacific
Islanders lobbied successfully to be disaggregated from Asian Americans
beginning with the 2000 census. At the same time, work by Asian American
Studies and Pacific Islander Studies scholars have begun to converge
in recent years, particularly with the development of often parallel
interests in issues of diaspora and migration, transnational economics
and identity, and the continuing legacies of of European and U.S.
colonialism. While significant differences in other subject areas
and professionalization and institutionalization remain,
members of the Collective felt strongly that a collaborative, comparative
dialogue on equal terms would be mutually beneficial to Asian American
Studies and Pacific Islander Studies scholars and wholly beneficial
to the larger aims of the project itself.
As a starting point, the
Collective adopted the somewhat cumbersome notion, “Asia |
Pacific | America,” (or A|P|A) as the subject of its reconceptualization.
While it resembles and evokes the idea of “Asian Pacific American,” A|P|A
signifies the shared emergence and historical relation between the
three geographic tropes: Asia, the Pacific, and America. All three
were products of the European expansion into, and transformation
of, previously existing linked political/economic/cultural systems
throughout the world. Asia was a redefined “Orient” that
remained separate, however fragilely, from Europe whose amalgated
South, Southeast, and Eastern subregions shared only the status of
European desires for their conquest and colonization. America was
a “New World” whose potential opportunity and wealth
masked exploitation and subjugation required to achieve them. The
Pacific was the farthest horizon in either direction, east or west,
from the centrality of Europe, sundered in two halves in most maps
of the world; only coincidentally was it also the ocean connecting
Asia to America. Connecting Asia, the Pacific, and America without
reference to Europe appropriated this geography to present — and
reorient — a different global perspective, and seemed appropriate
symbolically to the idea of reconceptualizing histories that centered
on peoples from these places. The vertical bars (the “|”)
separate the places to stress their differences and to allow for
many, rather than a single, relationship to be made between them,
just as there are many stories to be told of people living in, and
traveling between them.
With its capacity of hypertexuality, a web site is an ideal medium
for the project. Separate, individual sections may be developed for
specific historical topics or issues, or for the telling of
stories about particular individuals or groups. At the same time,
hypertextual links allows multiple connections to be made between
these issues and stories, creating syntheses with each set of links.
Visitors are free to navigate established sets of links or follow/create
their own links.
About this site’s organization
The site is organized into several interrelated and interconnected
sections: histories, episodes,
materials, resources, and comments (with a
final section for credits).
Histories are longer synthetic essays addressing broad themes
in a reconceptualized Asian Pacific America. Senior scholars in Asian
American Studies and Pacific Islander Studies discuss the dominant
tropes/ideas that have shaped and organized research and intellectual
inquiry in their respective fields: Empire,
the Body,
Culture, and Borders/Boundaries.
Histories narrate broader scope or perspectives that may seem
abstract and removed from ordinary people's lives. To ground these
themes and ideas, we present various historical episodes.
These essays discuss individual people and groups or
explore specific topics and issues — drawn from recent research and
scholarship — in depth and with attention to particular detail. To tell the stories in these episodes, historians rely on “primary
documents.” These materials from the past help scholars
examine particular historical periods and verify their ideas about
those periods. Included with the text of a history on the web, they
can also also add to it, demonstrating or illustrating its points
in non-textual ways. Through the generous permission of these
scholars, this site allows visitors to view some of the sources they
have collected in their research. Our
collection of materials is stored in electronic form in a database
and searchable according to the episode or history that use them
and by subject category.
Resources are secondary materials developed by scholars and
teachers for practical use. These include bibliographies, course
syllabi, teaching lesson plans, chronologies/timelines, and links
to web sites. The members of the A|P|A History Collective have generously
given permission to view and use these materials, asking that people
who use them remember to give proper credit and attribution.
Comments are reactions and thoughts submitted by other visitors
to this web site. They include comments on specific episodes, materials,
and resources as well as to the site generally. Comments are also
stored in a database and searchable. Once submitted,
comments become part of the site. Permission is granted to the A|P|A
History Collective to allow others to view the comments and to use
them for educational and research purposes (read
our privacy policy).
About The Collective
The A|P|A History Collective is a loosely-structured group of over
seventy academic historians, public historians, museum curators,
journalists, and others interested in reconceptualizing Asian Pacific
American history, and is an outgrowth of the History Caucus of the
Association for Asian American Studies.
Its mission is to:
- develop a new theoretical framework for Asian
Pacific American history;
- locate
historical scholarship about diverse Asian Pacific American experiences
in relation to theoretical developments in History and Asian Pacific
American studies as a whole; and
- disseminate materials and resources
for the incorporation of the history of these experiences into
history, ethnic studies, and Asian Pacific American studies courses.
As part of this reconceptualization, the Collective hosted
a series of conferences at different regional sites across the country
over a two-year period from 2002-2004. This web site is one outgrowth
of the discussions initiated in those conferences. The conference
series and production of this site was underwritten by a grant from
the Ford Foundation. |
