By Peggy Pascoe
©2001 Journal of Social History
Summer 2001

Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier is a book that historians will likely find more suggestive than definitive, but it is nonetheless one of the most insightful books currently available on twentieth-century Asian American history. The author, David Palumbo-Liu, exemplifies the best of the emerging field of cultural studies, combining history, literary criticism, and political critique to offer pointed analyses of American pasts and presents. Building on the work of a dozen cultural theorists, from Arif Dirlik and Lisa Lowe to Saskia Sassen and David Harvey, as well as recent social histories of Asian America and careful readings of films, short stories, and autobiographies, Asian/American offers a new framework for understanding twentieth-century Asian American history, culture, and literature.

Hoping to move beyond the "narrow, self-enclosed boundaries imputed to 'ethnic studies'," Palumbo-Liu conceives of his topic as a "history of persistent reconfigurations and transgressions of the Asian/-American split," understood in global as well as domestic contexts. (p. 383, p. 1). His most striking argument is that as U.S. immigration exclusion culminated in the 1920s and 30s, a major "rescripting" of Asian/America occurred, focusing new attention on Asian Americans in a period in which Asia became "central to the imagining of modern America." (p. 31). As the United States adopted a uniquely modern "blend of exclusionist practices coupled with liberal ideology," earlier attempts to confine Asian Americans to "the laboring class" were replaced by a new positioning of Asian Americans in "the median space between white owners and black laborers." (p. 20, p. 38.).

This expansive argument allows Palumbo-Liu to go beyond the metanarratives of exclusion that form the skeleton of most histories of Asian America and to provide intriguing examples of the inclusive appropriations made possible by American notions of modernity. He shows, for example, that early twentieth-century social scientists, who valued hybridity as an asset in modem society, regarded Asian Americans as quintessentially modem even as they described them as hybrid or split personalities with unstable identities. He argues that in the immediate post-World War II period, Americans used Asian Americans as models for the rightness of American democracy around the world as well as "to remind Americans of the traditional values it had cast aside in its rush to modernization," and illustrates these points with a wonderfully compelling reading of the 1961 film Flower Drum Song. (p. 156). And he ponders the significance of late-twentieth-century American envy of Japanese economic progress, which, he argues, spurred two parallel reformulations: the redefinition of capitalism as a joint Asian/American project, and the reconfiguration of Asian Americans as almost (but not quite) "white." In the 1992 Los Angeles rebellions, he contends, these reformulations allowed the media to use Korean American shopkeepers as symbols of the superiority of capitalism and white property rights without implicating whites in the violent repression of other racial minorities.

As this example suggests, Palumbo-Liu continually places Asian America within a multicultural context. At its best, his approach brings new meaning to seemingly familiar topics, such as the history and significance of "model minority" discourse. Like other Asian American cultural critics, Palumbo-Liu notes that after the phrase "model minority" was coined in 1966, it proved highly effective at containing civil rights protests in the 1960s and 1970s and promoting the conservative political position he labels "self-affirmative action" in the present day. But by placing the emergence of "model minority" discourse in the context of post-World War II depictions of the Japanese as "models" for American democracy, he shows that Asian Americans have also served as models for whites. In so doing he helps us understand why it was that by the 1970s and 80s, the cultural power of "model minority" discourse was so sweeping that it was extended even to Asian American groups it fit only awkwardly, such as South Asian refugees.

Yet another strength of the book is Palumbo-Liu's reading of the spatial dynamics of Asian American history. In two especially fine chapters, he links the well-known history of World War II internment camps to lesser-known histories of the alien land laws passed in the 1920s and the urban redevelopment projects of the 1970s and 1980s, interpreting all three as literal displacements of Asian Americans from "American" space. Many contemporary Asian American scholars are critical of the cultural nationalist frameworks adopted by Asian American activists of the 1960s and 1970s, and Palumbo-Liu is no exception. But his thoughtful reading of these spatial dynamics helps us understand why it was so important for Asian American activists, who inherited both this history of spatial displacement and the parallel history of the stigmatization of split personalities and unstable identities, to claim the grounded space and unified identity of cultural nationalism in the first place.