Disoriented: Asian Americans, law, and the nation state

Abstract

Does denote an ethnic or racial identification? Is a person of mixed ancestry, child of Euro- and Asian American parents, Asian American? What does it mean to refer to first generation Hmong refugees and fifth generation Chinese Americans both as Asian American? In Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and Nation State, Robert Chang examines current discourse on race and law and implications of postmodern theory and affirmative action-all of which have largely excluded Asian Americans-in order to develop a theory of critical Asian American legal studies. Demonstrating that ongoing debate surrounding multiculturalism and immigration in U.S. is really a struggle over meaning of America, Chang reveals how construction of Asian American-ness has become a necessary component in stabilizing a national American identity-a fact Chang criticizes as harmful to Asian Americans. Defining many borders that operate in positive and negative ways to construct America as we know it, Chang analyzes position of Asian Americans within America's black/white racial paradigm, how the family operates as a stand-in for race and nation, and how figure of immigrant embodies a central contradiction in allegories of America.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 126 citations exist upstream.