The Asian Turns

Abstract

Everybody Loves a Crisis The story of what's what in asian american studies is like the story of the profession at large: no one thinks in a vacuum. But the current drift in literary scholarship toward questions of transnationalism and globalization arrives at shores long explored by scholars who work on Asian America and the Pacific. Much of this familiarity has to do with the material history of their subjects, the ways in which questions of diaspora and integration, relations between the flows of people and the flows of things, and the narratives of international politics and imperialist violence constitute the ground of Asian America and indeed of the concept of the Pacific as an ocean, a sea of islands, a limit to westward expansion, and the lubricated surface of a certain transcultural history. The critical insights that unfold from the labor of Asian Americanist thought, like those gained through the study of African America and the Caribbean, do not add ethnographic detail to some larger and fundamentally established picture of the history of the United States or global modernity: they change the picture. They reframe it.

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