Common Ground: Reimagining American History

Abstract

“Over the past several years,” Gary Y. Okihiro confesses in Common Ground, “I have been in an absolute funk over the persistence of the binaries I herein critique. Like cockroaches they survive, nay thrive in environments old and new.… The situation can exasperate.” That reflection sets the tone for this impassioned set of essays by Okihiro, an eminent scholar of Asian American—U.S. history, who has devoted his career to offering alternatives to those narratives that devalue or exclude the experiences of Asian peoples. In a previous work, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (1994), Okihiro attempted to disrupt binaries by inverting them. As he explains, “Asians did not come to America, I wrote. Americans went to Asia; the mainstream is not the bearers of America's core values, I wrote, the margins are.” Now Okihiro admits to having realized that inverting binaries does not address the core problem—“binaries themselves privilege one over the other and thereby constitute hierarchies of difference and inequality.”

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