Race for citizenship: Asian-American and African-American cultural politics

“Race For Citizenship” argues that Blacks and Asians in the United States have been racialized in comparative relation to each other since the mid 19th century. This interdisciplinary project looks to the post-Reconstruction era and the WW II period in order to uncover a cultural history of how U.S. Blacks and Asians have narrated their incorporation into American institutions through racial discourses that exclude the other. This is not an ‘evaluative’ project written through a hundred years of hindsight, which would seek to criticize or discipline Black and Asian communities or individuals for being “racist” or unprogressive. Rather, “Race for Citizenship” reveals the limits of the very terms of Black and Asian inclusion which must effectively displace the racial Other in order to produce a narrative of national incorporation. Analyses of cultural institutions such as the Black press or Asian American novel subsequently reveal the failures of citizenship as an emancipatory institution for racialized subjects. From that space of failure or contradiction, the cultural discourses of Black and Asian American citizenship also articulate fractured yearnings for freedom, community, and subjectivity, which are in excess of the parameters of the nation-state.; The interdependency of Black and Asian racial meanings has become increasingly self-evident in the post-1965 period with the prominence of a “model minority” discourse that constructs the economic and social mobility of Asian Americans in direct relation to narratives of Black cultural pathology and underdevelopment. By demonstrating how the racialization of Blacks and Asians has been historically structured as an interdependent relationship within the political sphere of citizenship, the economic sphere of labor, and the social sphere of urban space, this project offers both a context and an analytic for examining the complexity of contemporary racial formations.