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African Identities
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Strategic orientalism: racial capitalism

and the problem of ‘Asianness’
a
Wendy Cheng
a
Asian Pacific American St udies and Just ice & Social Inquiry,
Arizona St at e Universit y , Tempe , AZ , USA
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 African Identities, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2013.797284

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Strategic orientalism: racial capitalism and the problem of ‘Asianness’
Wendy Cheng*

Asian Pacific American Studies and Justice & Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ,
USA
This article engages Cedric Robinson’s articulations of racial capitalism and Blackness
as an important set of intellectual provocations not only for Black and African diaspora
studies, but also for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between racial
identity, capitalism, and the development of oppositional consciousness. Specifically, I
argue that by following the analytical terms of racial capitalism, we can better consider
the global and historical placements of ‘Asians’ – a racial category constituted by and
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entangled with European imperialism – in terms of class, labor, and more. Is it possible
to conceive of ‘Asianness,’ like Blackness, as an ontological totality (a kind of
collective racial ‘being’ that is both defined by and subsumes a particular relation to
capitalism)? The answer will likely be an uneasy and ambivalent one, since one Asian
group after another has functioned as an intermediary labor class between Black and
White. Putting together racial capitalism and Edward Said’s theorization of
orientalism, however, to focus on how racial – economic tropes operate on the ground,
offers productive possibilities for implementing a racial capitalism approach to
theorize ‘Asianness’ alongside Blackness, as well as suggesting different and strategic
ways of ‘being’ Asian.
Keywords: blackness; orientalism; racial capitalism; ontological totality; Asian
American; activism

In Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism ([1983] 2000), a central component of Robinson’s

elucidation of racial capitalism is the idea of Blackness as an ontological totality. An
Ontological totality refers to a way of being that emerged from the terms of 500 years of
Western domination and exploitation, but also eludes these and makes its own terms of
history. Robinson writes of the ontological totality of Blackness as a revolutionary
consciousness that has never been destroyed or subsumed by world systems dominated by
imperialism and capitalism. Robinson’s articulation of a Black radical tradition infused with
the resilience and elusiveness of Blackness as ontological totality constitutes an important
set of intellectual and political provocations not only for Black and African diaspora studies,
but also for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between racial identity,
racial capitalism, and the development of oppositional consciousness.
In American studies and American ethnic studies, the past 20 years have seen a shift
from a concern with primarily national-(American) based ontologies to transnational,
postcolonial, and comparative approaches that center immigration, US imperialism, and the
interdependent formation of racial categories. In Asian American studies more specifically,
which had tended to privilege earlier, Chinese and Japanese immigration, scholars adopting
transnational and postcolonial orientations have grappled with the complexity and

*Email: wendy.cheng@asu.edu

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

 2 W. Cheng

heterogeneity of Asian immigration to the USA as well as the question of how to situate
Asian Americans within broader global histories of diasporic movement.1 Lisa Lowe’s
work has been both formative and exemplary of this shift (see especially Lowe, 1996; Lowe,
2006). In Lowe’s essay ‘Epistemological Shifts: National Ontology and the New Asian
Immigrant’ (2001), she summarized the state of the field and laid out the task still at hand,
arguing that the influx of new Asian immigrants over the past two decades
has made it more or less axiomatic to state that Asian Americans and Asian immigrants are a
‘heterogeneous’ group . . . . This has led scholars within the field to be critical of racial
essentialism and cultural nationalist formations of identity within the context of a single
nation-state, and led activists to question whether ethnic identity always and in every instance
leads to a progressive politics aimed at social and economic transformation. Yet it is
imperative that Asian American studies push this critique even further in order to consider
different Asian formations within the global or neocolonial framework of transnational
capitalism . . . in order to inquire into the significance of the ‘Asian American’ within local
situations and material conditions . . . . (273)
Like other ethnic studies programs, Asian American studies as a field evolved in a context
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of progressive post-Civil Rights Movement-era political commitments. As Lowe and

others have suggested, these political imperatives have posed particular limitations on the
possible symbolic and political properties of ‘Asian’ racial identity (Lowe, 1998; Lowe,
2001; Nguyen, 2002). More specifically, the symbolic possibilities of ‘Asianness’ have
been limited by preoccupation with nation-based identities and a reductive idea of shared
oppression based on a white-nonwhite binary. In order to ‘redefin[e] . . . the political
project for Asian American studies’ in the current moment, Lowe argues: we need to move
past ‘an assumption of the political subject along lines of racial, ethnic, or cultural identity’
and to ‘develop . . . a shared language about exploitation within transnational capitalism, a
language about economic and social justice rather than cultural or nationalist identity’
(Lowe, 2001, p. 74). In other words, to fully reckon with the historical conditions of their
being, diasporic Asians – including Asian Americans – must break free from the
ideological constraints of nation-based ontologies. We must look back in time and around
the world and develop ‘a shared language about exploitation within transnational
capitalism’ – that is, a racial capitalism framework.
Asians represent a compelling problem when considering Robinson’s notion of
ontological totality, since out of the crucible of European imperialism and racial
capitalism, diasporic Asians have consistently acted as ‘both labor and capital’ in the
emergence of transnational economies (Lowe, 2001, p. 273). Considering a wide panoply
of Asian groups in colonial societies from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean to the
Americas, from ‘coolies’ and sharecroppers to shopkeepers, merchants, and
entrepreneurs,2 it becomes apparent that Asians have more often than not occupied
intermediary strata – in many cases consciously constructed and maintained by European
imperialist powers – between a white ruling class and other subordinated, nonwhite
groups. Indeed, the first colonial encounter between Chinese laborers and the ‘New World’
occurred at the moment of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1807. Chinese
laborers sent to Trinidad were explicitly conceived of as a racial solution to the continued
need for labor as well as a means to suppress Black rebellion. No measure would be so
effective, a British colonial administrator wrote in a ‘Secret Memorandum’ to the East
India Company in 1803,
as that of introducing a free race of cultivators . . . who, from habits and feelings could be kept
distant from the Negroes, and who from interest would be inseparably attached to the
 African Identities 3

European proprietors . . . The Chinese people . . . unite the qualities which constitute this
double recommendation. (Lowe, 2006, p. 193)
The ‘newly raced’ figure of the Chinese laborer inaugurated ‘a new racial mode of
managing and dividing laboring groups’; yet, Lowe argues, this figure has remained
relatively obscure and its presence unmarked in dominant narratives and understandings of
the emergence of the modern world.
How and why should we ruminate on the ‘collective being’ of such a group in a world
order dominated by racial capitalism? As Lowe’s scholarship suggests, in order to fully
understand how capitalist, imperialist, and neoimperialist domination functions, we must
develop a theory that accounts for the interdependence of articulations of difference
between racialized ‘minority’ groups: what scholars in US ethnic studies refer to as
differential, or comparative, racialization. Claire Jean Kim has outlined how such an
approach works out in a US context, proposing as an analytical model a ‘field of racial
positions’ in which Asians are ‘racially triangulated’ – simultaneously ‘valorized’ relative
to Black people, and ostracized as perpetual outsiders (Kim, 1999, 2000). What would
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such a field look like in a global historical context? What and how can we learn from the
racial triangulation of Asians across broader swaths of time and space?
Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism (based on the proposition that racialism and
social structures emergent from capitalism mutually inform one another), interwoven with
ideas about discourse and power stemming from Edward Said’s influential text
Orientalism (1978), together provides a strong theoretical framework for shining a light on
this obscure and contradictory figure of ‘Asianness,’ toward a broader understanding of
how racial capitalism operates. The present in which we live has been shaped by the
legacies and continuing realities of imperialism and capitalism, which have flourished on
an inextricable binding together of the racial and the economic. Looking at the operations
of discourse across time and place helps us to see how this was, and remains, so.

Linking Black Marxism and Orientalism

Two aspects of Black Marxism are especially significant here: first, its recasting of the
dynamics of modern world history via a critique of Western Marxism and assertion of a
Black Radical tradition; and second, its revolutionary politics. Robinson argues that the
development of the modern world has been shaped and is continually reshaped by ‘racial
capitalism,’ the idea that racial ideologies and the social structures emergent from
capitalism mutually constitute one another. Assessing ‘two programs for revolutionary
change,’ Marxism and Black Radicalism, he critiques Marxism’s enmeshment in
European systems of domination and asserts the roots of Black Radicalism back hundreds
of years, claiming an African cultural core to resistance quite apart from Western models
of oppression and reaction – a kind of collective racial ‘being’ that is defined by yet
subsumes a particular relation to capitalism: ‘it had been as an emergent African people
and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement’ (245). With this
counter-ideology, an identitarian position based not in opposition but in its own deep,
historical essence, a new theory of history emerges even within the capitalist, white-
supremacist underpinnings of this global modernity.
Robinson traces this insight back through the works of both W.E.B. Du Bois and
C.L.R. James. In Black Reconstruction Du Bois saw that ‘The oppositions that had struck
most deeply at capitalist domination and imperialism had been those formed outside of the
logic of bourgeois hegemony’ and that Black struggle and ‘collective action had achieved
the force of a historical antilogic to racism, slavery, and capitalism’ (240). In The Black
 4 W. Cheng

Jacobins ([1963] 1989), James argued that although the slaves of Haiti were not an
industrial proletariat, the processes of revolutionary social formation were nonetheless the
same; (imperialist) primitive accumulation deposited the social base for revolutionary
masses in the peripheries; this insight ‘broke the [European-centered] evolutionist chain’
and closed dialectic of historical materialism (275 –6). This new theory of history – a
theory of how radical change occurs – redirects historical focus from the core to the
periphery (the demographically and geographically marginalized, whom are nonetheless
central to operations of imperial power), and forces acknowledgment of the persistent
interlinkage of bourgeois capitalism, imperialism, and slavery.
If Robinson recast history in order to see where and how imperialist systems of
domination break down, Said’s interest in Orientalism was in showing how these systems
were constructed and maintained. He argued that a fundamental means through which this
occurred in the Near (or Middle) East was via orientalist discourse, and indeed there was a
complete ‘coincidence between geography, knowledge, and power’ (216). ‘Orientalism,’
Said wrote, ‘is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological
distinction made between “the Orient” and . . . “the Occident”’ (2); ‘since one cannot
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ontologically obliterate the Orient . . . one does have the means to capture it . . . describe it,
improve it, radically alter it’ (95).
The ‘Oriental’ as constituted by orientalist discourse constituted a kind of ontological
pathology: merely to exist was his or her crime ‘The crime was that the Oriental was an
Oriental, and it is an accurate sign of how commonly acceptable such a tautology was that
it could be written without even an appeal to European logic or symmetry of mind’ (39).
The ‘oriental’ was seen not as a citizen or even as a person but as a racial form (cf. Lye,
2005): ‘rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed . . . as problems to be
solved or confined or – as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory – taken over’
(207). Paralleling Robinson’s argument about racialism and capitalism, one of Said’s key
points is that Orientalist discourse was not simply a rationalization of colonial rule after
the fact but a justification in advance of it (39). Thus, this systematic making of ontological
and epistemological distinctions in discourse had a ‘fatal tendency,’ enabling ‘the
systematic accumulation of human beings and territories’ (123).
Although Orientalism was written about European involvement in and with the Middle
East, the term ‘oriental’ and the reach of this discourse have enveloped people of East,
Southeast, and South Asian descent. Since theirs has been such a highly heterogeneous and
in some cases contradictory history in terms of imperialism, colonialism, and revolution,3
it has been common discourses more than any other commonalities – the idea of a shared
‘crime’ of existence – which have delineated the terms of their racialized group status.
Said’s exegesis of orientalist discourse showed that in Western modernity, whether one is
labor or capital, rich or poor, to be Asian is to be an aberration. Indeed, the utility of the
‘figure’ of Asianness depended upon its otherness or foreignness, its ‘distance’ or
triangulation from both Black and White. Imperial, colonial, and neocolonial power
depended upon the continued production and presence of this racial aberration in order to
reproduce its necessary hierarchies and divisions.

Racial capitalism and the problem of Asianness

Reading Black Marxism and Orientalism together shows us what might be gained from
deconstructing the dialectic of knowledge production and power and unearthing the
histories and meanings of revolutionary struggles for liberation. How, then, to approach a
history and analysis of this complex, contradictory, and in many senses unmanageable
 African Identities 5

racial grouping, ‘Asian’? When we look at the history of various Asian groups through this
racial –economic discursive lens, clear patterns emerge across different imperial, colonial,
and capitalist contexts – all having to do with the interlinking of the racial and the
economic. A number of scholars have already done extensive work along these lines. Yet,
the project and its commitments might be made explicit in order to articulate an
intellectual and political tradition of work upon which to build. Based on the dual concerns
of Said and Robinson – the imbrication of the racial and the economic, and the fateful
‘racial figuring’ of discourse – a few ways to implement a racial capitalism approach for
looking at the problem of Asianness are given in the following:

1. Focus on figurings of Asianness. These figurings, or perceived outlines or silhouettes

of human forms, include among them lazy natives,4 coolies, shopkeepers,
middleman minorities, entrepreneurs, and model minorities. The work to be done
is to parse each of them to understand how they have congealed as racial –economic
tropes within historically and geographically specific relations of power that are
political, economic, and interethnic. An example of this kind of thinking is Colleen
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Lye’s America’s Asia (2005), in which Lye employs the idea of an Asiatic ‘racial
form’ to elucidate how global capitalism is implicated in racial formation.5 Through
deconstructive readings of early twentieth-century literature, Lye illustrates how
economic tropes function as racial forms and vice versa, and the interplay between
esthetic concerns and historical and political – economic contexts. An earlier
example is Malaysian scholar Syed Hussein Alatas’s Myth of the Lazy Native (1977),
in which Alatas argues that the depiction of Malays as ‘indolent’ by colonial powers
stemmed not from any actual support for this claim but from Malays’ general
avoidance of direct participation in the capitalist economy (i.e., work as cheap labor
in mines and plantations) – what colonial officials perceived as a ‘lack of
acquisitiveness.’6 Important to Alatas’s analysis is that this trope of the lazy native
was formed in contrast to representations of Chinese immigrants as reliable,
hardworking, and more intelligent than the native Malays.
2. Look to the ‘peripheries’ of erstwhile empires and neo-empires (the Caribbean, the
Americas, Southeast Asia, and Africa). Under European colonial rule in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, East Africa,
and parts of Latin America Chinese and Indian immigrants worked as cheap ‘coolie’
labor on mines and plantations and served as plantation overseers, owners, and
entrepreneurs; they covered the whole range of racial –economic figurings of
Asianness still prevalent today. In Myth of the Lazy Native, Alatas points out that
European colonial powers facilitated the rise of the Chinese as the dominant trading
class in Southeast Asia after destroying the indigenous Malay, Filipino, and Javanese
trading classes.7 On the question of Chinese in Latin America, Evelyn Hu-DeHart
has contrasted the experiences of Chinese contract laborers in Cuba and Peru with the
emergence of a Chinese petite bourgeoisie in Mexico from the late nineteenth to
early twentieth centuries (Hu-DeHart, 2005).8 Regarding the Caribbean, Walton
Look Lai has chronicled a century of shifts in representations of Chinese immigrants
in the West Indies, from ‘foreign sugar worker to peripheral minority petite
bourgeoisie to prized multicultural citizen’ (Look Lai, 2005). Moon-Ho Jung’s
Coolies and Cane (2006) connects the development of American ideas about Asian
labor to the sugar economy of the Caribbean, during attempts to incorporate Chinese
‘coolie’ labor into the post-Civil War labor structure of the American South (see also
Jun, 2006; Loewen, 1988).
 6 W. Cheng

3. Tackle the question of middle-classness and heterogeneity of ‘Asian’ racial identity.

What does it mean that Asian immigrant groups under Western rule have so often
emerged or been represented as middle-class formations? What are the longer
histories behind this, and how does class consciousness function in the ‘dialectic of
assertion and assignation that shapes the content of racial categories’ (Koshy, 2001)?
Here, the Chinese and Indian diasporas present rich objects of analysis of which a lot
has already been written, if not extensively theorized in these ways.9 Finally, when
and where can claims for ‘Asianness’ be made? One way to do this might be to make
comparative studies of what ‘Asianness’ means in different historical and
geographical contexts – for example, what does it mean to be ‘Asian’ in Britain
today versus in the USA? Besides the telling difference that ‘Asian’ typically means
South Asian in Britain and East Asian in the USA, these groups have also been
differentially positioned vis-à-vis Black and White in each national context.10
Today’s Asian ‘model minorities’ are the inheritors of these colonial, racial –economic
problematics, and the dynamics of racial capitalism will help us understand the discursive
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and material durability of this racialized intermediate position. In Black Marxism,

Robinson writes that once slavery was addressed in ‘comprehensive,’ ‘world-historical
terms, its true nature [its real relation to the development of modern capitalism] was
revealed’ – it was not ‘a historical aberration’ or a ‘“mistake” in an otherwise bourgeois
democratic age,’ but systemic (200). A racial capitalism framework of analysis, coupled
with Said’s emphasis on discourse, has the potential to show us how racial –economic
figurings of Asianness are and have been systemic. This is important work. How do we
then follow Robinson further, though, to look for what has arisen both in opposition to and
apart from these figurings at the junctures of culture and lived experience – to seek an
‘ontological totality’ that exceeds the terms of history as determined by 500 years of
Western domination and exploitation? And then, will it be possible to conceive of
‘Asianness,’ like Blackness, as an ‘ontological totality’? Is it even desirable to do this? Or,
to put it another way, if we read Black Marxism and Orientalism as activist texts, as I do,
what is the use of thinking about ‘ontological totality’ on the ground?

Strategic orientalism
Most Asian American political work, like all processes of coalition building, has sought to
make claims of common cause with other racialized nonwhite groups.11 However, even
while accounting for the class and ideological heterogeneity of different Asian groups, this
model of claiming shared – and implied parity of – oppression can serve to elide the
relative privilege in which some Asian Americans partake via model minority discourse
and differential immigration histories. This elision likely serves to limit the range and
ability of Asian American activism to appeal to both other racial/ethnic groups and
middle-income Asian Americans, who may feel that they have neither legitimacy nor
reason to participate in struggles for social justice. Strategic orientalism, which is the
strategic employment of the dynamics of racial capitalism and orientalism toward specific
political interests, offers Asian American activists and scholars a way out of these
confining paradigms. Gayatri Spivak has discussed strategic essentialism or the ‘strategic
use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest’ (Spivak, 1988,
p. 13). Strategic orientalism is a form of strategic essentialism, in which those who cannot
avoid being racialized as ‘oriental’ embrace rather than reject their stereotyping as model
minorities, middlemen, inscrutable exotics, and so forth – and use their inevitable
embodiment of these tropes in service of specific political goals.
 African Identities 7

Beginning in 1993 and lasting over several years with no conclusive outcome,12 the
struggle to unionize hotel workers at the New Otani Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the
majority of whom are Latina/o, drew in a number of Asian American activist groups and
students.13 Over the years, a coalition of multiethnic union and community activists
organized boycotts, staged human blockades, forged international labor alliances, and
made common cause with Chinese survivors of a World War II slave labor camp run by
the same Japanese corporation responsible for developing the New Otani (Kajima
Corporation).14
James Kyung-jin Lee reads the New Otani struggle as an example of the political work
of Asian American activists who understand racism as ‘integrally tied to a racialized
political economy’ (Lee, 2004, p. 98). Lee elaborates:
What might have been seen as another example of interracial strife, between Asian and white
management and African American/Latino workers, or even worse, as an instance of anti-
Asian bashing, did not arise thanks to the intervention of the New Otani Support Committee,
many of whom are longtime Asian American activists in Los Angeles . . . what is also
important . . . is the making visible of an Asian American political identity on the picket line,
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not to erase their Asian body in favor of a class issue, but to highlight their status as Asians so
as to articulate an adaptiveness to the new forms of racial politics in Los Angeles. Thus, when
Asian Americans, alongside Black, Latino and White picketers, confront other Asians who
patronize the hotel, the effect is jarring: for what is foreclosed is the possibility of the
management to exploit what could have been a racial divide. (Lee, 2004, p. 204n28)
I want to highlight this idea of the protestors ‘making visible’ with their bodies ‘an Asian
American political identity.’ The presence of racialized Asian bodies disrupts
management, the press, and other observers’ abilities to form normative narratives of
racial conflict, and furthermore makes it difficult to essentialize or orientalize the Kajima
corporation as scheming Asian capitalists. The transnational alliances made by labor
activists and Chinese slave labor survivors instead force the company’s practices to be
contextualized in terms of global capitalism and imperialistic war. As Lee writes, ‘the
effect is jarring.’ In putting themselves forth as racialized Asian bodies, the New Otani
activists performed an act of strategic orientalism: precisely because they must inevitably
already embody orientalist and model minority stereotypes, they drove a wedge into
observers’ abilities to understand the scene within the terms of the commonly accepted
racial order of the USA.
The New Otani case is just one of a number of recent political struggles in which one
could argue that the involvement of Asian Americans has challenged their racially
overdetermined roles in upholding the dominant racial – economic hierarchy and disrupted
facile narratives of political and economic conflict among nonwhites. Other Los Angeles-
based examples include Asian American activists’ participation in the umbrella group
Multiethnic Immigrant Workers’ Organizing Network (MIWON), and the support and
participation of members of Koreatown Immigrant Workers Association (KIWA) in
campaigns to assert rights for predominantly Latina/o workers at Korean-owned
supermarkets in Koreatown. It is no accident that Japanese Americans based out of Little
Tokyo and Korean Americans in Koreatown have often taken the lead in such actions and
organizations: the wholesale incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II
and the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992, in which many Korean American merchants found
themselves as abandoned by the state as African Americans and Latinas/os, have figured
prominently in the development of each group’s racial and political consciousness.15 In
the New Otani struggle, Asian American activists consciously addressed other Asians
when explaining their actions. As one activist wrote:
 8 W. Cheng

Many Latinos and immigrant Asians are not aware that Japanese Americans have a history of
oppression as minorities and as working people . . . [C]ontinue a tradition of unity with the
Mexican American working people by supporting the workers at the New Otani. (David
Monkawa, quoted in Jenks, 2008, p. 278; emphasis is mine).
As Lee writes, the New Otani activists’ ‘highlighting’ of their Asianness ‘articulate[d] an
adaptiveness to . . . new forms of racial politics.’ I would argue further that this staging of
essentialized contradictions, this act of strategic orientalism, returns us to Robinson’s idea
of an ‘ontological totality,’ a way of being that enfolds contradiction and exceeds it, in the
process enacting a politics of liberation. Asian American activism then, when it embraces
its embodiment of multiple historical contradictions of Asianness, can be a strategic
performance of race that rests upon essentialist identities but also gestures toward a
different way of ‘being’ Asian.

Conclusion
The triangulation of the obscure and elusive figure of the ‘Asian,’ whether as merchant or
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laborer, is integral to a fuller understanding of the modern world order. More detailed
study and analysis of the racial – economic figurings of ‘Asianness’ can reveal how
colonial and neocolonial discourse works in racial capitalism to justify and reinforce
durable hierarchies of power. Robinson’s theorization of racial capitalism and elucidation
of the Black Radical tradition as a theory of historical change form a challenge to take up
the question of ontological totality more widely: to find and assert collective
consciousnesses and ways of being that begin to undo imperialist and capitalist structures
of domination, by the mere fact of their existence outside of the logic of racial capitalism.

Acknowledgements
The author thanks H.L.T. Quan and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard for their vision, hard work, and
insightful editorial comments in putting together this important collection. This article took its
earliest form as part of a graduate-school directed reading with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whose
mentorship and intellectual guidance have been essential to it and to the author’s own development
as a scholar. Fred Moten’s teaching was also influential. Any shortcomings are the author’s.

Notes
1. Elaine Kim has described this as an imperative to move ‘beyond railroads and internment.’
(Kim, 1995).
2. For a sampling of this literature, see Hu-DeHart (1999), Anderson and Lee (2005), Jung (2006),
Loewen (1988), Look Lai (1993), and Alatas (1977).
3. As Viet Nguyen and Tina Chen have noted: ‘Asian America [and, I would argue, other sites of
Asian diasporas] is a place that offers particular challenges for the application of postcolonial
theory, given the uneven and sometimes contradictory histories of Asian Americans and their
nations of origin. Some Asian American populations, such as Filipinos, Indians and
Vietnamese, clearly come from histories defined by colonial and imperial warfare and
exploitation conducted by the west. Others, such as Koreans and some Chinese, come from
nations dominated by a neighbor – Japan. In contrast to these populations, many Asian
Americans have no direct experience with imperialism and colonialism, except to the extent
that their immigration or their ancestors’ was a product of the global movement of culture and
capital that is related to imperialism and colonialism. The contemporary outcome of this global
development of capitalism is the contradictory fashion by which different Asian American
populations are situated – some find their experiences profitable and liberatory, others find
their experiences exploitative and compulsory.’ These experiences are ‘an integral part of any
definition of a postcolonial condition.’ (Nguyen and Chen, 2000)
4. See Alatas (1977) and discussion below.
 African Identities 9

5. Also see Lye (2008a, 2008b).

6. This strongly recalls Du Bois’s characterization of the Black worker as having ‘neither wish
nor power’ to share in the exploitation of others. The author thanks Fred Moten for directing his
attention to this passage in a seminar discussion of AMST 520: Readings in Race and Ethnicity,
Spring 2005, University of Southern California. The original passage in Du Bois reads: ‘Above
all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate exploited; that he formed that mass of
labor which had neither wish nor power to escape from the labor status, in order to directly
exploit other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance, with capital, to share in their exploitation’
(DuBois, [1935] 1998, 15).
7. According to Carl Trocki, during the arrival of Europeans in Southeast Asia in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Europeans did not significantly alter earlier systems. They adapted
to local practices but also ‘distorted them only for their own purposes in certain specific areas.
Their conquest of key port facilities such as Melaka and the construction of fortified “castle”
towns there (and later in Manila and Batavia) actually quickened the pace of Chinese
commerce in the region. Europeans were major customers for Chinese products, and they
usually paid in cash. This was partly because they had nothing else to offer in exchange and
partly because they possessed vast supplies of precious metals from the Americas . . . ..
Europeans, like Southeast Asian rulers, were content to allow Chinese to collect their taxes and
manage many of their economic affairs, particularly those that involved contacts with other
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Chinese or Southeast Asians.’ (Trocki, 1997, 66)

8. Also see Hu-DeHart (1999) and Hu-DeHart and Lopez (2008).
9. Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship (1999) is probably the most famous recent addition to the
large body of literature on Chinese diasporas. Also see Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires
(1997) and Peach (1994).
10. Besides the obvious difference that ‘Asian’ typically means South Asian in Britain and East
Asian in the USA, these groups have also been differentially positioned vis-à-vis Black and
White in each national context. For a sampling of literature on the racial and class identity of
British Asians (including South Asians as well as Chinese), see Allen (1971), Hiro (1971),
Parker (1995), Brah (1996), Raj (2003), Shukla (2003), Benton and Gomez (2008), and Benson
(1996). On Black identity and race relations more generally in Britain, see Alexander (1996),
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1983), and Gilroy (1987). On the construction of
whiteness in the British Empire, see Mohanram (2007).
11. For example, racist violence, formal and informal exclusion from the polity, and economic
exploitation.
12. The New Otani, now called the Kyoto Grand Hotel, remains a nonunion hotel today.
13. Including the Japanese American National Coalition for Redress and Reparations (NCRR),
Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA), Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance
(APALA), and a group of UCLA students organized by Professor Glenn Omatsu.
14. For an overview of the struggle, see Davis (1996).
15. See Sa-I-Gu (1993), Abelmann and Lie (1995), and Gooding-Williams (1993).

Notes on contributor
Wendy Cheng is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American studies and Justice & Social
Inquiry at Arizona State University. She is a coauthor, with Laura Pulido and Laura Barraclough, of
A People’s Guide to Los Angeles; and author of The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Remapping
Race in Suburban California (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2013).

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