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October 4, 2003, 2:06 a.m.

To the left is my new Punk Planet header, by the way. My old one, bearing the old slogan for this site, "Some spies hide their bombs in books," has been getting issues of the magazine returned from prisons for reasons of "national secuity."

 

October 3, 2003, 7:56 p.m.

reading: The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, Barbara Cruikshank; Women's Studies on its Own , ed. Robyn Weigman
listening: Slant 6, Inzombia CD 
watching: School of Rock, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , Season 4 DVDs

Life is good, and I'm actually enjoying writing this dissertation. I'm finishing my fourth chapter which, in the broad sense, examines legacies of Cold War knowledge production in the field of ethnic studies and critiques the field's reliance on nation-based paradigms. The specifics will be unveiled at the upcoming American Studies Association conference in Hartford (CT) during a roundtable organized by Inderpal Grewal, the description of which follows, and helped to shape my fourth chapter's political project:

"Changing Paradigms of Asian/American Studies: Confronting the American Security State and its Subjects"

The events of 9/11 and its aftermath continue to pose questions of knowledge and power that pervades our research and teaching. In particular, Asian/American studies, in all its interdisciplinary and disciplinary formations, with new directions in diaspora and transnational studies, is one site where these questions have become crucial. Thus the issue of identity in relation to the heterogeneity of Asian communities in the US requires that we pay attention to new forms of racialized and gendered violence that have been directed at Muslim communities whose backgrounds lie in a number of Asian countries. The identification of the Muslim male as "fanatic" or "terrorist" means not only a surveillance of immigrants from many Asian countries, but also a new connected representation of such places as the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Singapore as sites of the birth of the violence of "terrorism" because of their large Muslim populations. Moreover, the renewed emphasis on the "victimization" of women in these "traditional" (read "Asian" or "Muslim") cultures as the reason for waging war in order to save these women (as argued by George Bush at the time of the bombing of Afghanistan) means that we need to rethink some of the paradigms of "tradition" that have pervaded both Asian and Asian American studies. In a related vein, the urgent question also becomes how we define and demarcate the area known as "Asia" in light of these recent events and what can be gained or lost by such reconsiderations. These are just three examples of the ways in which those of us who work in the related fields of Asian/American studies have to examine the forms of knowledge that we produce, the subjects of that knowledge and the uses of our knowledges by the US security state.

Thus the question of "culture" is important here not only to think about how Other "cultures" are constructed in the US but also the role of culture in current forms of state power in the US. In particular, the question of the kinds of orientalisms that underlie ideas of Othering through representations of Asian or Muslim as essential identities have played important roles in creating new kinds of consensus to the militarism of this new century, especially in the US.

Our purpose for the roundtable is three-fold. First, to address the forms of violence emanating from the US state as it related to Asians in the US both historically as well as at present. Second, to see how our academic knowledges might collude or confront this kind of violence. Third, to examine what in the received paradigms of Asian/American studies might be changing in relation to the forms of power and kinds of subjects produced by the "security state" as a new kind of state whose policies are focussed on combating "terrorism" globally and protecting the security of "Americans." Lisa Lowe. s work has done a great deal in bringing in issues of heterogeneity within Asian/American studies as well as enabling us to rethink the assimilation/acculturation paradigm. These and other questions (such as those I mentioned in my first paragraph) are urgently required as we address the new forms of surveillance, reduced civil liberties, racial and gendered violences that have emerged in the past year.

The roundtable brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who will together think about these questions. These scholars include some that have been working in the field of Asian/American studies and some that have begun to work in this field more recently. Some work on older Asian American communities and some on recent migrants from Asia. This is a group of people across disciplinary divides who are doing groundbreaking work in reconfiguring some of the paradigms of Asian Am studies in recent years as it has addressed issues of transnationalism and diaspora.