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ABSTRACT
Finding Asian Americans during the 2020 presidential election requires us to take up the paradoxical task of looking for what is not there. Elections stage our national narratives, resurrecting or revising them to define who we imagine ourselves to be. To be left out of the election narrative is to be neglected in the national imagination. This article contrasts the outsized effect of COVID-19 on Asian American populations with our near absence from election news coverage and neglect by presidential campaigns. Rather than remediate national narratives, I turn to the work of photographer Corky Lee to visualize Asian Americans outside of those narratives and to contest the assumption of homogenous national time.
Notes
1 Andrew Yang, “We Asian Americans are not the Virus, but We Can Be Part of the Cure,” Washington Post, April 1, 2020, Opinion, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/andrew-yang-coronavirus-discrimination/; Stacy Chen, “Andrew Yang Faces Backlash from the Asian American Community Over Op-Ed,” CBS News, April 5, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/andrew-yang-faces-backlash-asian-american-community-op/story?id=69961672.
2 Kamala Harris, “Kamala Harris & Mindy Kalilng Cook Masala Dosa,” November 25, 2019, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz7rNOAFkgE.
3 Saloni Gajjar, “Asian Twitter, Black Twitter Joke about Harris’ Disapproving Auntie Vibe,” NBC News, October 8, 2020, Asian America section, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-twitter-black-twitter-joke-about-harris-disapproving-auntie-vibe-n1242583.
4 Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
5 Katherine Kam, “Why Asian American Women Have had Highest Jobless Rates During Last 6 Months of Covid,” NBCNews, January 27, 2021, Asian America section, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/why-asian-american-women-have-had-highest-jobless-rates-during-n1255699; Catarina Saraiva, “Asian-American Workers See Biggest Losses in Tepid Job Report,” Bloomberg News, February 5, 2021, Economics section, https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/asian-workers-see-biggest-losses-in-tepid-u-s-jobs-report; Amy Yee, “COVID’s Outsize Impact on Asian Americans is Being Ignored,” Scientific American, May 6, 2021, Policy and Ethics section, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covids-outsize-impact-on-asian-americans-is-being-ignored/.
6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006).
7 Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
8 Madhavi Mallapragada, “Asian Americans as Racial Contagion,” Cultural Studies 35, no. 2–3 (2021): 279–90, doi:10.1080/09502386.2021.1905678
9 Nylah Burton, “Why Asians in Masks Should Not be the ‘Face’ of the Coronavirus,” Vox, March 6, 2020, https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/3/6/21166625/coronavirus-photos-racism.
10 Heather Long et al., “The Covid-19 Recession is the Most Unequal in Modern U.S. History,” Washington Post, September 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/coronavirus-recession-equality/.
11 I use the term Latino here instead of Latinx because the images in the article are exclusively of male-presenting workers.
12 Scott Horsley, “‘Overlooked’: Asian American Jobless Rate Surges for Few Take Notice,” NPR, October 1, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/918834644/overlooked-asian-american-jobless-rate-surges-but-few-take-notice.
13 Jonnelle Marte, “Asian-American Businesses Suffer OutsizedPandemic Toll,” Reuters, April 14, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/asian-american-businesses-suffer-outsized-pandemic-toll-2021-04-14/.
14 Lenny Bernstein, “The Coronavirus Pandemic has Caused Nearly 300,000 More Deaths Than Expected,” Washington Post, October 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-excess-deaths/2020/10/20/1e1d77c6-12e1-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html.
15 Agnes Constante, “Why the Asian American Covid Data Picture is so Incomplete,” NBCNews, October 20, 2020, Coronavirus section, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/why-asian-american-covid-data-picture-so-incomplete-n1243219.
16 Yee, “COVID’s Outsize Impact on Asian Americans is Being Ignored.”
17 Yee, “COVID’s Outsize Impact on Asian Americans is Being Ignored.”
18 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14, original emphasis, 13.
19 John Kelly, “Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous, Empty Communities in Contemporary Social Theory,” Development and Change 29, no. 4 (1998): 839–71, doi:10.1111/1467-7660.00101.
20 Kelly, “Time and the Global,” 848.
21 Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?,” Millennium 20, no. 3 (1991): 521–5, doi:10.1177/03058298910200030601.
22 Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?”, 521.
23 Shan-Yun Huang, “‘Wandering Temporalities’: Rethinking ‘Imagined Communities’ Through ‘Wandering Rocks,’” James Joyce Quarterly 49, no. 3/4 (2012): 589–610, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24598623.
24 Hanna Park, “How Corky Lee’s Legacy Goes Far Beyond Photography,” NBCNews, February 2, 2021, Asian America section, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/how-corky-lee-s-legacy-goes-far-beyond-photography-n1256415.
25 Sabrina Tavernise, “Amid Awakening, Asian-Americans are Still Taking Shape as a Political Force,” New York Times, April 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/04/us/georgia-asian-americans-politics.html.
26 Stephanie Hueon Tung, “Why We Must See Asian Americans in US History,” Aperture, April 22, 2021, Opinion, https://aperture.org/editorial/how-do-photographs-reveal-a-history-of-asian-american-erasure/.
27 Frank Chin, Donald Duk (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1991); Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Vintage, 1989).
28 Neil Genzlinger, “Corky Lee, Who Photographed Asian-American Life, Dies at 73,” New York Times, January 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/nyregion/corky-lee-dead-coronavirus.html.
29 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
30 Anjali Arondekar, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005): 10–27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704707. I would like to thank Dr Amanda Friz for suggesting this article to me.
31 Thank you to Drs Linh Nguyễn and Habiba Ibrahim and the editors of this special issue for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article. All mistakes are my own.