Decolonizing Intervention for Asian Racial Justice: Advancing Antiracist Art Inquiry Through Contemporary Asian Immigrant Art Practice

Abstract

Drawing on scholarship about decolonization and anti-Asian racism, this article offers a decolonizing mode of thinking that intervenes in and advances antiracist art inquiries and praxis. Refusing a nationalist and fictitious Americanization that focuses on the successful stories of Asian immigrants, this new mode of antiracist art inquiries and praxis challenges the existing paradigm of antiracism for and of Asian immigrants that heavily centers on the communities’ empowerment and inclusion within a multicultural discourse. By viewing racism as a function of settler colonialism, a decolonizing intervention helps to uncover the limitations of forms of Asian American racial justice work that collide with the work of Indigenous survivance while submitting to the development and maintenance of the settler colonial system. Based on a contemporary Asian immigrant artist’s site-specific video performance, this article discusses new orientations of antiracist art inquiries that critique settlers’ colonial representational strategies that manage the racial formation and relations of Asian immigrants/Natives/White settlers to secure White settlers’ supremacy and sovereignty. A critical understanding of Asian American positionalities that explains its roles in the settler colonial framework requires a contextual understanding of the transcultural context where both imperial and settler colonial powers are consolidated to shape Asian immigrants’ settlement and an ethics of relationality for Asian–Indigenous solidarity that sustains Asian American communities’ racial equity and liberation in line with Indigenous survivance.

Notes

1 I use the term “Asian Americans” interchangeably using Asian immigrants because Asian immigrant subjectivities vary and are parts of Asian Americans.

2 The term AsianCrit is originated to highlight racial experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and provide an analysis of White supremacy in lives of and from the perspectives of AAPI (Chang, 1993; Cho, 2003; Matsuda, 1996). Iftikar and Museus (2018) proposed a framework of AsianCrit with seven tenets, to provide an educational space for those who do critical work on and with AAs. These tenets focus on the awareness of the term Asian/AA as a construction of White supremacy and racialization, a critical understanding of a transnational context where AAs’ lived experiences are shaped in relation to other global hegemonic systems, intersectional understanding of AAs’ racial formation, actions for reconstructive narrative and storytelling based on a strategic (anti)essential approach, and a commitment to social equity to abolish all systemic oppression and dehumanization.

3 The concept of the term has been developed and applied to understand various historical moments like the French Revolution, Nazi movement in Germany, and England’s industrialization (Sayre & Löwy, 1984). It generally means an ideology that views capitalism by producing an opposition between the concrete, sensory, and natural value such as human labor, on one hand, and the abstract, intangible, nonsensory dimension standing for capital accumulation, surplus value, and money on the other. Romantic anticapitalism promotes the concrete dimension while discrediting the domination of a purely abstract dimension (Postone, 1980).

4 Long View has a video version and photographic work for postcards. The single-channel high-definition video runs 1 minute, 27 seconds (Figure 1). The photographic work consists of six perforated color postcards. http://www.jin-meyoon.com/index.html.

5 It is a 9-minute, 29-second–long single-channel video installed at Musée d‘art Contemporain des Laurentides in 2019. http://www.jin-meyoon.com/index.html.

6 https://www.jeeyeunlee.com/100-miles.

7 https://www.jeeyeunlee.com/colonized-colonizer.

8 https://www.jeeyeunlee.com/unsettling-project.