Knowledge in movement: configuring Asian American studies in Asian classrooms

ABSTRACT

This article takes classrooms as crucial sites to explore the critical challenges and opportunities arising from Asian American studies’ relocation to Asia. Taking a cue from Erin Manning’s theory on “the minor gesture,” I conceive classroom dialogism as operating not as much to pass on inured thoughts as to generate “minor” forces that push knowledge into movement. Specifically, I argue that the confrontations and encounters of various nationalist, culturalist and imperialist perspectives—which usually contribute to the differences and difficulties of teaching Asian American studies in Asia—may be taken less as obstructions than as “minor” activators that push for renewed knowledge structures. Section one of this article reads selected teaching accounts to not only highlight the implications of Asian classrooms’ readings of Asian American texts in the power dynamics between Asia(s) and America(s), but also excavate from students’ readings and responses the habitual models of receiving Asian American studies in Asia. Section two then turns to my experience of teaching an undergraduate Asian American literature course in Taiwan to explore classrooms’ potential to usher in the time and space needed for opening habitual thinking paradigms into movement and variation. By mobilizing in classroom switches and exchanges between thinking positions and interpretive frames, I invoked from the documentary film Voices in the Clouds (2010) the intersecting life stories of Atayal, Han Taiwanese, Asian Americans and Americans to underscore the importance to think in terms of historical change and human movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American studies in Asia
• transpacific studies
• the minor gesture
• classroom dialogism
• Voices in the Clouds
• Taiwan Indigenous culture

Acknowledgements

Parts of this essay were presented at the international conference “Asian American Studies in East Asia” held on 28 April 2017, at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. I thank the conference participants for their feedback. Special thanks go to Guy Beauregard for bringing my attention to Voices in the Clouds and offering invaluable suggestions during the process of my conceiving and revising this essay, and to Masumi Izumi for reading and commenting on the final manuscripts. I also wish to acknowledge—with heartfelt gratitude—the students who took my Asian American literature course. It was their curiosity about knowledge and generous participation in each class that has inspired the writing of this essay.

Notes

1 Major scholarship in English includes AALA Journal’s forum “Asian American Literature in a Global Frame” (2005); Amerasia Journal’s special issue “Word Travels: Asian American Writing in China, Germany, Korea, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Singapore & the U.S.” (2008); Inter-Asia Cultural Studies’s special issues “Asian American Studies in Asia” (2012) and “Studying and Teaching Asian American Studies in East Asia” (2019); and Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies’s special issue “Phantom Asian America” (2013). For an overview of the development of Asian American studies in East Asia, see Feng (2014).

2 See C. Wang (2012), Yoneyama (2012), and Lin (2016).

3 Although the shared ethnicities might give rise to readers’ sense of ethno-cultural affinity/familiarity and thus increase their chance of identifying with the characters and messages these texts conveyed, this affinity/familiarity could be superficial or even illusory, let along its tendency to reinforce blood or cultural essentialism. See Shan (2000), Wong (2004), and Tee (2012).

4 I made the transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of my course clear in the course description included in the syllabus: in this course we will

read and discuss stories that have emerged in-between “Asia” and “America” out of the transpacific flows of people, cultures, politics, and histories since the second half of the nineteenth century. By reading and discussing stories of immigrants, migrants, exiles, travelers, students, cultural mediators, etc., we will understand Asian Americans’ engagement with and intervention into the construction of Asia, America, and the Pacific history and humanities.

5 See the website on Voices: http://voicesintheclouds.com/.

6 A total of 26 students took this course in 2013 and 2014. Among these students, one was an exchange student from Singapore, one identified herself as a Taiwanese growing up in the Philippines, and one had experiences of living in South Africa. The rest of the class grew up in Taiwan.

7 Voices was introduced to my students at the fourteenth week during an eighteen-week semester. The course readings were grouped into four themes: “In Search of ‘Asian Americans,’” “Language and Generations,” “Asian American Romance” (in 2014; “Human Rights and Life Politics” in 2013), and “Thinking Asian American in Asia.” Voices was put under the fourth theme. Before watching Voices, students had read, viewed and discussed texts such as Eat a Bowl of Tea (film and selected passages from the novel), chapters selected from China Men and The Woman Warrior, A Thousand Years of Good Prayer (both the story and the film), selected short stories from Pangs of Love, among other texts.

8 See Liu (2010) for the development of elementary and high school curriculum in Taiwan in relation to Indigenous cultures.

9 I did not have the chance to include into my class the insights from Asian American settler colonial studies. From hindsight the increasing realization of Asians and Asian Americans as not merely “immigrants” but “settlers” across the Pacific and in Americas would definitely enrich my class’s inquiry into the analogy of Asian Americans and Indigenous groups. About the development of Asian American settler colonial critique, see Day (2016), Lo (2019), and Tiongson (2019). See also Beauregard (2019) for how settler colonial critique intersects with teaching transpacific texts in East Asia.

10 The inclusion of Indigenous cultures into grade school textbooks and the wide-spread celebratory and rescue rhetoric toward Indigenous heritage in Taiwan testify to Taiwan government’s attempted appropriation of Indigeneity. See Sugimoto (2018) for detailed discussions of the settler colonial “incorporation and inheritance” of Indigeneity in Taiwan since 1949.

11 Coolidge reiterated in “Standing up in Taiwan” (2016) that “the Taiwanese Indigenous people want to be part of the bigger world” (00:01:03) and what he meant to do in Taiwan is “to be a bridge” (00:01:09).

12 This idea was further elaborated by Beauregard (2015). According to him, Coolidge is presented in Voices as a “‘good’ Asian American subject: respectful, thoughtful, caring, and committed to advancing a form of liberal multiculturalism” (9).

13 Intermarriages between Atayal women and other national/ethnic groups have not been uncommon since the Japanese colonial era. After the Chinese Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan, more Atayal women married Han people or members of the US military. See Chen (2001, 8). In the case of Coolidge, many women of his mother’s family married foreigners (“Standing up in Taiwan” 2016, 00:03:05).

14 One sequence in Voices presents Coolidge attending to his hospitalized father-in-law and subsequently the father-in-law’s funeral. Coolidge considered this experience an interruption to his Atayal roots search project in Taiwan and “felt disappointment” (00:55:53). However, for viewers who look for Coolidge’s transnational and trans-ethnic life trajectories, this sequence could be especially meaningful because it offers glimpses to Coolidge’s encounters and negotiations with the Han culture and his language barriers in Taiwan.

15 The practices of facial tattoos were banned during the Japanese colonial era and gradually disappeared. See Sylvia Dean, “Lost Treasures: Taiwan Atayal Facial Tattoos” (Taipei Times, 10 October 2019).

16 Similar ideas were advanced by Singapore-based scholar Walter S. H. Lim (2008, 139), who observed that his students “have less conceptual problems dealing with the idea of migration involving movement from the old country to the new world than with the idea of diaspora and transnationalism”—the students “have a slightly more difficult time analyzing and writing on representations of the experience of traversing and crossing transnational borders and demarcations.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST104-2410-H-003 -034 -MY3 and MOST 107-2410-H-003 -017 -MY2).

Notes on contributors

Hsiu-chuan Lee

Hsiu-chuan Lee is Professor of the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University. Her essays on Asian American literature and transpacific studies have appeared in Cultural Studies, Ariel, Amerasia Journal, Mosaic, Concentric, EurAmerica, Tamkang Review, etc. She is also a co-editor of The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique (Temple UP, 2020).