In Search of the Asian Nation: Self-Determination, National Liberation, and the Asian American Movement

Abstract: Though today "Asian American" marks a category that has been used to indicate a narrowly racial or cultural identity, at its inception in the late 1960s, Asian American was an idea of political community routed through the language of national liberation. The emergence of Asian American was facilitated through the appearance of revolutionary subjects on the global stage of Third Worldism, in which Asian indexed a new radical political subject. This paper traces debates within the Asian American Movement over the national question, elucidating a historical moment in which activists sought to define the structural position of Asians in the US in relation to a global struggle against capitalism and towards decolonization. Drawing from archival research and original oral history interviews, I argue that national question debates indexed the contradictions of integrating the US and Asia, race and class, reform and revolution, into a unified political program. Furthermore, I trace the evolution of the idea of Asian American self-determination from its revolutionary Third Worldist roots in the 1970s to forays into electoral and special interest politics in the 1980s, arguing that the two periods held more continuity with each other than rupture. I suggest that the US transition from Third Worldism to multiculturalism was overdetermined by the decline of national liberation movements and the introduction of market reforms in Asian socialist states.