On Inheritances

In this presentation for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Tamara K. Nopper analyzes the emergent discourses of “anti-Asian violence” and “Black-Asian solidarity” within historical and sociological contexts. She begins with a discussion of the importance of the 1980s and 1990s as formative moments in terms of post-Asian American Movement organizational infrastructure. She then discusses interracial violence, the coeval growth of hate crime data and legislation, and the hashtag #StopAAPIHate. Her primary concern in this discussion is to reveal what work these narrative framings do in service of or in opposition to anti-Blackness and carcerality.

“A Living Artist with Open Eyes”: the Transnational Journey of Mitsu Yashima

Mitsu Yashima (1908–1988) was a political dissident and artist in two countries. In prewar Japan, she became a proletarian rights activist; during World War ii she continued to oppose Japanese militarism by working for the United States government. In her later years, she opposed US militarism during the Vietnam War. In San Francisco, she became an admired cultural worker in the Asian American movement. Examining her life offers rare glimpses of a woman’s efforts to forge a career in the male-dominated art worlds of twentieth-century Japan and the US. Her transnational life expands the boundaries of Japanese American history, which has long focused on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century immigration to the US West and Hawaiʻi. Her activism also challenges the perception that only third-generation Japanese Americans joined the Asian American movement of the 1960s-1970s. Yashima’s concern for human rights and peace fueled her art, political engagement, and community building.

The Asian American Movement and Critical Practice

Though Asian American literary studies bears its critical legacy, the Asian American Movement (1968–1977) is largely invisible within Asian American literary studies. This has led to a critical murkiness when it comes to discerning the extent of the Movement’s influence on Asian American literary criticism. The Movement is often remembered in literary scholarship as the activities of the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP)—a collective of four writers who were only loosely associated with Asian American Movement organizations. As metacritical scholarship on “Asian American” as a literary category has suggested, CARP’s introductory essay to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) is simultaneously held as the epitome of cultural nationalism’s misogynist tendencies and as the prototypical theorization of Asian American literature. However, this essentializing of CARP as the Movement ignores how the collected writings of the Asian American Movement, Roots (1970) and Counterpoint (1976), identify literary production and criticism as sites of racial critique in distinction from CARP’s viewpoints. Literary and cultural scholarship’s deconstruction of “Asian American” as a stable term has provided the tools to expand what constitutes the literature of the Movement. As Colleen Lye notes, the Asian American 1960s novel has emerged as a form that challenges the direct association of the era with the Movement. The historical arc of the Movement as centered on campuses highlights the university as an institution that enables Asian American student organizing, from the 1968 student strikes to contemporary interracial solidarity actions, as well as their narrativization into literary forms. Expanding what counts as literature, the decades of Asian American activism after the Movement proper have been documented in the autobiographies of organizers. In this way, the Asian American Movement is not a past-tense influence, but a continuing dialectic between narration and organizing, and literature and social life.

Conclusion

The conclusion describes and analyzes an informal performance of the song “Joy Bubble” by Tiffany Tamaribuchi and its expansion into the dance “Tanko Bushi,” a popular obon song, at a 2017 gathering. In August 2017, more than forty women convened in San Diego, California, for a three-day event focused on women and taiko. The layering of two different but related songs—one new and one old—highlights the similarities between the Asian American movement and the current political moment, as well as the role of performance in resisting oppressive structures. After a brief review of the book’s main arguments, the chapter concludes with questions about the future of taiko.

A New Taiko Folk Dance

One of the first groups in the United States, San Jose Taiko has influenced North American taiko significantly through its performances, leadership, and philosophies. This chapter interrogates the group’s movements on two levels: by examining its connections to the Asian American movement and by analyzing its musical and choreographic repertoires. To that end, the chapter provides an analysis of P. J. Hirabayashi’s participatory taiko folk dance “Ei Ja Nai Ka?” in a variety of performance contexts and its implications for re-membering pre-internment Japanese American histories and honoring immigrant labor. It further demonstrates how the group navigates the sometimes Orientalist strategies that agents and presenters use to market the group, despite its efforts to emphasize its identity as an Asian American group.

Five Decades Later: Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned Poet

Uyematsu considers the past/present/future applications of the Asian American movement and activism via a reflection on her foundational essay, “The Emergence of Yellow Power.”

Sansei Women and the Gendering of Yellow Power in Southern California, 1960s–1970s

In the 1960s and 1970s, third-generation Japanese American (Sansei) women in southern California began to challenge gendered racializations in both the ethnic community and the larger society. As activists in the Asian American movement, they criticized stereotypical images of Asian/Americans, using the arts to create new representations, as they drew inspiration from Asian women engaged in revolutionary struggle. They also organized women’s groups to address community issues such as childcare access, seniors’ health, drug abuse, and workers’ rights. Sansei women not only assessed their position in U.S. society but also debated their relationship to Japan. Their experiences show the persisting significance of gender in the racialization of Japanese Americans as well as the ways in which women’s critique of gender expectations helped to shape the Asian American movement.

The Asian American Movement

The Asian American Movement was a social movement for racial justice, most active during the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, which brought together people of various Asian ancestries in the United States who protested against racism and U.S. neo-imperialism, demanded changes in institutions such as colleges and universities, organized workers, and sought to provide social services such as housing, food, and healthcare to poor people. As one of its signal achievements, the Movement created the category “Asian American,” (coined by historian and activist Yuji Ichioka), which encompasses the multiple Asian ethnic groups who have migrated to the United States. Its founding principle of coalitional politics emphasizes solidarity among Asians of all ethnicities, multiracial solidarity among Asian Americans as well as with African, Latino, and Native Americans in the United States, and transnational solidarity with peoples around the globe impacted by U.S. militarism. The movement participated in solidarity work with other Third World peoples in the United States, including the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State College and University of California, Berkeley. The Movement fought for housing rights for poor people in the urban cores of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and Philadelphia; it created arts collectives, published newspapers and magazines, and protested vigorously against the Vietnam War. It also extended to Honolulu, where activists sought to preserve land rights in rural Hawai’i. It contributed to the larger radical movement for power and justice that critiqued capitalism and neo-imperialism, which flourished during the 1960s and 1970s.