Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Margo Machida is Associate Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is a co-editor of Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art, winner of the Association of Asian American Studies' 2005 Cultural Studies Book Award. Machida curated the groundbreaking 1994 Asia Society group exhibition ASIA/AMERICA: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art. She is a co-founder of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium and Godzilla: Asian American Art Network (1990-2001).

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"This is a foundational text for appreciating and interpreting contemporary Asian American art. It is an intelligent and intelligible work built on many years of dedicated research and original thinking. Margo Machida has obviously been inspired by deep encounters with the art emanating from this marvelously complex demographic. "Unsettled Visions" has set the standard for the field."--Franklin Odo, Director, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program

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UNSETTLED VISIONS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

list of illustrations......................................................................................ixpreface....................................................................................................xiiiacknowledgments............................................................................................xixintroduction Art, Asian America, and the social imaginary a poetics of positionality.....................11 A Play of Positionalities reconsidering identification..................................................172 Othering primitivism, orientalism, and stereotyping.....................................................573 Trauma, Social Memory, and Art...........................................................................1204 Migration, Mixing, and Place.............................................................................194Epilogue toward an Ongoing Dialogue.......................................................................271notes......................................................................................................283bibliography...............................................................................................321index......................................................................................................353

Chapter One

This book takes it as axiomatic that contemporary identifications and affiliations are complex, multidimensional, and fluid-a continually evolving play of positions constituted through and derived from transactions with language, art, customs, ideas, politics, spirituality, and history. Identities are aptly described as names for the divergent ways we are positioned both by and within accounts of bygone times. Simultaneously mediated by tradition and change, interpellated by operations of power, and increasingly shaped by the imperatives of a globally dispersed yet ever more integrated world economy, such positionings index the continuum of circumstances, experiences, and narratives by which individuals and groups both make and take meaning from their times, their journeys around the planet, and the places in which they live.

For my purposes, a positional framework needs to be expansive and open ended, providing a context for grounded inquiry and ongoing dialogue. At the heart of my investigation is the question of how artists of Asian heritage, whether foreign or U.S. born, conceptualize the world and position themselves as cultural and historical subjects through the symbolic languages and media of visual art. This approach to positionality must be responsive to the contingent, shifting, and frequently ambivalent nature of social and personal identities in a multiply determined world, and to new ideas emerging from arenas of intellectual discourse. It should also allow scope for acknowledging the realms of the emotive and affective, including the nuances and richness of collective imaginings. It should recognize the need for belonging, stability, continuity, and origins, and the impact of individual standpoint and agency on both the artistic imagination and the cultural record. Although not in itself a theory, the critical resonances and antireductionist implications of positionality make it a robust device for exploring and mapping visual art and artistic practices informed by a poetics of self- and collective identification. Positionality also takes into account the self-conscious, and at times quite idiosyncratic, subjectivities through which it is given expression. The term likewise seeks to denote and acknowledge the significant shifts that have occurred in the demography and cultural politics of Asian America over the last four decades, which in turn helps to trace and contextualize the artworks and concerns of the artists in this study.

Since the 1970s, the term positionality has been used to frame a spectrum of social critiques that point to the situatedness of our knowledge of and actions in the world, which are intertwined with different places, shifting contexts, and unequal access to power and resources-including expressive resources made available through educational, gender, and class privilege, among other factors that are pithily referred to as "positions of enunciation." This move to rigorously scrutinize the epistemic, material, and discursive positionings of oneself and of others, and to grapple with realms of difference within and between groups, has had transformative effects in the academy and on post-1960s social movements more generally. One thinks, for instance, of the foundational challenge posed in the 1980s by the critique of hegemonic Western feminisms that would take "woman" as a naturalized category of analysis, thereby assuming the homogeneity of women as a group. In a similar spirit, this project (and the decade of research during the 1990s on which it is primarily based) insists on the recognition and careful elucidation of different positions articulated by artists of Asian background through their work-ranging from strong assertions of ethnic heritage and community, and unifying cultural symbols, to deconstructive critiques and antiessentialist postures.

The political space of the nation that Asians negotiate is usefully framed as simultaneously "juridically legislated, territorially situated, and culturally embodied." While each of these realms must be considered, the arena of national culture is where individuals are politically constituted as "Americans." Although Asians have historically been positioned, both legally and culturally, as outsiders to the United states, this position can be conceived as generative, in that the Asian American presence disrupts and challenges dominant representations of a unified, homogenous nation-state. Rather than entailing the recovery of some originary or essential social categories, such an evocation of Asian American culture as a productive site of alterity-one that is not simply imposed from without but also continuously constructed from within-meshes with and helps to contextualize the various strategies of agency and cultural intervention with which the artists in this study are actively engaged.

Matters of identity, identification, and affiliation continue to galvanize many Asian American artists, despite the prevalence of contemporary discourses that would discount the validity of such conceptions. Continued attention to positions based on social identification is motivated not only by the desire to retain cultural and political agency, and by the necessities of resistance against an ascribed status, but by the fact that identity is generally deemed foundational as a source of meaning. Indeed, the quest for larger identifications and affiliations is integral to the quintessentially human activity of trying to make sense of the world and our place within it. For example, the Filipino American artist and filmmaker Marlon Fuentes remarks, "I've been using my art in trying to create stakeposts or outposts, kind of an orientating device.... the images that I've been making are a way of reconciling myself to my own past as well as my own culture." That "orientating device" can draw on many elements for its imaginative constructions, each feeding into the ever more prolific and diverse production of Asian Americans in the arts. Alongside...