Daryl J. Maeda

Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972

On March 22, 1969, in Portsmouth Square, a public gathering place in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a group of young Chinese Americans calling themselves the Red Guard Party held a rally to unveil their “10 Point Program.“ Clad in berets and armbands, they announced a Free Breakfast program for children at the Commodore Stockton school, denounced the planned destruction of the Chinese Playground, and called for the “removal of colonialist police from Chinatown.“ The Red Guard Party’s style, language, and politics clearly recalled those of the Black Panther Party, with whom they had significant contact and by whom they were profoundly influenced (AAPA Newspaper March 1969 1; Lyman 20-52). At the rally, the Red Guards performed an Asian American version of black nationalism by adopting the Panthers’ garb, confrontational manner, and emphasis on self-determination. Many years later, the Asian American playwright and critic Frank Chin dismissed the Red Guards’ rally as a “yellow minstrel show“ (Terkel 310). But while Chin rejected the Red Guards’ performance as a vain attempt to imitate blackness, in 1971, just two years after the rally, he offered his own dramatic take on the interplay between Asian Americans and blacks in his play The Chickencoop Chinaman. Widely acknowledged as a germinal work of Asian American literature, Chin’s play explores the relationship between Asian American identity and blackness by featuring Chinese American and Japanese American protagonists who associate with, claim sympathy for, and exhibit speech and dress patterns most commonly associated with African Americans. Set in the late 1960s, The Chickencoop Chinaman chronicles the adventures of Tam Lum, a fast-talking Chinese American, and his Japanese American sidekick, Kenji, as they attempt to produce a film about the career of their childhood hero, the African American boxer

Racial Politics, Resentment, and Affirmative Action: Asian Americans as “Model” College Applicants

ABSTRACT This article uses philosophical analysis to clarify the arguments and claims about racial discrimination brought forward in the recent legal challenges to affirmative action in higher education admissions. Affirmative action opponents have argued that elite institutions of higher education are using negative action against Asian American applicants, so they can admit other students of color instead by using race-conscious affirmative action. We examined the surrounding controversy, while positing that the portrayal of Asian Americans as a model minority in this debate foments a politics of resentment that divides racial groups. Our analysis centered on how key concepts such as racial discrimination and diversity may be central to this politics of resentment. Given persistent threats to access and equity in higher education, it is important to gain conceptual clarity about the racial politics of anti-affirmative action efforts.

Nomad of the Transpacific: Bruce Lee as Method

Abstract:The martial artist and film star Bruce Lee embodied the multidirectional, transpacific interflows of people, cultures, aesthetics, and ideologies between China and the United States. Tracing his transoceanic crossings reveals how colonialism and militarism contributed to his martial arts evolution, which intermixed influences from China, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and the United States; how he melded bodily aesthetics and their gendered meanings from Italy, China, and the United States; and how he connected struggles against racism in the United States with anticolonialism in Asia. Rooted in the emerging theoretical framework of transpacific studies, and committed to deimperializing the production of knowledge about both Asia and the United States, this essay uses Bruce Lee as method by which to focus the circulating currents of power and resistance that have contributed to the mutual construction of China and the United States.