Abstract
Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics is a very timely book in the current era in which White patriarchal supremacy became more empowered, seen in the explicit violence in Charlottesville and the massacre in El Paso. It is a time when people of color need to coalesce in solidarity and resistance. Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics is a book that attempts to contribute to this goal. It explores epistemological, conceptual, and methodological frameworks of Asian American feminisms and how the Asian American feminist praxis for resistance is essentially connected to coalitional politics of Women of Color.
The 12 chapters of the book are divided into five Parts. The two chapters in Part One trace Asian American feminist genealogies in the emergence of Women of Color politics. Hong looks into the role of Asian woman activists in the New York Third World Women’s Alliance that combined the Black Power Movement’s anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideology with Third World feminisms. Hong found that the organization’s periodical often featured anticolonial revolutionary women fighters against U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, China, and North Korea and idealized them as models for U.S. feminists. The second chapter, written by Wu, also notes that solidarity with women revolutionaries in decolonizing Asian nations helped Asian American women challenge their political invisibility, historically enforced by the “model minority” racialization and gendering of Asian women as submissive. Both Hong and Wu argue that Asian American feminists’ co-creation of Third World Feminisms was accomplished through their political alliance with other Women of Color characterized by both shared and different experiences of the triple oppression of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism/imperialism. Part Two of the book is about epistemologies of Asian American sexual politics. It also includes two chapters, one by Ninh about nuanced aspects of sexual violence in the everyday lives of Asian American women and the other by Sarmiento that presents fascinating analyses of contemporary diasporic Filipinx literature through the intersecting lenses of peminism (Filipinx American feminism), queer praxis, and Filipinx decolonization. Part Three, titled “Decolonial Investments,” focuses on epistemologies and methodologies for Asian American feminist praxes that acknowledge but also reject Asian Americans’ complicity with settler colonialism at the expense of Indigenous people in Pacific Islands and North America. In their enlightening chapter, Teves and Arvin acutely criticize the common use of the demographic category “Asian/Pacific Islander” and ask “What kind of intellectual and political work is necessary to dislodge the demographic grouping and supposed coalition between Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans so that we can have conversations about the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, capitalist accumulation, and white supremacy that continue to divide Indigenous peoples and communities of color?” (pp. 107-8). Also in Part Three, Kimoto presents an epistemological framework, called “restive orientation,” for Asian American feminist liberation that moves away from our orientation toward Whiteness as Americanness, rejects the destruction of Indigenous communities, and orients ourselves toward Blackness to build a coalition with other women of color against white hetero-patriarchal supremacy. Part Four of the book critiques the Asian–Backward and US–Progressive binary ideology through diverse topics ranging from a Hmong feminist refugee epistemology to feminist discourse about exploitation of Filipina migrant workers. I found Kandaswamy’s contribution especially interesting. Her chapter is based on the case study of Purvi Patel, an Indian American woman who was sentenced to twenty years in prison for feticide. Through this study, Kandaswamy unearths “common differences” in the ways the criminal justice system and other state apparatus control the reproductive rights of Asian American women and other women of color. Part Five of the book is devoted to theorizing an Asian American feminist praxis. Fujiwara claims that strategies for solidarity necessitate understanding multiple valences of power and oppression to articulate incommensurable positionalities and relative privileges among Asian Americans and to place an Asian American feminist praxis in dialogue with women of color frameworks. The book concludes with Roshanravan’s chapter that asks a very critical question “How do we need to rethink what visibility should mean for Asian Americans who have benefited from the model-minority racial project at Black Americans’ expense?” (p. 263). According to Roshanravan, disrupting the anti-Blackness of the model-minority logic requires explicit Asian–Black solidarity that will create the “racial third space” for Asian Americans to expand their sense of self as interdependent with the Black community and enable an Asian American feminist praxis of coalitional visibility.
Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics is not always easy reading, but it is a book with many insightful ideas for scholars who are interested in women of color feminisms and Asian Studies. It presents diverse theoretical and political frameworks for an Asian American feminism that is based on heterogeneity of Asian Americans, resists our relative privileges and complicity with settler colonialism, and places its ontology in women of color coalition.