Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State.

• Author: Wing, Adrien Katherine
• Position: Review

DISORIENTED: ASIAN AMERICANS, LAW, AND THE NATION-STATE. By Robert S. Chang. New York: New York University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 180. Cloth, $34; paper, $19.50.

1. INTRODUCTION

   Robert Chang, (1) a promising young scholar, has given us the first book on Asian Critical Race Theory, or AsianCrit, in his short, readable volume Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State. It is a loosely woven collection of essays divided into three parts, drawing upon work Professor Chang published in several earlier law review articles. (2) This book is part of the Critical America Series of New York University Press. The general editors are Critical Race Theory (CRT) senior scholar Professor Richard Delgado of the University of Colorado Law School and his wife, legal researcher Jean Stefancic. (3) The series has produced the single largest collection of legal literature by Critical Race Theorists. The introduction of this brief Review will situate this book squarely within the CRT tradition from which it springs. The next section will provide a short overview of the volume's major contours. Then, the final section of the Review will humbly engage in a CRT narrative to explore the possible implications of Chang's work by mid-century.

   Professor Chang makes the case for an AsianCrit (4) that is a natural outgrowth of CRT jurisprudence. (5) His pioneering work dovetails nicely with simultaneous flowering in other outsider (6) scholarship areas known as LatCrit, (7) Queer Crit, (8) Critical White Studies, (9) and Critical Race Feminism, (10) all of which are outgrowths of Critical Legal Studies. (11)

   Chang uses the deconstruction methodology that is part of all critical theory to critique legal cases and popular culture -- exploring the legal and societal implications of white supremacy on Asians and Asian Americans. Like all CRT scholars, he places race at the center of the analysis. Instead of an explicit or implicit assumption that the minorities are Black or predominantly Black, he enhances our understanding of minority groups that are Asian. Moreover, Chang brings out that Asians in America are comprised of many ethnicities, some of whom are recent immigrants (p. 2); racism in the Asian context has different ramifications than in the African-American context, where the bulk of the group is comprised of one ethnicity that has been in the United States for several hundred years. (12)

   Chang applies other CRT tenets to the Asian context. Some CRT scholars, primarily focusing on African Americans, have pointed out the color-conscious nature of American law, critiquing the allegedly neutral, objective colorblindness of American jurisprudence. (13) Chang naturally extends this critique to an Asian context to illustrate how the law's treatment of Asians was biased and subjective. In doing so, he endorses the CRT emphasis on the attainment of rights for people of color in America. While these rights may be subjective and socially constructed as Critical Legal Studies adherents claim, they are nonetheless important for Asian peoples who have never fully experienced them in their countries of origin or the United States. (14)

   Chang's book highlights the CRT tenet that race is socially constructed: it is relational and contingent, rather than fixed biologically. (15) He reveals how American law vacillated in its classifications of Asians in a binary Black-White legal paradigm. (16) The use of historical analysis in addition to law is indicative of the multidisciplinary efforts of CRT.

   Chang also devotes considerable space to a defense of the controversial CRT narrative technique (pp. 61-75). Telling stories about Asians is a powerful means, as Delgado would say, "for destroying mindset -- the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place." (17) Finally, Chang goes beyond the realm of critical race theory to endorse critical race praxis, (18) when he idealistically calls for radical plural democracy in the new century.

2. OVERVIEW

   The introduction, entitled Becoming Asian American (pp. 1-8), builds upon the social construction of race tenet of CRT. Scientists have proven that there are more commonalities between so-called different races than within them. (19) These racial terms have no meaning other than what a particular society gives them culturally and legally at a given point in time. Chang came to America from Korea at an early age, and thought of himself as an "Oriental" for many years (p. 1). He later learned that this was a derogatory racist label created in the West (p. 2), and that he was an Asian American, or even more specifically a Korean American. A central question that Chang confronts is whether the term "Asian American" is an ethnic or racial classification. Asians, after all, were the third part of the discredited nineteenth-century taxonomy of Caucasoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids. (20) Because Asian American includes so many ethnic groups, ranging from fifth-generation Chinese Americans to new immigrant Hmong Americans, should they all be put into the same category? Why do we lump Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis in this category as well?

   Chang would quickly be identified as American in Korea due to his poor facility with the Korean language, among other factors. Ironically, his excellent command of English does not identify him as a native here either -- other Americans ask him where he is from, the implication being he could not be from the United States. For Asian Americans, even wearing the quintessentially American garb of girl scouts does not identify them as belonging in the United States. When members of a predominantly Japanese-American girl scout troop asked if a man would like to buy cookies, he said, "I only buy from American girls." (21)

   Thus Asians, even Asian Americans, are forever the "outsiders."(22) The Japanese have a term, kimin, which means an abandoned people -- not any more from the old country, yet not embraced by the new (p. 6). They are sad people, "who live in transit, between their imaginary homelands and the mythic America" (p. 6). He evokes for me the recent poignant memoir of Palestinian-American professor Edward Said, Out of Place. He was kimin -- Palestinian-Egyptian-American -- no true home. (23) To me, the situation of my own group, Black Americans, is even more poignant, since most of us can not even identify the actual country that can be the imagined homeland! Even though we have been in the United States for 400 years, not only one generation or even five, we still remain the permanent outsider -- the group that others can look down on -- including the Asians.

   There is no "essential" Asian ethnic identity. (24) Chang quotes Yen Le Espiritu, who views Asian as a Panethnic identity (p. 5). (25) Takaki defines it to include people from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. (26) I would add Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as Thailand.

   I endorse the panethnic concept with respect to my own so-called race. Sometimes I am called African American or Black American or just Black. To the extent American society continues to use broad racial categories, are African Americans a racial category, or have we been guilty of conflating race with ethnicity? Within the racial category Black, we have the subgroup I belong to called Black Americans, formerly Negroes, or before that, Colored people. I have cousins from Liberia who may or may not consider themselves African Americans, but clearly may not consider themselves part of my same group. Also, I have cousins from Jamaica. Some may consider themselves Black like me or may consider themselves Jamaican Americans, a separate group from mine. (27) In one Florida school, there is a Caribbean Students Association, which is clearly distinct from the Black law students associations found in most American law schools. The Caribbean group may contain Latinos like Cuban Americans or Puerto Ricans, but also French-speaking Haitians. Of course complicating it all, there can be people who we in the United States might call Black Cubans and White Cubans, although very few Cubans would categorize themselves that way.

   In the United States, I am Black, even though my skin is what is called "high

   yellow" within the African-American community. (28) We even have Blacks that look phenotypically white, including former Ohio State University Law School Dean Gregory Williams. (29) In Brazil, the one-drop rule works in the opposite fashion. I am considered "white." (30) The Brazilians might categorize most of their country as white, but from a U.S. perspective, we would see most of the people as Black. In South Africa, I am seen as part of a group called "Coloured." (31) When I teach every summer in Capetown, I blend in, as Capetown is the home of the Coloureds. Many people look like me, much more than in the United States. My partner, James, is a very dark African American. When we walk together, we are considered an interracial couple, and people stare -- a very weird phenomenon for us. Yet his wavy hair and aquiline nose, which actually reflect his American-Indian heritage, cause many people in South Africa to think that he might be an Indian from Calcutta. They often wonder, "what is that man?"

   The panethnic group known as Hispanics or Latinos also faces identity issues even as to its very name. Clearly Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, the latter also known as Chicanos, are different ethnicities. Of course, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Argentinean Americans cannot be lumped easily together. People from Spain can rightfully be called Hispanic, but they are not usually who we mean when we use the term. Some scholars, like Arriola, for example, avoid using the term "Hispanic," as it has "been criticized for lumping groups together `without articulating their histories:'" (32)

   Chang sees Asian...