AAAS Forty Years On

5 AAAS Forty Years OnThe Boycott, Internationalism, and West Asian American Critique Sunaina Maira (bio) In this essay, I reflect on the interventions made by the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) and scholars in the field of Asian American studies in relation to West Asia and West Asian American studies, drawing partly on a talk I gave for a plenary, "Urgent Solidarities: Resisting Racial and Ethnic Divisions" at the AAAS conference in San Francisco in 2018. In the talk, I addressed the politics of solidarity with Palestine and refugees from West Asia during the Trump presidency. Here, I will explore what the academic boycott resolution endorsed by the AAAS in 2013 means for the field today, given the legacy of Asian American studies as an intellectual and political project generated in the context of radical political struggle against the US racial state, and the Vietnam War, and for new expressions of pan-ethnic solidarity. These movements were based on the revolutionary politics of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) and left internationalism connecting domestic racism to global fronts of anticolonial struggle. As Gary Okihiro has pointed out, the demand for Third World studies by the TWLF emerged from "global solidarity with the liberation and antiracist struggles of Third World peoples," that is, a Third Worldist intellectual project based on the principle of self-determination and "a new world consciousness."1 In this essay I also touch on internationalist solidarities with the people of Yemen suffering from an ongoing US-backed war and transnational lockdown, and the implications of the travel bans and siege on Yemeni Americans for West Asian American studies critique, which is the focus of my current research. [End Page 199] BOYCOTTING APARTHEID A milestone in the history of AAAS that had national and global reverberations was the resolution endorsing the academic boycott of Israeli institutions with a unanimous vote passed at the AAAS conference in April 2013. In my view, this act of solidarity with Palestinian scholars and students who live under occupation and in an apartheid state, supported by the United States, was actually not remarkable in itself. It was simply a statement responding to the call for academic boycott that had been issued several years earlier, in 2004, by our Palestinian colleagues who are denied the right to academic freedom as well as human freedom.2 The boycott resolution, which was long overdue, provided a public platform for Asian American studies scholars to take a principled stand in keeping with the anti-imperialist, antiracist, and antiwar politics of the Asian American movement. In other words, the resolution was squarely part of the legacy of the San Francisco State University and Berkeley Third World student strikes of 1968–69 that led to the emergence of our field. The Palestinian liberation struggle was an element of the Third Worldist politics of that moment and was viewed by leftists, including Black Power activists, as an anticolonial struggle, especially after the 1967 Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.3 What was so remarkable, then, about the boycott resolution? One, it was the first academic boycott resolution adopted by a national academic association in the United States, and in fact, anywhere outside the Arab world, and it was followed by the historic endorsement of the boycott by the American Studies Association later that same year. For years, even Palestinians assumed that it would be unthinkable for US-based academics to take a collective and public stance in support of the boycott, as scholars in other countries were doing, and as US academics had previously done in breaking ties with the South African apartheid state and its academic institutions. The firm hold the Zionist lobby has on political discourse about Palestine-Israel, including in the US academy, had made academic boycott organizing seem virtually impossible. Two, the AAAS resolution signaled a sea change in the sanctioned discourse about Palestine-Israel in the US academy that had for decades been bound by a consensus that the Israeli state was above criticism, even in liberal-progressive spaces and in the university. Support for Palestinian rights or liberation was outside the powerfully policed norm of academic allegiance to

Boycott · Communism · Internationalism (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Solidarity · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society