Defamiliarizing Asian American Studies

14 Defamiliarizing Asian American Studies Kandice Chuh (bio) There's a tactic I use, both in teaching and in writing, similar to one derived in the 1960s by a group of French writers who worked under the group name OuLiPo.1 The group emphasized constraint as a writing technique—writing without the letter "e," for example, or without "the." These constraints were meant to catalyze imagination and propel creativity, to bump habits of language sufficiently to create space for the emergence of something unexpected, something new. My version is less oriented toward novelty but is aligned in the aims of defamiliarization: it is to impose the constraint of not using the familiar terms of a given critical lexicon, to withhold common critical terms and thereby interrupt habits of thought, and by doing so, to prompt the greater specificity that can come of having to use more and different words. So, for example, I ask that classroom discussions and analytic writing be free of "problematic" and "ideological" and "interesting," with the understanding that everything is problematic, ideological, and interesting, and that our jobs as teachers and students and scholars is to understand and explain how and why and with what consequences. We know that terms that once had critical leverage can become dulled with use, so this practice of withholding extends to keywords, too: Can we describe neoliberalism without using the term? What does "queer" mean and do in a given context? To what are you/we referring when you/we speak of race? Racialization? Racism? And so on. I've found this tactic to be helpful in eliciting specificity and clarity—or sometimes simply awareness of their absence—in part because it creates a [End Page 335] pause in which more textured thought might form. Words are so dense, so full not only of meaning but also of the worlds in and out of which meaning takes shape and has weight, that withholding them, through a process indebted to Raymond Williams's take on keywords, can allow us entry to the conditions and debates and desires and exigencies that constitute worlds; this is the proposition put into operation by this tactic.2 It is a means by which to activate the energies underlying the emergence of key terms, the energies that are so often sapped by dint of their sedimentation. Withholding in this context is a means of sinking into the before of meaning—into the conditions of possibility, the materialities and histories, that give rise to meaning, and the exigencies underlying the crystallization of thought and desire into focal points, thematics, keywords. In this spirit, in this essay, I ask us to withhold "activist" from explanation of the project of Asian American studies. As we move through and reflect on more than fifty years of Asian American studies as modes of reckoning with the field's histories and practices in order, at least in part, to orient our engagements with the present and future, I believe it serves us well to pause on this term rather than assume either its transparency or clarity in enunciating the work of the field. At least for me, and as I explain in what follows, the effort to describe the contours and aims of Asian American studies without recourse to activism and its derivations prompts us to think the specificity, the distinctiveness, of its institutional/academic location, in relation to the exigencies of the present. This invitation to pause comes in part from a growing uneasiness I have with the construct "scholar-activist." To be sure, it isn't difficult to understand its usage or the work that it does. The construct invokes the social movement history that is so deeply a part of the emergence and academic establishment of the field. Generally, those understood to have defining commitments to community that determine their relationship to the academy are designated scholar-activists. There are indeed people whose political and community organizing doesn't begin or end in or remain within academic institutions, or whose intellectual work is generated from within but rather emerges from organizational or social movement work uninterested in the academy as a primary site of engagement. Moreover, the construct, it

Aesthetics · Context (archaeology · Defamiliarization · Epistemology · Ideology · Linguistics · Pejorative · Political science · Politics · Queer · Race (biology · Racialization · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy