Editor’s Preface

Editor's Preface Rick Bonus This JAAS issue begins with an essay that traces and ruminates on the earliest known histories of the public appearance of Filipino performers on the US mainland, who, in many pivotal ways, introduced turn-of-the-twentieth-century American audiences to people they had not seen before. Foundational to these first encounters via traveling shows was the shifting and expanding geographic reach of the US empire beyond its West and East Coasts, with the Philippines as one of its remotest colonial prospects ever. What were these encounters like? Who were their players, and how were these players made to represent the empire's potential new members? How were the Filipino performers received, and in what ways did these performers resist the unwanted nationwide presentation of themselves? Emmanuel David and Yumi Janairo Roth provide us with a glimpse of this history—mostly unwritten about or relegated to the "shadows" of archived collections—in their piece on "Playing Filipino: Racial Display, Resistance, and the Filipino Rough Riders in Buffalo Bill's Wild West." My reading experience in this one was akin to leafing through a patinaed photo album, which was very moving on so many levels. But the historical contextualizing by David and Roth was equally illuminating and heartrending. I hope you experience the same. Yet another register associated with moving geographies, this time pertaining to the multiple and seemingly contradictory emotions generated by conditions of war and refugee resettlement politics in the contemporary, is explored by Giang Nguyen-Dien in their essay, "Hận: The Haunt of Home, Vietnamese Refugee Melancholia, and the Challenges to Asian American Critiques." Nguyen-Dien offers here a deep and attentive reading of first-generation Vietnamese writings, focusing on hận as an expression, a sentiment, and, even more so, a kind of affect register that traces the nuances of trauma-induced emotions and feelings related to being "both injured and rescued by US empire." Indeed, [End Page v] Nguyen-Dien's piece on this double-edged set of experiences may be read as a geographic genealogy of simultaneous violence and melancholia that produces hard-to-resolve forms of contradiction and contestation. We continue this place-inflected analytic on collective affect with an account of late twentieth-century urban policing and its damaging consequences upon the lives of very vulnerable groups. Reading Jacinda Tran's take on "Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement in Philadelphia through the Shifting Frames of Racialization" is like walking on a tightrope of sorts for me, similar to traversing the dueling contradictions of Nguyen-Dien's injured-rescued tandem. In Tran's account this time, it is the racialization of Southeast Asian American refugees as "victims" who get turned into "criminals" that gets charted with gripping precision. Culling local newspaper articles, census data connected with resettlement, government and organizational reports, testimonies, and photographs, Tran exposes the myriad and uneven ways in which the classification of individuals and groups as a technology of police and community power determined the prospects and limits of subject inclusion. Our final essay provides yet another convincing explanation of the vicissitudes of spatial and temporal instability in relationship to identity construction. Can something like caste status neatly cross borders and be transplanted intactly? Can diasporic movements withstand the causes and effects of new relationships within existing and recently settled communities? How are identities and social statuses reinvented and repurposed in the diaspora, for whose benefit, and at what costs? Sasha Sabherwal offers a case study of "The Elasticity of Caste in the Sikh Diaspora: Jat Cool and Caste Masculinities in the Pacific Northwest" to demonstrate what we might expect to happen in a transforming diasporic community and what we might also be surprised to find out when being "cool" for a part of this community turns out to be something not as "cool" for others. Caste hierarchies tend to be firmly grounded in certain places, but when such hierarchies travel across time and space, as with many other hierarchies associated with race, class, gender, and social status, we are indeed confronted by the urge to transform them, and oftentimes, do so at a cost. Our reviews section features appraisals of three monographs that focus

Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies