Asian Americans exist at the juncture of exclusion and inclusion. Asian American culture and politics is more unified in the face of exclusion and less unified in the face of inclusion. This lecture looks at this dynamic as it is dealt with in literature, which has also been one of the most successful ways for Asian Americans to achieve inclusion through narrative plenitude for Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center
About the Speakers
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Jeff Chang is a writer, journalist, and cultural organizer. His books include Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post Civil Rights America, and We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation. He is a Lucas Artist Fellow and has received the American Book Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the USA Ford Fellowship in Literature. He is finishing Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America.
Introduction By:
Catherine Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures at Emerson College.
About the Norton Lectures
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.
Read below for transcript.
Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I’m Catherine Nguyen, and I’m a comparative literary scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora and assistant professor at Emerson College. I’d like to thank executive director Steve Biel, interim director Bruno Carvalho, events coordinator Mary MacKinnon, and the staff of the Mahindra Humanities Center for getting me across to Charles tonight. I met Viet way back when, when I was a graduate student and he was just an assistant professor, and not yet the USC Aerol Arnold Chair and Professor of English, when we were just both trying to learn how to read– read literature in Vietnamese at the CRC Summer Language Institute.
The second time I met Viet was actually at Harvard. He was a Radcliffe Fellow, and I was in Boston for the Northeast MLA Conference in Boston. Viet invited me to a Radcliffe luncheon and that was the first time I visited Harvard. Years later, I would teach for Harvard History and Literature and have the privilege of being a Mahindra Postdoctoral Fellow. And so it just happens that Harvard yet again brings us together, the Mahindra Humanities Center calling on their former fellow to introduce this Third Norton Lecture with Viet Thanh Nguyen.
I have always been drawn to this work because he contemplates and constructs the double and the other as never and either or, but crucially, as an and, as one and the other, both at the same time. In his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, the narrator begins by stating that, “I’m a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps, not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.” The narrator therefore is already a doubled other, a half Vietnamese and a half French man, a Communist spy pretending to be a South Vietnamese refugee, and a Vietnamese refugee resettling in the United States. For Viet, the act of creative writing is an act of writing as another.
The first Norton lecture on the double or inauthenticity dwells on this question to interrogate further the temptation of and for writers who write about others and for writers who themselves be others. Viet asks, what does it mean to write both as an other, to others, but also as I’ve come to realize as an other to myself. This framing of the writer’s dilemma within literature writ large as temptation is an ethical one. This ethical impulse brings to mind Viet’s scholarly work Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam and the Memory of War that opens with the oft-quoted lines, “this is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield and the second time in memory.
Here, the double functions within history and memory as the ethical work of just memory. Just memory, as Viet proposes, is an ethics of remembering one’s own and remembering others. He takes this ethical underpinnings of just memory and of writing as an other into the intimate realm of the family with his recently released memoir, A Man of Two Faces, which he draws from for his second Norton lecture titled On Speaking as an Other. Viet does not position the other as merely any other, or as an abstract theoretical other. Instead, he finds in the other, his mother, the one whom he betrays in speaking of and writing about her. He says, if my mother was my first other, and she is also as of now my last other, not counting perhaps myself.
This powerful engagement of memory and intimacy asks as a memoir’s opening lines pose, “when does memory begin, what memory is it that I seek, and where on the thin border between history and memory can I remember myself?” Where will we begin, and what will we seek together with Viet in his third Norton lecture tonight, and where might we go in the ensuing conversation with Jeff Chang, culture organizer, journalist, and author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, A History of the Hip Hop Generation; Who We Be, A Cultural History of Race in the Post-Civil Rights America; and We Gon’ Be All Right, Notes On Race And Resegregation.
I am particularly excited for today’s lecture because its title on the Death of Asian-Americans suggests a return to Viet’s roots as an Asian Americanist and to his first book the scholarly monograph Race and Resistance, Literature and Politics in Asian America. This was my first introduction to Viet as a scholar and a writer, and the same for many of my fellow Asian Americanists present here tonight. With Race and Resistance, Viet challenges how Asian-Americans must either resist or accommodate. In doing so, he rejects this binary in favor of flexible strategies of resistance and accommodation, how both are employed by Asian-American authors and characters to navigate their political and ethical situations.
Given the overall title of the Norton lecture series, To Save and To Destroy on Writing as an Other, I wonder about and am eager to learn and to hear how Viet returns to Asian-American studies, and Asian-American literature, and on the Death of Asian-Americans, how might he save and destroy us. Let’s welcome Viet Thanh Nguyen to the stage.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for that introduction, Catherine. It’s such a pleasure to be introduced by someone who’s known me for so long. She actually has seen me wearing cargo shorts during that hot summer in Madison, Wisconsin. So after making that confession, let me begin this lecture by confessing that I cannot help but look for myself whenever I see bookshelves, bookshelves in airports, or friends’ homes, even the background of people’s Zoom screens. Usually, my desire for self-satisfaction is thwarted and my books don’t appear. The absence keeping my ego at a reasonable size. Occasionally, However, my books will appear as happened at BHV, or BHV, a department store in the heart of Paris. There, in its bookstore, I found my books in French. The section under which my work was categorized, Anglo-Saxon Literature.
[LAUGHING]
I felt no more Anglo-Saxon than I felt oriental. But while I laughed at being included with the Anglo-Saxons, I would have been offended, if my work was placed among Oriental or Asian literatures. I am Asian-American, not Asian. As for Oriental, I can almost hear the sound of a gong when I say the word. Not to mention smell the incense and feel a Persian rug under my necessarily bare feet. As Edward Said argued in Orientalism, the Oriental is an object and an opportunity, manufactured by the occident, a fantasy with very real consequences. What was an oriental to me but a shadow to dispel, a double to destroy, a name to reject.
If I had ended up in this Anglo-Saxon category in a French bookstore, it was ironically because I had written about and worked through what it meant to be Asian-American, my particular brand of otherness with its great possibilities and very serious limits. In this lecture I think through three ways that we Asian-Americans have organized ourselves, and our politics, and our literature. These three ways also resonate with others who have been subordinated, racialized, colonized, and so on. In increasing order of difficulty, these three ways of organizing otherness are self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity.
Self-defense is needed to ward off efforts to kill and subjugate us, reducing us to the bare life of being a human animal. In defending ourselves, we also author our own stories. But the danger in self-defense lies in becoming absorbed by our own victimization, and through insisting so strenuously on our humanity that we’re incapable of acknowledging our inhumanity. Through self-defense, we seek inclusion into a larger community that has excluded us, like a nation. We can work for inclusion as individuals. But doing so collectively is more effective. But if we succeed in gaining entry, we may forget who remains excluded as an other, and whether we, the included, now participate and profit from the mistreatment of others.
This inclusion requires solidarity as those who have excluded others now extend hospitality to the excluded. The excluded also need solidarity as they seek kinship with each other. The crucial question that most preoccupies me is how far solidarity extends. A limited solidarity where we define selfhood narrowly, keep our circle of inclusion small, and do not contest the identity of our community leads to the most acceptable kind of politics and art in the eyes of dominant society. And expansive solidarity, where we find kinship with unlikely others in an ever widening circle is much more dangerous both to dominant society and to ourselves.
These modes of self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity are all necessary but also all double edged. In the United States context, self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity are the methods by which others seek to become uncontestedly American. For Asian-Americans, becoming American included a refusal to be Orientals. Finding that name demeaning, we called ourselves Asian-Americans. Naming oneself is defending oneself in the most spiritual, personal, communal way. Using this new name, Asian-Americans wrote ourselves into being, seeking to save ourselves and the memory of those who came before, from the forgetfulness of our descendants, from the silences of our elders, from the violence, death, and erasure aimed at the Oriental.
If the deaths of Orientals gave birth to Asian-Americans, we in turn attempted to kill off the Oriental symbolically, if not literally. The Oriental unsettles Asian-Americans but also disturbs the United States in even more profound ways than either Asian-Americans or Asians can today. If Said’s Orientalism provided much of the intellectual energy that drove the growth of Asian-American literature and culture, many of us forgot or overlooked that Said was Palestinian and claimed the Palestinian cause.
We Asian-Americans appropriated his argument about Orientals, since his book did not, for the most part, deal with America’s orient founded Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam, which is to say East and Southeast Asia. Said addressed Europe’s orient located in what Europeans called the Near East and Middle East and which some writers and scholars with ancestries in those areas now call in an act of renaming and reclaiming West and Southwest Asia.
Orientalism appeared in 1978, four years after the publication of the most important anthology of Asian-American literature, Aiiieeeee! That is spelled A-I-I-I-E-E-E-E-E exclamation point. I’m only going to scream once, OK. The title comes from the death cries uttered by untold Asian hordes killed by American firepower in American movies which the anthology’s four young editors turned into their rallying cry. The New York Times favorably reviewed Aiiieeeee! and presciently singled out for praise Jeffrey Paul Chan’s short story, The Chinese in Haifa.
One of the anthology’s editors Shawn Wong told me that many reviewers could only relate to Chan’s story because it had Jewish characters in it. The story served as a cultural bridge to this brand new thing called Asian-American literature. Despite its impact then, the story has been mostly forgotten now. Possibly because it raised an issue many Asian-Americans did not want to address or know how to, the significance of Israel and Palestine to Asian-Americans. It’s here where Asian-American literature and Jewish American representation meet over Israel and Palestine that I will look at the workings of self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity.
The protagonist of The Chinese in Haifa is Bill Wong. Wong’s wife has left him. And he’s about to go fishing with his neighbor Herb Greenberg. But on that morning, Herb is upset because his mother is about to go to Haifa, the third largest city in Israel. And the news has announced in Herb’s words that, the Japs just bombed an Israeli airliner in Rome. This is based on a real attack by the Japanese Red Army in 1972 on the Lod airport near Tel Aviv, which killed 26 people, Israelis as well as Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. “God damned Japs”,
Herb says to Bill, describing them as three Japanese terrorists. Perplexed, Herb asks, “what in the hell do the Japs have against us?” From Herb’s perspective, Israel’s existence is presumably based on the self-defense of Jewish people with the Japanese Red Army attack proof of that need. Herb’s plaintiff question implies that Japs and Jews should have something in common, or at least nothing in antagonism. Bill puzzled, says, “Japanese, disguised as Arab guerrillas.”
The shift from Japs to Japanese is Bill’s deliberate refusal to use such racist language. The change from Herb’s terrorists to Bill’s guerrillas is also intentional, as is Bill’s invocation of Arab. Herb, however, ignores these shifts as he does Bill’s confusion which stems not just from hearing that Japanese in Rome killed people bound for Israel, but also why Herb says Japs to his Chinese-American friend. Herb refuses to understand his own racism and how it might muddle his belief that the Japanese have no interest in being opposed to Israel or Jewish people. Instead herb insists, they were Japs, dressed like Japs.
When I first read this story as a college student, I had never heard of Japanese attacking Israelis. And I wondered why a collection of Asian-American literature would include a story about Chinese in Haifa. The anomalousness of the story however points directly to how Asian-Americans and Jewish Americans are deviations from the norm of American society. Populations built for self-defense against an anti-Asian racism and an anti-Semitism that are embedded in the American grain. Both communities also foreground the need for inclusion. Jewish Americans have sought to become a part of the United States with great effectiveness, if not total success, given the endurance of anti-Semitism.
But in 1974, not quite two decades after World War II’s end, Herb’s Americanness relative to his Jewishness might have felt more fragile. As for Asian-Americans, we are increasingly included in the United States, but our vulnerability to symbolic and actual violence remains as evidenced by the surge in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic and the need 50 years ago to scream in protest. The Chinese in Haifa recognizes similarities between Asian-Americans and Jewish Americans situated inside and outside of the United States and Americanness.
The story moves towards a tentative solidarity between them. Herb’s wife Ethel tells Herb’s Haifa-bound mother, “maybe you can find Bill a nice Jewish girl, mama, in Haifa.” Herb asks, “are there Chinese in Haifa?” His mother says, “the Jews and the Chinese, they’re the same. You know, there are Jews in China. There must be Chinese in Haifa. It’s all the same, even in Los Angeles.” Under that note of hopefulness is a more tragic tone that marks the unspoken histories that led to these Jewish and Chinese diasporas. If Herb’s unself-conscious racism mars that hopefulness, Bill responds in kind.
He’s been having an affair with Ethel, Herb’s wife. And at the end of the story, Bill has his own racist daydream as he imagines Herb dropping off his mother at the airport. A vague collection of swarthy Japanese in Mufti crowding around Herb station wagon at the airport grew in Bill’s mind’s eye. Someone normally in uniform is in Mufti when they wear plain clothes, but a Mufti is someone with legal expertise over Islamic religious matters.
Is Bill fantasizing that herb will be killed by pro-Islamic, anti-Semitic terrorists, or guerrillas? Or is Bill, sympathetic to Herb, who is about to be attacked by swarthy Japanese of the kind that once inflicted terrible atrocities against the Chinese? The story comes to no conclusion as to whether the attackers are terrorists or guerrillas and gives no prescription as to whom one should feel solidarity with or desire to be included with as Bill and Herb take their stands of self-defense.
The modes of self-defense, , inclusion and solidarity overlap, contradict, and potentially confuse then and now. It’s telling for example, that Bill says, Arab but never Palestine even though Palestinians trained the Japanese Red Army. His silence on Palestine foreshadows how Asian-American consciousness will exclude Palestine, Since Palestinians do not seem to be Asian. But European Orientalism was transferred to the United States when it replaced Britain and France as the world’s imperial power. And in the American imagination, Palestinians, specifically, and Arabs and Muslims, in general, are Oriental.
Said’s afterward in Orientalism focused on these Orientals and their representations in the late 1970s. Their primary role was as terrorists. American representations of Arabs and Muslims have changed little except for providing a chance to be good Arabs and Muslims. The good other is willing to die for the West, while the bad other is willing to be killed by the West. This dichotomy is central to how the occident imagines its Orientals and the West, its Asians. This binary between good and bad others involves both anti-Asian racism and Western colonialism. In response to this racism, Asians and Orientals in the United States have assembled under the inherently incoherent name of Asian-Americans.
This task of self-defense is made easier if one excludes the world outside the United States and the question of colonialism. Hence, The Chinese in Haifa would have been much more comforting of a short story, if the Japanese terrorists or Arab guerrillas were removed. The result would be an easier, familiar tale about America’s inter-ethnic tensions and possibilities, about how the despised can despise each other, but can learn to live together as Jewish and Chinese-American neighbors, or as Asian-Americans, who can overlook the differences between being Chinese and Japanese.
But Jeffrey Paul Chan’s insistence on referencing not only Jewish Americans but also Israelis and Arabs points to how what happens inside America’s pluralistic society often posed as a problem of race and racism cannot be separated from war and colonialism. For those cast as others, the meanings of self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity shift depending on what occurs both inside the nation and outside of it. For Asian-Americans, the outside is Asia. The fear is being associated with a particular part of Asia when that part clashes with the United States. World War II turned Japanese-Americans into Japs.
While today, the possibility of war with China could provoke a surge of anti-Chinese American feeling that could quickly morph into anti-Asian American feeling. This fear underlies Bill Wong’s uneasiness over Herb’s use of Japs. Perhaps, Bill could be indiscriminately painted with that Oriental brush as Herb might feel the same marked by Jewishness, Israel, and the threat of violence and death. This peril also provides the most unifying experience for Asian-Americans, a shared history exacerbated by our concern that most of the world does not know this record of anti-Asians violence.
Lynchings, massacres, and brutal expulsions, when White people felt there were too many of us in too close proximity. Confinement, the ghettos, which White people sometimes burn down. Laws preventing us from owning land, obtaining citizenship, or testifying in court, even if we were the eyewitnesses to the murder of our friends by White people. Government decrees preventing us from immigrating to this country making the Chinese the first illegal immigrants in American history. Signs saying, no dogs or Filipinos allowed. Ruthless exploitation of bodies and labor from Chinese workers building the railroad, the Japanese and Filipinos toiling in the fields, the Asian women laboring in sweatshops.
The perpetual perception of Asian-Americans as foreigners. The acceptability of anti-Asian jokes and slurs. The routine murder and rape of Asians in American movies and television. All preparing the ground for the actual killing of Asian-Americans. Not least of all, America’s wars in Asia, which killed millions of Asians from the Philippine-American war of 1898 to the Post 9/11 Forever War waged in Iraq, West Asia, and Afghanistan, Central Asia. The deaths of Asians and Asian-Americans in the past and potentially in the future ironically enables the lives of Asian-Americans bringing us together in defiance.
Writing literature was one of the most important ways we sought to shake off the Oriental double, defend ourselves, and fight for inclusion. We may be an American minority, but we also demand our rightful place as Americans. Asian-American literature benefits from being a subset of American literature. And as American power projected itself globally, it brought Asian-American literature along. So that eventually my books could stand on a shelf of Anglo-Saxon literature in Paris. My inclusion inseparable from imperialism.
I was saved from being an Oriental when I encountered Asian-American literature and politics in college. Discovering how I knew nothing of Asian-American history and the violence done against us shocked me. I renamed myself as an Asian-American becoming an activist at 19. It was a time of great passion, great sincerity, and great self-righteousness. Some of the kinder terms applied to me were arrogant and smartass. And those were applied to me by my friends. I was motivated by a tremendous sense of conviction that Asian-American literature and politics were inseparable and necessary.
Through literature, we seized control of our own stories from racist narratives that stripped us of humanity and reduced us to bare life, able to be excluded or imprisoned, exploited or killed. Our literature rattled the imagination. Our movements shook society. Each one clearing the way for the other. As our populations and political power grew, so did our literature from its English language origins in the late 19th century. Imagine our surprise a few years ago, when the French newspaper Le Monde wrote on the success of Asian-American literature in the 21st century. We had made the French say our name of our invention, Asiatique America, Asian-Americans.
But if some of us managed to squeeze under the great bookshelves of the West, perhaps it is because we are not apprehended at the moment as engaging in a hostile takeover. In France, those of Vietnamese descent are treated well. Partly because we’re perceived to work hard and seek inclusion. Partly because we are not Algerian, North African, Arab, Muslim, or Black. A parallel to the United States, where Asian-Americans are who we are partly because of who we are not, not Indigenous, not Black. In France, as in the United States, the question of solidarity looms for those of Asian descent.
By identifying with other Asians of different origins, we practice a solidarity aimed for inclusion. This solidarity was once radical as people who did not seem similar, Chinese and Japanese, for example, came together. While this newfound similarity is important, if we settle for it, and exclude those who do not seem like us, it becomes limiting. The question is whether we can practice continually and expansive solidarity with the others whom our country excludes, subordinates, and targets the most, both inside and outside our borders.
If we decline expansive solidarity, we signal that we are not going to take over because we know our place, until we reach some unknown number or percentage, and there might be too many of us. So it has been here at Harvard where some perhaps thought there might be too many Asians. As once upon a time, there were too many Jews. A great comic novel in the manner of Philip Roth could be written about the plight of Asian-Americans at Harvard or similar elite institutions and all they embody about power. The immigrant themes of aspiration, assimilation, and anxiety are present. The standard dilemmas of the ethnic nouveau riche from an earlier generation of Jewish Americans to their ethnic descendants, Asian-Americans.
But words like ethnic and immigrant pad the hard foundations of enduring anti-Semitism, of anti-Asian racism, of racialized and colonizing capitalism which is the reason why we Asian-Americans even exist. To speak of capitalism without racism or colonialism exiles their embarrassing necessity in the same way that some can forget how enslavement, genocide, and exploitation enriched the West. Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness described the colonizers process of enrichment. They were conquerors. And for that, you want only brute force. Your strength just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. Robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale.
This conquest of countries and people created the routes for masses of fearful and hopeful Asians to migrate to the United States and, eventually, for a select few, to Harvard. Here as elsewhere, we foreground our success stories which are inextricable from our sob stories, we are valedictorians, salutatorians, celebrities, influencers, actors, chefs, politicians, writers. We are who you want as lab partners. Although that we does not include me for when I took chemistry as an undergraduate in a half hearted attempt to do pre-med, my lab partner, also Vietnamese, recognized my incompetence and refused to let me touch our lab experiments.
My lab partner and I are your friendly competition. We are your doctors, radiologists, internists, optometrists, dentists, pharmacists, nurses. We take your blood pressure, give you injections, empty your bedpans. We look into each and every part of you. We tutor you in math and play your classical music. We kneel at your feet to do your pedicures. We dry clean your clothes. We introduced you to acupuncture, and yoga, and martial arts.
But we have been so successful in these endeavors that we probably no longer teach you yoga, or martial arts, since you like to teach them yourselves. We gave you an incredible array of spices, flavors, and dishes without which your lives, diets, and palates would be much blander. We design your microchips and program your code. We become the objects of your fantasies and desires. We smile and reassure you. We serve as your excuses to end affirmative action. And after all we have done for you, you still won’t let us have an Asian-American studies major at Harvard.
[APPLAUSE]
Perhaps that is because we have not accumulated enough numbers and mass, although we constantly threaten to do so. The novelist Julie Otsuka described the danger that other Americans saw in the Japanese immigrants of the early 20th century. We were an unstoppable, unbeatable, economic machine. And if our progress was not checked, the entire Western United States would soon become the next Asiatic outpost and colony. How then to stop our progress? In the Japanese-American case through the internment camp. The camp demonstrated the law’s arbitrary nature and how the state could take away rights and lives at any time.
This recognition that the violence aimed against Asians could possibly end in death is a dominant theme in Asian-American literature. Our experiences with death provide the basis for singular sorrows but also more capacious grief. If we think about how we relate to others subjected to similar violence, how our Asian Americanness would not be possible without the land taken from Indigenous and colonized peoples. Our contradiction is exacerbated by the following problem. If the Oriental is a monstrosity, is reviving it and renaming it the Asian-American any less monstrous?
Even if it is our monster of our making, it seems stitching together the odd parts of our body and being Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos would never have called themselves Asians until they came to the United States. When these different parts could speak to each other in English, the Asian-American body became animated. As that body grew and as its capacity for speech became ever more vigorous, that body with its new name no longer seems so ridiculous to other people, and most importantly, to Asian-Americans themselves as well as to those who had not yet heeded the call to become Asian-American.
In the wake of the war in the former Indochina, those who sought self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity as Asian-Americans include Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, Burmese. What do some of these Southeast Asians have in common with East Asians? Many experienced European and American interventions into their countries via war and colonialism, and on reaching the United States encountered the same anti-Asians sentiments experienced by those who came before. A similar dynamic of colonialism overseas and racism domestically compelled South Asian immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and more to say that they are Asian-Americans too.
That self-recognition. That willingness to take on a name is the difference between being labeled an Oriental or an Asian against one’s will versus seeking identification as an Asian-American. This identification with the group is self-defense. Self-defense can lead to a politics based on identity and the demand for inclusion as well as asking for equity, for our fair share in representation and democracy, capitalism, and the military, industrial complex.
But this desire for identification can also lead far beyond to a politics of expansive solidarity across seemingly vast differences. The incoherence of Asian America lies in the gap between the acceptable politics of inclusion and limited solidarity and the potentially more radical politics of expansive solidarity. Both the acceptable and the radical versions of otherness are based in self-defense but with different definitions of the self. The self seeking inclusion through limited solidarity is small. While the self reaching for expansive solidarity is vast. To be included, Asian-Americans have to contain ourselves, dob on the makeup of assimilation to hide our seams and our monstrousness, learn what is acceptable to do and say and what is not.
But to engage in a politics and a literature of expansive solidarity requires opening the self to others and saying what should not be said. Here , the silence of The Chinese in Haifa on Palestine matters. The silence gestures towards the ambivalence among Asian-Americans about how far Asia or the Orient extends, which is to say how far self-defense, inclusion, and solidarity extends, and to whom. Asia is the world’s largest continent extending from Turkey to the West to Japan to the East, from Kazakhstan to the North and Sri Lanka to the South, and Indonesia to the Southeast. Israel and Palestine are in Southwest Asia.
This does not mean that anyone who lives in Israel Palestine is Asian in the American sense. But the geography opens the question, what if they Israelis or Palestinians identified as Asian and eventually Asian-American? If the question might seem absurd to some, that is because claiming affiliation via Asia or the Orient itself so vast and heterogeneous might already seem absurd. What alleviates the absurdity is the tragedy of racism and colonialism that might drive someone from the Southwest corner of Asia or their descendant to ally with people from East, Southeast, and Southeast Asia or their descendants, and vice versa. Is this any more absurd or less tragic than the Jews and the Chinese of Los Angeles, of Haifa, of China finding common ground.
Self-defense inclusion and solidarity are not mutually exclusive or linear stages of becoming and being Asian-American or some other kind of other. They exist simultaneously as different sometimes conflicting impulses in the other’s monstrous body. For Asian-Americans, these conflicting impulses mean that we recognize Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians as part of our necessary coalition, even if they are not Asian-American.
But the existence and survival of Kanaka Maoli, Chamorro, and Samoans should trouble Asian-Americans and Americans as a whole with the reminder that the United States is a settler Colonial Country whose parts have been violently assembled through conquest, in this case of numerous Pacific Islands and Hawaii. The outside of colonialism is already inside the United States and inside Asian-American communities unsettling our desire to settle. For the more American we become, the more we may affirm this country’s settler colonialism with our silence about how we can be citizens and colonizers at the same time. The condition of our belonging, our inclusion is our silence on this matter.
The Chinese in Haifa tentatively brings up colonization by mentioning Arab guerrillas. Guerrillas must be fighting against something, and this revolt of Arab guerrillas disrupts the anti-racist consensus that brings Asian-Americans and Jewish Americans together, a unity that comes at the price of rendering Palestinians invisible and inaudible. The ultimate silencing is death. And America’s support of Israel is inextricable from the deaths of Palestinians, the poet Mahmoud Darwish argues in “Memory for Forgetfulness”.
His memoirs set during the Israeli siege and bombardment of Beirut in 1982. Darwish the most famous of Palestinian poets says of Palestinians that America still needs us a little, needs us to concede the legitimacy of our killing, needs us to commit suicide for her in front of her for her sake. Describing the Israeli shelling of Beirut, Darwish could be narrating the Israeli attack on Gaza 41 years later. I don’t want to die, disfigured under the rubble. I want to be hit in the middle of the street by a shell, suddenly.
Given the silence around Palestine in The Chinese in Haifa, it’s fitting that Darwish brings up Haifa at his memoirs end. He dwells on the symbolism of Haifa which he calls the dove, a city from which most of the Arab population was expelled by Jewish forces in 1948. Haifa symbolizes all that was lost. So much so, that one Palestinian fisherman in Darwish’s telling attempts to return by stealing a boat and rowing from Beirut to Haifa. A week later, the sea brought his body back to the Coast of Tire, back to the rock where he used to gaze at the dove.
In another story, Darwish asks a fellow Palestinian where he hails from. Haifa, the man says. But I wasn’t born there. I was born here in the refugee camp. To be from somewhere but not born there describes an exilic feeling that descends generationally leading to an existence, Darwish says, in a middle region between life and death. Caught in this zone, Darwish concludes his memoir by saying, I don’t see a dove. Haifa is beyond reach or sight. As is everything else a dove might symbolize. If anything might help us rescue– if anything might help rescue us from the sadness and despair found in Darwish’s memoir, it could be expansive solidarity.
I end with two writers who embrace expansive solidarity as they deal with Israel and Palestine. In Nadine Gordimer’s Norton lectures titled Writing and Being, she describes being an other in her own country, apartheid era South Africa, a feeling of alienation, inseparable from the isolation of becoming a writer. Having rejected apartheid and her own implication in it, Gordimer criticized her White ruled society, a stance complicated by being the daughter of European Jewish immigrants.
Consider, Gordimer asks, how immigrants, such as her parents, could come to South Africa and suffer hardship while opening a store in view of a community of Black miners. A generation later, the immigrants and their children have become upwardly mobile and moved on. But the Black miners remain where they are. The problem, Gordimer understood, was one of racism and settler colonization, both of which she and her immigrant parents profited from. Their Jewishness less important, Gordimer thinks, than their Whiteness.
Gordimer invokes Amos Oz of Israel as another writer critical of his own society and his place in it. She focuses on his novel Fima whose title character she describes as carrying both the embittered history, millennia of persecution of the Jewish people, and the embittered history of their occupation by conquest of land belonging to another people, the Palestinian Arabs. Both Gordimer and Oz writing about 30 years ago are depressingly still relevant now. Oz depicts Fima an outlier among his fellow Israelis saying, we’re the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms.
Fima continues, can a worthless man like me have sunk so low as to make a distinction between the intolerable killing of children and the not so intolerable killing of children. In one charge symbolic moment, Fima comes across a cockroach in his kitchen and raises his shoe to smash it. But looking closely at the cockroach, he was filled with awe at the precise minute artistry of this creature which no longer seemed abhorrent but wonderfully perfect, a representative of a hated race. He leaves the cockroach alone.
For Gordimer, the hated race persecuted and confined is Fima’s own. He is himself the cockroach and so are the Blacks. and at this moment in history, in the occupied territories, the Palestinians. And he himself is the hater, the persecutor, the one with the hammer, the raised shoe. Human and inhuman, victim and victimizer, we can be both in turn or even at the same moment. Gordimer and Oz have gone past limited solidarity to expansive solidarity. From defending oneself and demanding inclusion for people like oneself, one should then be able to recognize the demands of others who are excluded, or who are under attack. And from there, heed the call for solidarity. One should, that doesn’t mean one can or one does.
Gordimer did and published her book in 1995 on a quietly triumphal note. The struggle against apartheid had won, and she could finally claim her country as her own. For her, inclusion could only be achieved by ending apartheid and settler colonialism rather than aiding them. Otherwise, inclusion entailed an erosion of one’s soul and art. Gordimer’s expansive radical solidarity is actually a defense of the self, her own self, and the ethical, political, and artistic integrity needed to be a writer of her kind.
I return to my own otherness. Being Asian-American is not the only dimension of myself, just one aspect born from defending myself and others like me or seen as being like me. But my Asian Americanness matters less than my ethics, politics, and art. Together, they constitute a stubborn otherness that resists the lure of a domesticated otherness satiated by belonging. I cease being an Asian-American, if and when Asian-Americans cannot emerge from self defense, inclusion, and a limited solidarity bound by race and nation in order to embrace an expansive global solidarity.
For Asian-Americans, defending ourselves and seeking inclusion is crucial, but what happens when we recognize that our democracy is also a settler country, and an imperial country, a country that aids in the colonization and occupation of other lands. What is the worth of defending our lives if we do not seek to protect the lives of others? As for who we should feel solidarity with, the answer is simple yet difficult. Whoever is the cockroach, whoever is the monster. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Wow.
Jeff, it’s awesome to be here with you. Jeff preceded me at Berkeley by a couple of days so– a couple of years, or a year or two, so you can testify to my arrogance and smartassness, hopefully.
And we’re all so happy that you’ve brought your smartassness to the world that we can all experience the brilliance. So thank you for that. That was an amazing, powerful lecture. It felt timeless, I think, in its really incisive and provocative questions. But it also feels obviously very timely as well in its urgency. So first, let’s just say thank you to Mahindra Center for bringing us all here today. Thanks to all of you for coming. And thanks so much to you, Viet, for just your brilliance, your expansive mind. I wanted to start by asking if you could help us tie together your three talks? Because the first two– well, and you know, in like under two minutes.
The first two felt very personal, and you introduced these big ideas that I feel like are such important frameworks for us to be able to take forward. You talked about capacious grief. You talked about this idea of the other being someone very close to oneself. And then today, you introduced this idea of expansive solidarity. And I’m wondering if you can tell us, maybe biographically, how did you come to these ideas? Like were there key moments in your life in growing up and that kind of thing that brought you today to this type of idea of expansive solidarity, which seems much more outward facing?
Well, you know, I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community. And I was very familiar with the grief of Vietnamese refugees. This people having survived a war and the refugee experience, lost their country, came to this– came to the United States and felt that they had been abandoned, betrayed, and that their cause was lost, and that their own children were going to forget them, and what they had been through. And so I have a lot of empathy for that community and the refugee grief of these people who were my people. And I felt for them. And I still do.
I attended a discussion with the Vietnamese students here at Harvard today. And as we were sharing stories, some of them were sharing their stories of their relatives, their parents, and grandparents, and they were getting emotional. And as they were sharing– as they were getting emotional, I got emotional, you know. I was like, Oh, I feel the grief. I feel– I feel this emotion and this sorrow. And so it’s very important to validate people’s grief, and what they’re going through, and what they have gone through.
But then, I also realized that a lot of these Vietnamese refugees had taken their grief and turned it into vengeance. And they dwelled on that vengeance, and this particular refugee community in the United States, the Vietnamese, the majority of them were anti-communist nationalists. Some of them were racists. So how could I reconcile this capacity for empathy that I have for these people who are my people and the grief that they’re undergoing while also recognizing that I completely disagree with their politics, you know?
And that was the emotional core. You asked about the autobiography, that is the emotional core, I think that I had to pursue through my own work. And so, you know, I became an Asian-American writer because I wanted to tell these stories of these Vietnamese people and other Asians like them and so on. But then what does that mean to tell their stories, if what I’m also going to do is criticize them at the same time? And so that’s a very interesting dilemma for me to work through as a writer.
And you’ve been doing that in your novels, the sort of line that you walk between empathy and betrayal, in so many ways. I wanted to ask you about this notion on the death of Asian-Americans, right, to get at this question of anti-Asian violence, which we have all been living through and which is, of course, intensified over the last three years and it’s caused us to actually think a lot about what it means to be Asian-American. You see it happening across the board. And I think one of the things that comes up, as you pointed out in your talk, is this sort of strange fear of mistaken identity, right?
This idea that in the 1940s Chinese were wearing signs saying I am Chinese, so they could distinguish themselves from being Japanese. And that during the pandemic, you have Southeast Asians, and Texas, and Burmese person being attacked in a Walmart because people think that he’s Chinese. And so Asian Americanness becomes one of the ways that we form this solidarity to protect ourselves. But I guess one of the things that I’m wondering about then is do we need these notions of self-defense and inclusion, as you had mentioned, in order to constitute an Asian-American identity.
I don’t– I don’t know what we have if we don’t have self-defense and inclusion. I don’t even know– I don’t know what we have if we didn’t have anti-Asian violence. That’s the paradox, right? If there wasn’t anti-Asian violence, there would be no Asians. Why would we need to– why would we need to bond together, you know? What similarity do I have from me to you, you as a Chinese-American, let’s say– I don’t even know if you identify as a Chinese-American.
Either Chinese and Kanaka Maoli.
Right.
Yeah.
And so what’s the similarity between the two of us? That’s similarity, I think, is enforced by an anti-Asian violence that– and here’s the problem– that is structural to the United States. Now this is a problem. I think, for a lot of Asian-Americans and other so-called minorities in this country, the lure of inclusion and belonging is to say that in fact, our history is a matter of the past, and we can be included, and we can belong. And somehow, we can be included and we can belong on the very basis of the identity that was created out of the violence that constituted us in the first place. It’s an impossibility.
So to be an Asian-American is, I think, when I talk about limited politics and limited solidarity, it’s that reduction to this idea that we can all be included under diversity. We’re Asian-Americans. That’s our identity. In fact, I think that we are produced out of a history of colonizing and racist violence that is fundamental to the country and is completely related to how the United States deals with Asia. So in fact, our only reason for existence is the violence. So it’s an impossible question to say, what would we be without self-defense and inclusion because that is our mechanism for coping with the mistaken identity that we have now taken on as our identity because we’ve had no choice. Now, the expansive solidarity is my solution to that.
Yeah, yeah.
The expansive solidarity is let’s not be trapped by limited solidarity. The impulses that drove us to become Asian-Americans were actually expansive solidarity. Like what does a Chinese and a Japanese and a Vietnamese have to deal with each other? We hate each other in Asia, or we’re rivals. And so then for us, now– now it’s because Asian-American is so established people are like, Oh, yeah, of course Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese you’re all like, of course. No, we’re not. We’re not. We’ve only been able to build that because of expansive solidarity, but when that expansive solidarity becomes frozen as identity, then that becomes limited solidarity. And we accept as a– we take for granted this terrible history rather than trying to contest it.
So if we were to project out this idea of expansive solidarity 20 years, 25 years into the future, alongside this notion of Asian Americanness, are they compatible?
No.
I mean, do we– do we– can we imagine an Asian Americanness in 25 years that’s about– does expansive solidarity lead us to a renewal or revival of an Asian-American identity?
Well, I think the mistake we make is to argue that somehow being Asian-American as an identity correlates with a kind of politics, and it doesn’t. It used to. So again, we go back to this foundational moment of the late 1960s when Asian-Americans named themselves. And at that point, the expansive solidarity was part and parcel of a radical politics. And I don’t think we can come back– we can go back to that. So to go back to that is purely an act of nostalgia because we’ve been the victims, so to speak, of our own success.
We become so large, so necessary as a part of the United States, that to be an Asian-American now is not inherently to engage in radical politics. And that actually is a problem for those who are attached to the nostalgia of 1968. But I think, for me, it’s actually a moment of political clarity because now we can decide, well, there are some Asian-Americans who have this kind of politics, and they’re of limited solidarity. And they’re invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then there are some Asian-Americans who are actually interested in shedding their Asian Americanness, not because they want to be White, but because they want to have expansive solidarity with other people who may be facing conditions of oppression and exclusion.
So are you arguing that in some ways the notion of Asian Americanness as it exists right now, split in so many ways, is actually something that needs to be abandoned over time, that we actually need to move on from self-defense, move on from inclusion, immerse ourselves in solidarity? What does that create for Asian-Americans who are thinking about how to position themselves amidst continuing violence, amidst mistaken identity, misrecognition as you call it? I draw a distinction between tactics and strategy. I think it’s tactically necessary for us to have Asian-American organizations, and Asian-American literature, and have representation, and all that good kind of stuff.
The problem is when we mistake those tactics of identity for an actual strategy. And that’s when limited solidarity somehow becomes everything for us. But yes, I would argue that once we think about strategy, there comes moments when, in fact, we may have– some of us may have to abandon that Asian Americanness because we want to have solidarity with other kinds of people. We want to expand our sense of who we can have kinship with around the questions, the political questions that matter to us. Otherwise around the question of tactics, it’s great to be Asian-Americans now. You have BTS, you have Bobo, all this good stuff. It’s a great time to be an Asian-American. And you know what, it doesn’t change anything. I mean, it doesn’t change anything because all it takes is a war to blow all that stuff up, literally.
Yeah.
Right. And so that’s when the strategic part becomes really crucial. So it’s great again that tactically we have positioned ourselves so that we’re no longer for some people a threatening Asian with the Asian you want next– OK, look, I mean, 50 years ago, Asian-Americans were redlined to in some parts of the country. Couldn’t buy houses in certain neighborhoods, right?
You remember, Chancellor Tien of UC Berkeley, our first Asian-American chancellor. He talked about how when he came as a grad student in the ’50s. He couldn’t buy a house in the Berkeley Hills. So it’s progress, yes, that now you can buy houses in the Berkeley Hills. But, you know, I mean, structurally, the same issues remain there. We’ve just been shifted from one part of the line to the other part of the line. But the line is still there. And I think that’s where the strategic– our strategic focus needs to be.
I’m going to ask you– I could ask you a million more questions on this, but I’m just going to try to restrict myself to one on this because it’s really fascinating to me to think about the arc of this, right. Like that this begins as self-defense and inclusion, that there is a leap into solidarity as a way of being able to define and recover an identity that includes resistance, that also includes a transformational notion of where to take the US.
I guess, the question that I want to ask here is, let’s say, you have Asian-Americans who are wanting to move towards expansive solidarity, right. Does that require them to leave the past behind? And then in retrospect, what value then does an Asian-American who denies the name Asian-America have to an expansive solidarity to others that they are trying to be in solidarity with?
Right. Well, I think part of the contradiction of our project as Asian-Americans is that we have to be focused on the abolition of our own condition as Asian-Americans, right. If we become attached to Asian-American identity and we say, well, that is our politics, then in fact, we’ve completely resigned ourselves to the very history that we would reject, that the history of Orientalism that has created the Oriental. And so, of course, yes, again, tactically we have to fight back against that.
But strategically, I think part of the goal is to abolish the very necessity for Asian-Americans that– and so this is a very long-term project. Because again, being an Asian-American is tied to the very foundations and origins of the country. So this is– an expansive solidarity is also an expansive politics because we have to think beyond. We have to, of course, think about how to address Asian-American needs and so on. But you also have to think beyond that. The questions of injustice, and inequality, and so on are not purely Asian-American questions. They’re systemic questions of which Asian-Americans are a manifestation, right. But if we focus only on the manifestation, we forget the structural part that we need to be engaged with.
Let’s talk about Anglo-Saxon literature, and then– and then let’s open the questions up to the audience. We have probably time for about two or three questions from the audience before we have to bring this home. I know we have a time limit tonight. We could talk to you all tonight. But let’s talk about Anglo-Saxon literature, and this sort of idea of writing in English, right. That English in so many ways actually allows us to be able to create this notion of solidarity that builds the Asian-American.
Is there– in turn because you’ve talked about this expansive solidarity as being not just national but global, is there in turn the danger in Asian-American narratives becoming actually hegemonic in anglophone Asian spaces? Like we both just got back from Singapore. And this was a question that I was surprised to actually confront. I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you’ve been thinking about that question.
The Singapore example is a really good example because we’re both there. We’re being brought over and vetted and everything as Asian-American authors, which is inseparable from being American authors.
Right.
So one of the good things about being in France is that I’m treated usually as an American author. I’m not treated as an American author here, but I am in France, right.
[LAUGHS]
And then in Singapore treated as an American and an Asian-American author. But again, the irony is that Asian-American authors are more widely read around the world than Singaporean authors. And we’re talking about Singaporean nationals and majority and so on. And so that is a function of the size of the Asian-American population, but also a function of us being American and being a part of this whole American apparatus I hope to address in a future lecture, this idea that we’re a subset of imperial literature. You know, so we’re an ambivalent subset because we’re producing static, right, but nevertheless a subset. That are static is being channeled through American networks of power.
And so I think Asian authors do have a right to be skeptical and resentful possibly of the success of Asian-American authors. Because even as we’re talking about– as Asian-American– as Asian-American authors, even as we’re bemoaning racism and so on and so forth here and the mistaken identity, that’s actually the currency by which we’re read overseas, and why Singapore would even be interested in us.
I think also about the fact that if I was a Vietnamese writer writing in Vietnamese, my chances of being read globally would be much, much– or is much, much smaller than me as a Vietnamese American writer writing in English. That is again part of the contradiction, part of the paradox of colonialism, and warfare, and the inequities that it produces. And so I’m very cognizant of this fact that the very possibility of my speech, as I think I talked about in the first lecture, is conditioned by being both the target of but also the beneficiary of American imperialism.
OK. OK, so I know we have folks out here with mics. If you have a question, please raise your hand. And we will recognize you have time for about two questions. We have somebody over here, and we have somebody in the front row here. Yes.
Yeah, excuse me. Thank you so much this is, I think, one of the most important lectures I feel in Asian-American studies, I’ve heard in a very long time so thank you. My question is, I’m thinking about Cedric Robinson. I’m thinking about Black Marxism, and the way he names a Black radical tradition and so forth.
And I think there’s something important about the way he names the Black radical tradition as such, right. And when we think about Asian-American studies methodologies and Asian-American radical thought, is there something important about naming an Asian-American radical tradition as such, or do we truly need to transcend it entirely? I guess, my question is whether or not Asian-American positionality and Asian-American history offers the kind of political potentiality that Blackness has offered the likes of Cedric Robinson, and Ruthie Gilmore, and so forth, when we’re naming a Black radical tradition.
I think that, specifically, in terms of this discussion of Israel-Palestine. I think what’s really beautiful about this talk is the way that on the one hand, we see Asian-Americans being associated as the kind of new Jews. But on the other hand, relying on the intellectual genealogy of Edward Said and Palestine, right. So we’re indebted to both on this conflict. So in a lot of ways this political choice of who to choose, who we choose to identify with, to identify with the [INAUDIBLE] as it were, is also sort of a battle for the soul of Asian-America with regards to who do we analogize with, like whose narrative–
Thanks. Thanks very much. Yeah, I think that’s really good. Viet, do you want to–
Yeah, no, thanks.
–respond to it?
[INAUDIBLE] I’ve been trying to see in the light here. But I think it is important to name that radical tradition. We have those people in our tradition, not just our E-editors and the establishment of Asian-American literature. But also, I mean, every– I think every– when I think about Asian-American literature, every Asian-American writer who was writing at some moment when no one wanted to hear them was radical, you know. And because of the limits of the lecture, I took out all the names of all those writers, like Carlos Bulosan, like Susan Farr, and so on.
And of course, those are the writers that we who identify with this tradition identify with. And then also Grace Lee Boggs, and Yuri Kochiyama, people you’ve worked with or discussed. So it is important to name that tradition and to name that it exists. I’m also cognizant of the fact that very tradition is what’s being mocked by a younger generation of Asian-Americans. When Jay Caspian Kang’s book came out The Loneliest American– Loneliest Americans?
The Loneliest Americans.
That’s a much larger discussion I have to do separately. But I remember one of the reviews of Jay’s book said, Yeah, he’s talking about those boomer Asian-Americans, like the ’60s are over, why are you still talking about the ’60s? You’re just boomers, right. And I don’t totally agree with that critique, but I do think there’s a way in which the radical tradition for Asian-Americans has become nostalgic. And it’s not that it’s not important. Is that it needs to be updated.
And so that push back by some and a younger generation of Asian-Americans saying what’s the relevancy of 1968, what’s the relevancy of this particular stance to our current situation is I think asking about the limitations of an Asian-American Coalition that Asian-Americans themselves are not willing to address. So yes, we need to acknowledge the radical tradition, and we also need to acknowledge the very serious limits of an Asian-American Coalition at the same time.
And as for the question of choice, who do we choose. That’s why I ended with this sort of enigmatic line. You choose the cockroach. You choose the monster. And the point is that it shifts. It shifts. So if Jewish Americans are the victims of anti-Semitism, absolutely, that’s who we align with, right? But on this question of Palestine, Gaza, Israel. the war, the invasion and so on, I mean, I feel like I had to write this lecture because I had to choose. I had to make it very, very clear that these complicated history still require us, compel us to make a choice at certain moments.
Thank you.
There was a question here in the front row. And while you’re walking over. Do we need to clarify that we’re not boomers? We–
[LAUGHS]
We’re as good as boomers to the younger generation. They can’t tell the difference, OK. We’re not boomers.
Hello.
Sorry.
Thank you for this vigorous and enchanting talk. And thank you for talking about France. I am– I happen to be Le Monde correspondent. And–
OK.
[LAUGHS]
And how you are perceived in France. Also Thank you for talking about Gordimer, Amos in the same breath as Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish. However, I would like to find out– in fact, I’m also very happy that you are opening the floor, the thoughts, the minds for a global inclusion that we rarely encounter because identity is either here or there and you choose in between. So it’s wonderful. In your view, where do we go from there? Because you’re raising some really, really serious issues. And also on which side? You left your talk at the end was a big question mark. What do you feel today about what’s happening in Palestine?
I feel that, like many people, I think, this vast disconnect between what appears to be happening from what we can see in images, videos, and photos, what we are being told about in terms of the sheer scale of death in Gaza versus the rhetoric that our own administration the United States administration is telling us and what the Israeli government is saying.
And it feels to me that even describing this as the Israel-Hamas war, which now has seemed to become the official name of what is taking place, is the use of language to distort what I think is happening, which is a war on Gaza and a war on Palestinians. Because it’s hard for me to look at these statistics, whether it’s 15,000 dead or 20,000 dead, and somehow conclude that this is collateral damage. And that somehow the goal of Israel and the IDF is simply to destroy Hamas. I’m sure that’s their goal. However, it appears to me that the goal is also to destroy Palestinians and the possibility of Palestine in Gaza. It looks to me like ethnic cleansing. It looks to me like genocide.
[APPLAUSE]
I– you know, I take heart from the fact that I do think that–
Why doesn’t Hamas get out of the hospitals, the schools, and the UN agency? Why doesn’t Hamas accept the presence of the State of Israel, which by the way, has many Western Asians from Iraq when they were expelled in 1948, what about those people?
Absolutely. And I think that–
And so what–
I’m about to try to answer the question. Yeah. I think about other kinds of wars in which similar questions could be raised. You were talking about what about– what about these facilities, what about these fortifications, what about these militaries that are hiding among civilians. To me, that is the rhetoric of colonial warfare. You create the conditions by which it’s impossible to have conventional warfare. That’s the ambition. And then when the people who are colonized or occupied, depending on your rhetoric, have no option but to wage war, in the example that I cited via guerrilla warfare, then it inevitably becomes warfare on civilians.
So this is not a new situation in that sense. This war of total warfare, this war of scorched Earth, this is the colonizing response to anti-colonial guerilla warfare. My thinking, obviously, is that we need to be critical of this particular kind of Israeli project. That the Israeli government and its supporters are creating– are continuing to recreate the conditions for rising anti-Israeli sentiment. And yes, that is being conflated with anti-Jewish sentiment as well.
And so in fact, we should be– not we, yet the United States should be using its influence to encourage Israel to de-escalate, to move to another solution besides the kinds of violence that’s being enacted. Because I don’t think that violence is actually going to lead to the solution that Israel is advocating for. And so that’s the best answer that I can give you. I don’t have a solution. I don’t pretend to have a solution. All I can see, however, is that whatever success is Israel may have on the battlefield, the consequences in terms of the perception of Israel are going to be much worse than what Israel would want.
I’m going to use my Asian-American privilege as the respondent here to actually ask you the last question. So you ask us in your talk, right, to imagine those of us who are Asian-American and those of us who are not Asian-American, if Palestinians and Israelis were to identify as Asian-American as a way of thinking it’s sort of a thought exercise to have us think about what it would mean to practice an expansive solidarity. So my question is, well, what are some of the ways that we can practice moving towards thinking about how we develop an expansive solidarity?
I went and reread Said’s afterword to Orientalism in preparing for this talk and I was struck by how as he’s describing Orientalism, and he’s saying, yes, Arabs and Muslims are the Orientals in the Western imagination, he also says that both Jews and Arabs are oriental Semites in this Orientalist imagination. And he cites an example of the depiction of the Jewish in Proust, for example, that is no different than depictions of Muslims in other kinds of racist imaginations.
That’s an interesting gesture that he’s making, I think. Because I think he is practicing an expansive solidarity. He’s making a political choice. He’s saying, yes, he sides with Palestinians. He’s against Israeli occupation. But he’s also saying that, in fact, there is a possible kinship there between Arabs and Jews that has been prevented by the interventions of colonialism. Now I think that’s to me is when we talk about expansive solidarity, part of expansive solidarity is to ask questions and seek possibilities that we are prevented from seeing because of colonization. And colonization gives us a Fait accompli, you know.
[APPLAUSE]
Partitions, divides, and then gives us these political realities that we’re supposed to live with. The same thing with the Oriental and the Asian. And so again, the tactical thing is we have to respond to the immediate necessities. But the should– the strategy is to look beyond the options that are given to us by racism and by colonization, and by seeking these other histories that Said here is alluding to for a solidarity that seems utopian but which we hope is possible.
Viet Thanh Nguyen.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, Jeff.
Thank you so much.
No problem.
[APPLAUSE]
I want to say one last thing here. Thank you for joining us tonight. We hope to see you at the next lecture on February 20. Don’t miss it. It’s going to be amazing. Happy holidays to everybody
Thank you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen.
[APPLAUSE]
