#I once had classmates that invented their own sign language to communicate with each other from far away when the teacher wasn't looking

[asian-con-2017-blog]

Asian Con 220 - Integrative Essay

                           Imaginations, Constructions, and Identity

         Throughout the Asian Conversations sequence, I held insincere certainty about my knowledge related to the concepts of “Asia” and even how my personal identity fit into those concepts, as an Asian American female with a passion for delving into anthropological ideas like gender, race, and community. What I realized is that experience and interest do not necessarily preclude the understandings of these concepts but instead they are integrated into them, negotiating and reflecting in order to fit a deeper critical understanding. Fitting my own racial and gender identity into their broader constructions proves to be a complicated feat and has revealed a sort of vulnerability of my inner self that I fought to ignore as an Asian in a white space. Perhaps the most importantly relevant ideas to this integration discussed in the block of the three course program that I will explore include Asia’s imagined communities, the constructs of whiteness and gender, and the east versus west foreigner dichotomy.

          It is one thing to learn about the history of a whole continent in summaries of conquests and colonial accounts and it is another thing to critically analyze the various ways in which those accounts are bound to fail in their conclusions and observational data, details too broad and self-fulfilling to actually accurately encompass such a large area. These “imaginations” of such a diverse range of communities serve to underlie the most popular conceptions of “Asia”, in which the “east” is thoroughly generalized in maps, the census, and the very fabric of history. In disregarding the heterogeneity and diversity of China, Dutch colonizers were able to imagine the seemingly “endless series of hidalgos” as all one large mass of “Chinezens” (Anderson, 168). This “inventive status” became a way to keep control and as the power of the colonial state grew, so did the power of the social constructions of census. The use of mapping also not only initiated the geographical shaping of borders but also changed the way that historical policy held by the colonial powers would revolutionize the future of further colonial ventures. They would use “totalizing classification” to draw out maps which showed the unexplored areas by Europeans in which were to be “filled in” by the military forces and explorers (Anderson, 173). In attempting to “construct the property-history of their new possessions” or their claim of “geographic space” which they already believed was to be inherited, “historical maps were designed to demonstrate, in the new cartographic discourse, the antiquity of specific, tightly bounded territorial units. Through chronologically arranged sequences of such maps, a sort of political-biographical narrative of the realm came into being, sometimes with vast historical depth” (Anderson, 174-175). The census was used in addition to mapping in order to impress on the world a certain image of the physical boundaries between nations and therefore between east and west. They would broaden the boundaries within and attempt a unification, despite the fact that the map separated them, such as with the Dutch and Indonesian tribes. In the Dutch West Indies, the idea was that the natives weren’t responsible for building up the monuments in an area of poverty and weren’t the same race as their builders, therefore making them seem incapable of self-rule. We talked in class about how boundaries are constructed and imagined, the differences between Asian countries determined by colonialism, reinforcing nationalistic ideals and self-fulling prophecies about the hierarchies between “races” and “nations”. “Concepts of Asia” perhaps cannot be explained by their histories alone. However, by analyzing the imagined communities that have been shaped by colonial intentions, conceptualizing aspects of difference within Asia becomes clearer and understanding the ways those differences are negotiated makes Asia less of a single concept and more of a complicated plethora of diversity with separate histories. This is a recurring theme throughout other course material that we read and is one thing that even the Asian Con program itself plays into. We learn Japanese or Chinese in order to help us when we go abroad in the January trip abroad and we label the department “Asian Studies” even though we do not and cannot focus on every single aspect of Asia that there is. We use maps and census labels to explore specific areas of Asia and their specific histories. Whether it is the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the dancing Shanghai era or the globalization of photography in Java, despite the many conflicts and isolation that a lot of these groups experience between each other, we still place it all under the umbrella category “Asian”. I definitely value what this course has taught me in understanding this idea better.           In terms of my personal experiences, I believe that the range and depth of experiences allowed me to take away a lot from the Asian Conversations sequence. From first semester discussions about geisha, samurai, and Shanghainese history to interim where the images and concepts we talked about could be tangible for the first time, it was all about taking what we learned through mapping and popular historical images and applying it to a physical space. And then to second semester where we analyzed and reflected on theories related to the broader concepts of Asia such as indexical signs, the geo-body, and performance of identity, it became a challenge to conceptualize Asia in its diverse forms while applying anthropological ideas to our understanding. I personally enjoyed being able to apply these concepts to real life during the interim trip, where the physicality of linguistic and built spaces could be visualized as the concepts described them. One such example is when I was looking for examples of linguistic landscape in Tokyo and it was obvious that despite most people around me being Japanese, many signs displayed multiple languages, with English being surprisingly common. Being able to realize that this phenomenon had to do with the desire of “concession” of foreign language speaking residents and a more “overseas atmosphere” helped put the experience in a critical perspective, whereas before I might have assumed Japanese people could actually understand the multilingual signs (Backhaus, 64). Even when we went up to Nikko in the mountains, where I expected there to be very little foreign influence, there were quite a few foreign signs and images of white foreigners. Later during second semester, we talked a bit about the dominance of whiteness, as it “embodies racial power…whether ‘actors’ deemed white are cognizant of it”, and the hierarchy between whiteness within Asia (Bonilla-Silva, 346). TCM as a field showed the favoring of white students in its “worlding” and the modernization of it as a respectable field internationally (Zhan, 42). My experience as an East Asian American particularly in China was a pressing matter for many of the locals who, when forced to talk to them, I felt an embarrassing vulnerability around and fear would constantly creep on my conscience. Inside a bank in Shanghai, I was trying to withdraw money and the man turned frustrated when I didn’t understand him and didn’t say anything back. However, once a white classmate came to help, he immediately showed a bit more understanding. It was an experience that was very shocking until we had discussions about white privilege and I remembered back to it, being able to put it into better perspective than before. Along with race, gender was also very important in my personal experience abroad. A noteworthy string of experiences in Akihabara led me to be wary of the city as a whole, the sex ratio being observably overwhelmingly male in every shop I walked in. As a female “presupposed of [my] sexual difference”, there was an uneasiness that I felt in Akihabara that I hadn’t felt anywhere else which was strong enough to leave an impression on me of Japan as a whole (Butler, 530). Looking at gender as a performance instead, and the social and historical constructions of it, forced me to reevaluate this constitution of presupposing sexual difference and remake some sense in myself and my gender identity.             As an Asian Studies student, I perform an identity of someone against the mainstream of St. Olaf as an institution with a Eurocentric curriculum, as well as a student with an international interest in the conceptions of east vs. west and the diversity of the east. I wonder whether it is possible to have Asian Studies coexist with the rest of the Eurocentric curriculum just as Zhan advocates the negotiations and “worlding” of TCM within the scope of a biomedicine dominant medical world. Even just simply existing in the curriculum, Asian Studies is marginalized as “other”, alternate to all the other courses and relegated to those who must have some kind of connection to Asia unless they are that weird white person that has an unusual obsession with Asian culture. This entanglement of west and east proved to open conflict between TCM and biomedicine practitioners with fear of TCM being appropriated and commercialized as it became popular within western medical spheres (Zhan, 82). As an Asian American Asian Studies student, I do not come across the stigma associated to questioning my position in Asian Studies like white students might have had. However, my place within the sphere certainly is confusing, as someone stuck in the middle and “not really Asian” nor “fully American”. Within the broader spectrum of studies, Asian Studies proves to be a field that is still very international, but placed on a binary divide of west and east. The question is, would the “authenticity” be lost if Asian Studies was taken over by non-Asian faculty? Zhan argued that TCM negotiates itself around western biomedicine in order to be seen as legitimate, there not being an actual “authenticity of TCM” because of these entanglements of both fields in their worlding (Zhan, 64). It seems to me that despite the marginalized position of Asian Studies within the curriculum, an authenticity could not be lost in part because similar types of negotiations take place with Asian Studies being run by quite a few non-Asian professors and overlapping into other largely Eurocentric fields like political science. The dichotomy does not exist as one field integrates into another but with one negotiating and repositioning itself to retain its distinction and familiarity at the same time.            Understanding how I fit into the Asian Conversations sequence has proven to be challenging, however, I appreciate these challenges and how they’ve changed me. From how the conceptual frameworks put into broader perspective ideas of Asia to how the understanding of my personal experiences was shaped by delving into this theoretical framework, the things I’ve learned have proven to be valuable to the shaping of myself as an Asian Studies student. I realize the negotiations and steps forward I have to take in order to take critical accounts of what I experience in the context of Asia, something I look forward to continue doing as I keep pursuing Asian Studies until I graduate.