Global Anti-Asian Racism volume Call for Proposals

David Kenley Discussion

Call for Proposals: Global Anti-Asian Racism for Asia Shorts

Guest Editor: Jennifer Ho (University of Colorado Boulder)

Series Editor: David Kenley (Dakota State University)

This special issue of Asia Shorts (Columbia UP and the Association for Asian Studies) focuses on “Global Anti-Asian Racism,” a phenomenon, particularly in the guise of Yellow Peril, that has endured for centuries around the globe. In Europe and the Americas, Asian immigrants and refugees are and were treated as threats to national security, as well as the society/culture of American (whether US, Latin American, Central American, Caribbean or Canadian) and European people. Yellow Peril and anti-Asian racism is also found in Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—wherever Asian immigrants and refugees found themselves, anti-Asian sentiments quickly followed.

In the hope that this volume will be widely adopted by specialists and non-specialists alike, as well as serve as a valuable pedagogical resource for teachers, we seek shorter submissions that range in variety—traditional academic essays that have a historical or theoretical orientation or that thematically engage in cross-comparative Asian national perspectives—as well as creative and personal pieces that delve into how people have experienced or witnessed anti-Asian racism and/or Yellow Peril from different vantage points and perspectives. While we are living in an era of profound and violent anti-Asian racism, the volume seeks perspectives that go beyond our current COVID-19 moment to consider the ways in which anti-Asian racism has persisted across time and space.

 Logisitcs:

October 1, 2022:  1-2 page abstracts due (12 point font, double spaced please)

April 1, 2023:  Essays due (not to exceed 5,000 words, including all notes and works consulted – if anyone wants to include illustrations/graphics, that’s also fine so long as you have permission)

May 1, 2023:  Feedback on essays sent out (may happen earlier)

July 1, 2023:  First revisions due

Summer/Fall 2023:  Page Proofs

 

Further questions can be sent to Jennifer Ho: Jennifer.Ho@colorado.edu

6 Replies

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It seems to me that for a volume like this, speaking of racism against Asians with a global scope, it would be necessary to engage the topic of the massive racist campaign against the Uyghurs and other minority people in China, targeted by the Chinese government as part of the ongoing genocide against them, -- which has been noted as racist discrimination at least since the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination held hearings and issued severe criticism in August 2018. https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CERD/Shared%20Documents/CHN/CERD_C_CHN_CO_14-17_32237_E.pdf

 

See too the short video explanation by the American member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (Gay Mcdougall, a former legal advisor to Nelson Mandela, who was later terminated by the Trump administration): https://nowthisnews.com/videos/news/uns-gay-mcdougall-speaks-on-chinas-detention-of-uighur-muslims

 

The multifaceted, continuing racialized genocide, which includes mass arbitrary detention in concentration camps, and family separations with children confiscated in the hundreds of thousands; racially targeted mass sterilizations, forced labor, and the targeted destruction of ethnic cultural and historical heritage, is one of the (or simply the) most massive and most severe human rights crises since WWII, targeting up to 15 million people -- as such it is certainly by far the most profound and violent expression of racism against Asian people right now, anywhere.

 

It is perpetrated by Chinese people. It is true that individual Chinese have bravely protested the discrimination (including a former Culture Minister) -- only to be quickly silenced by the regime, which drives the genocide; the regime’s campaign is clearly rooted in a widespread Han Chinese supremacism, which condones, inflames and drives the violence.

 

I have discussed the roots of this virulent, violent racism in my article "Racism with Chinese Characteristics: How China’s imperial legacy underpins state racism and violence in Xinjiang," (China Channel-Los Angeles Review of Books, January 22, 2021, https://chinachannel.lareviewofbooks.org/2021/01/22/chinese-racism/  ) and I would be glad to adapt it for this volume.

 

See too other writers who have taken up the challenge: from the victim's perspective, f.ex., "Racialization and Racism: Interpreting Witness Statements from the Uyghur Genocide," by Rahima Mahmut, Society and Space, Dec 7, 2020. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/interpreting-witness-statements-from-the-uyghur-genocide ), and f ex the interesting piece by Wenhao, “Are Han Chinese the whites of China?”: American racial issues prompt reflections" (in Chinese; VOA, May 9, 2021,  https://www.voachinese.com/a/China-Racism-Han-Uyghur-20210508/5883341.html ).

 

Conceptually, the Burmese genocidal assault on the Rohingya and the worrying rise in Indian discrimination of Muslims in India, all fall under the same label, as does, for example, the historical examples of Japanese racist supremacism and the horrific racist violence by Malaysians against indigenous populations of the Malay peninsula, just to take a few examples. For a global scope, these would arguably also have to be mentioned, otherwise the volume could justifiably be accused of narrow identitarianism and a dishonest, selective disinterest in the general issues of how racism is engendered and perpetrated, even on Asian people. 

 

Magnus Fiskesjö

Anthropology, Cornell University

magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu

Dear Magnus,

to me, what you suggest sounds more like a companion piece on “Inner-Asian Genocides“ rather than something to be included in this volume necessarily. It would certainly be interesting to contextualize the repression of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang with both current and historical examples of various racially motivated atrocities committed by some Asian perpetrators against other Asian peoples and to explore how these are linked with global forms of racism (Islamophobia etc.). This could be fruitful both in conceptual and empirical ways.

Maybe someone wants to pick up on this idea.

Best wishes
Björn

I disagree. To separate the racisms would defeat the purpose ... as I was saying, a book on "global anti-Asian racism" without the Uyghurs would risk becoming an exercise in indefensible, biased identitarianism -- or, another exercise in silent complicity and hypocrisy. 

The whole point is to recognize racism fully and completely, such as, prominently, the Han-Chinese supremacism so widespread in China, where it is, as you know, by no means limited to the ongoing genocide. As in other contexts of racism, it is, for example, as many have been pointing out, closely allied with the kind of everyday brutal male chauvinism on display on social media recently; and on the other hand, like elsewhere, not everyone in China is a racist, but the racists are many, they are very mean, and they have support in, and from, the government: The main difference with the Chinese genocide situation is that the racism is systematically mobilized by the Chinese State as fuel for the atrocities centered on the western regions. 

So it is State racism, actually, as the UN racist discrimination document made clear already in 2018. Yet because the world's scholars and others aren't telling the racist regime off for it, they keep getting away both with the genocide, and with playing the race card all around the world -- playing innocent and even mustering violence abroad to silence critics, while at the same time murdering and raping the targeted minorities who are supposedly citizens of their country, but are targeted in the millions. We should simply not let them get away with that sort of game. 

So, I hope the Association of Asian Studies, in its series, will be able to handle Asian racism coolly and completely, in all its factual ugliness. 

The AAS back in 2019, in the second year of the genocide, did issue a good initial statement condemning the Chinese atrocities https://www.asianstudies.org/aas-statement-on-extra-judicial-detention-of-turkic-muslims-in-xinjiang-prc/   , and another to reject the Chinese government's assault on fellow scholars calling out the atrocities, https://www.asianstudies.org/aas-statement-on-chinese-government-sanctions/  -- but these did not go far enough. 

Now that the full scope of the genocide in all its aspects is being recognized -- not just the camps serving as tools of identity destruction, but the bulldozing of the historical legacy and monuments of an entire region, complete with the decapitation of the cultural representatives of the targeted peoples, as well as the mass sterilizations of their women, mass family separations, etc.; now that the whole range of racially targeted atrocities have become much more clear and much more fully documented in their undeniable enormity, this is also a chance for the AAS to make progress, not least in a scholarly and conceptual sense.

Sincerely,
Magnus

We are heartened to see the responses to this proposed Global Anti-Asian Racism volume and have already received a few submissions. Please send any questions or submissions to Jennifer Ho: Jennifer.Ho@colorado.edu. All submissions should be in a Microsoft Word file, not as text within the body of the email. We look forward to engaging conversations regarding this very important topic.

David Kenley
Dakota State University

Dear Magnus,

when you write “ I disagree. To separate the racisms would defeat the purpose ... as I was saying, a book on ‘global anti-Asian racism’ without the Uyghurs would risk becoming an exercise in indefensible, biased identitarianism -- or, another exercise in silent complicity and hypocrisy.” I sympathize with your sentiment and I fully support your effort to highlight the plight of the Uyghurs. And maybe the volume should be more properly entitled “Anti-Asian racism in non-Asian context” if it is not to include racisms of Asians vis-a-vis other Asians.

But my point is that you have to draw a line somewhere if you plan such a project. Or else you would have to include everything all at once: Why stop at anti-Asian racism? For instance, a BLM activist might use the same argument you made and argue that one cannot discuss anti-Asian racism in the US without giving equal space to anti-black racism. A feminist might charge it is hypocrisy to only discuss racist violence and not that against women. Same for other repressed or marginalized groups.

Simply put, I don’t think it is fair to preemptively accuse the editors of a *short* book for focusing on one thing not the other. In my view this is not to be confused with “silent complicity” but is a totally defensible editorial decision. I don’t see what is to be gained by playing off one victimized group against another. That’s why I suggested to turn your idea into a separate companion volume.

I think that Magnus's point (or to be more clear, my point) is that it seems odd that an Association for Asian Studies-sponsored book would specifically and deliberately not talk about what is going on in Asia, and then call the book "Global." I think that it would be great if Magnus's article about anti-Asian racism within Asia were included. It would be intellectually interesting because it gets us to think comparatively, and get beyond East/West stereotypes that figure racism as a "white" problem that sometimes spreads to Asia. In my own teaching and research, I've found that Chinese racism is an amazingly touchy subject, where sophisticated research is characteristically rejected for being "anti-Chinese." Surely there is room for a chapter or two or racism within Asia in this worthy book project. If so, I hope that the editors would clarify this in the call for papers.
William A. Callahan
London School of Economics