What would it look like to decolonize solidarity? Is there a place for comparison in such an endeavor? In an essay on the “Afro-Asian analogy,” Colleen Lye suggests that Asian Americanists have used a method of racial comparison and a rhetoric of cross-racial solidarity to overcome rather than theorize indeterminate and illegible modes of racialization. “Asian as a racial concept requires comparative thinking,” she writes, but in rushing from comparison to coalition, analogical treatments of Black and Asian experience have minimized the material effects of differential racialization and, in the end, exposed “the Asian American’s attenuated relation to racial conceptualization” (“The Afro-Asian Analogy,” 2008, PMLA 123, no. 5: 1732–36; 1732, 1733). Native studies scholars, meanwhile, have challenged the tendency to conflate the experiences of colonialization and racialization. In this vein, Jodi A. Byrd observes that Asian and Native peoples’ differing relations to sovereignty dampen “some of the optimism of comparison”...

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