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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Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements
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December 2024
Issue Editors
Book Review|
December 01 2024
Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements
Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America
Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements
. By Juliana Hu Pegues. Chapel Hill
: Univ. of North Carolina Press
. 2021
. 232
pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $32.95.Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America
. By Long Le-Khac. Stanford, CA
: Stanford Univ. Press
. 2020
. 264
pp. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $30.00.
Sunny Xiang
Sunny Xiang is an associate professor of English at Yale University. She studies the styles and sensibilities of US military empire in Asia and the Pacific. Her first book, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability during the Long Cold War, was published in 2020.
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American Literature (2024) 96 (4): 773–776.
Citation
Sunny Xiang; Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements
Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America. American Literature 1 December 2024; 96 (4): 773–776. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11611127
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