Targeting Arab/Muslim/South Asian Americans: Criminalization and Cultural Citizenship

In this essay, we further explore the responses of Arab and South Asian Muslim communities to the War on Terror, and ask whether these responses reveal alliance-building and pan-ethnic identification. Do the targeted groups, now portrayed as monolithic, find solidarity with each other, and if so, what are the bases for their sense of affinity. These questions force us to consider the deeper issues of pan-ethnic and political affiliation that highlight quandaries at the core of Asian American studies: how does a pan-ethnic approach challenge or support the racial and cultural categories used by state and empire to subordinate and divide populations

"'Asianness Under Construction:' The Contours and Negotiation of Panethnic Identity/Culture among Interethnically Married Asian Americans."

Based on life-history interviews of interethnically married U.S.-raised Asians, this article examines the meaning and dynamics of Asian American interethnic marriages, and what they reveal about the complex incorporative process of this “in-between” racial minority group into the U.S.. In particular, this article explores the connection between Asian American interethnic marriage and pan-Asian consciousness/identity, both in terms of how panethnicity shapes romantic/ marital desires of individuals and how pan-Asian culture and identity is invented and negotiated in the process of family-making. My findings indicate that while strong pan-Asian consciousness/ identity underlies the connection among intermarried couples, these unions are not simply a defensive effort to “preserve” Asian-ethnic identity and cultur against a society that still racializes Asian Americans, but a tentative and often unpremeditated effort to navigate a path toward integration into the society through an ethnically based, albeit hybrid and reconstructed identity and culture, that helps the respondents retain the integrity of “Asianness.