Abstract
The chapter sketches the contexts in which Asianness, gender and visual art interact in contemporary US culture. Focusing on issues of circulation of contemporary art and the related politic discourse, the chapter outlines the ways in which Chinese art and Asian America connect today in the USA, with the new interest in China overshadowing the history of Asian American communities and their diasporic art. The author offers a postcolonial critique of how this cultural dynamic renders invisible the contributions of Asian women artists living in California.
The persistent questioning of the insider’s and the outsider’s position in terms of cultural politics is yet another way to work at the difficult edge between these movements—inside out and outside in.
—Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Digital Film Event, p. 193
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Notes
- 1.
These are authors apparently belonging to different traditions, and yet connected by their poetic feminism and by their biographies intertwined with the francophone postcolonial contexts, such as Algeria and Vietnam.
- 2.
I connected Cha’s work with the 1980s emergence of other women-of-color writings on gender. Among many titles the list includes: Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s edited volume This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings from Women of Color (1981), Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984), bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (1981), Elaine Kim’s edited volume Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (1989).
- 3.
Throughout the rest of the book I am going to use the word “orientalism” and the adjective “orientalist” in lower case, from now on, and throughout my book. It should already be clear that I do not refer to the Orientalist painters nor do I consider the Orient a valid category of analysis. I wish to signal here that I maintain a critical view while still needing to use the term to point at such a discourse that still has currency, as well as its related scholarship. I have added “neo-orientalism” to further develop Edward Said’s critique, and adapt it to the present fear of “the rise” of China.
- 4.
Since 2010, the Obama administration had adopted a policy of rebalancing the United States toward Asia, as detailed in 2012 its military, economic decisions and trade, human rights, and diplomatic initiatives. Barack Obama stated that the United States will play a leadership role in Asia for many years to come, but this slogan may very well be a new label for old policies aimed at furthering the influence of the United States in Asia. In fact, many scholars have argued that since World War II the major focus of United States foreign policy has been Asia. In this context, I only wish to underline the resonance between such focus, and the US cultural policies effecting circulation of art across the Pacific.
- 5.
My use of “Asian American” is consciously loose, as my writings reflect on how Asian Americanness is not a fixed category, but the result of historically situated and strategic uses, constantly renegotiated. I do not intend to treat the category of Asian Americanness as static and monolithic, but to signal more clearly its usefulness to evade national and ethnic labels and, by virtue of its political fluidity, its proximity to the queer and postcolonial theory on which I found my research.
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Fantone, L. (2018). Introduction: Visuality, Gender and Asian America. In: Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms. Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2_1
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