The limits of imperial incorporation: Alternative sociological frameworks to study Asian American subjects

Abstract

AbstractThis paper argues existing scholarship on Asian American communities is limited by an assumption that incorporation into the US can productively address racial and economic precarity. As an alternative, we offer “Extinguishing Asian (American) Insurgency”, a theoretical framework that incorporates histories of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial politics of incorporation into contemporary sociological analyses of Asian subject formation. Applying Du Boisian sociology alongside Frantz Fanon and Joy James, the framework adopts a global, relational analysis of Asian Americans and the US state. We demonstrate the framework's utility through two case studies: anti‐colonial Sikh diasporic politics through the Gadar Party and US state efforts to tie diasporic South Vietnamese identity to an anti‐communist politic. As such, we encourage the study of alternative possibilities of Asian subject formation that are extinguished by state incorporation, particularly through imperialism and military serivce. Specifically, we address sociologists who extinguish the insurgent Asian American subject in their scholarship by assuming incorporation and pro‐state politics as a natural end goal of migration, or those who simply do not name the US as the institutional force extinguishing possibilities of Asian Americans' insurgency.