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Constellations of Power, Constellations of Hope

being “syncretistic” or being “pagans/Christians at the same time.”24 Of course, religious pluralism does not necessarily dislodge Christian hegemony, just as demographic diversity does not necessarily mean the demise of white racism. Furthermore, depending on practice, a syncretistic Christianity may just be another form of appropriating the other. Nevertheless, these emphases by an earlier generation of Asian/Asian American women theologians show the potential connections with those of a younger generation. I emphasize this because I found myself being tempted to look for what I would call a “progressive narrative” as I read the 1987 JFSR issue and Joh and Kim’s essay, even or especially when such a narrative is not present in Joh and Kim’s essay. For such a narrative to work, the easiest thing is to refuse any similarity between these two generations of women. I am not saying there is no difference or no growth between what was written in 1987 and what Joh and Kim are putting forth in 2015. Besides the subtler distinction between Asian and Asian American women through the use of a solidus, one can see that the central concern for “home” in Southard and Brock’s essay has become but a trace in a brief remark about multiple homes by Joh and Kim; Joh and Kim’s naming of a racist “heteropatriarchy” is also highly significant. What dawned on me as I was tempted to read Joh and Kim’s essay as a progressive narrative is that “assimilation” is precisely such a narrative, since the foreignness of Asian/ Asian North Americans is partly characterized by our perpetual belatedness to “modernity” or what is “up-to-date.”25 Given “the tendency in contemporary literary and cultural studies to locate minority cultures in alternative temporalities that unsettle teleological modes of historicism,”26 I, being a truly latecomer to this conversation on Asian/Asian North American scholarship and feminism, must watch out for the temptation to characterize our Asian/Asian North American foremothers as behind the time.