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Asian-American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex: Departures and Re-narrations

This essay offers a schematic reflection on the institutional formation and political location of Asian-American Studies in relation to the rise of the United States prison industrial complex over the last three decades. I am generally concerned with the peculiar location of ‘‘Asian Americans’’ as fabricated cultural figures within a U.S. social and racial formation that is increasingly constituted by various discursive and institutional technologies of criminalization and punishment. More specifically, I am interested in a critical assessment of the problematics—that is, the schematic sets of assumptions that frame and discipline processes of critical inquiry and intellectual formulation—through which Asian-American Studies has come to (re)narrate and cohere itself in the context of a post–civil rights, and allegedly ‘‘multicultural,’’ civil society. The post–1965 migrations of professional, petit bourgeois, working class, undocumented, and refugee Asian populations to the United States has facilitated the emergence of a field of discretely ‘‘Asian American’’ civil productions which encompass everything from academic initiatives and programs, community-based nonprofit and social service organizations, legal advocacy groups, alternative subcultures, student movements, and other similar social constructions of ‘‘panethnic’’ Asian-American political and cultural interest. Amidst the proliferation of this putative Asian-American bloc, however, has been the consolidation of a neoliberal American