Week 3 - Christopher Lee

Week 3 - Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Asian American Studies: Positions and Debates

Gilbert Gammad

Reading Christopher Lee’s article, which describes the ways that Asian American Studies has figured its object of study as a transnational object, I was particularly struck by the discussion of Gayatri Gopinath’s idea of a queer South Asian diaspora. Toward the end of the article, Lee talks about the usefulness of transnational frameworks for generating new discourse to talk about globalisation and the connection between the local and the global. Thinking back to his introduction of Gopinath’s queer framework of critiquing modernity and nationalism (30), I am wondering about the relationship between queerness and a transnational framing of Asian American Studies. As Lee me

ntions in his discussion of David Eng’s work on how cultural nationalist conceptions of Asian American have often been heteronormative, which brings together a transnationalist and queer framework (30). However, being interested in ideas of “home”  and the meaning of “ diaspora”  for American-born Asians, I am wondering about what home might mean for queer members of the Asian diaspora.

When we think about not “fitting in” within the US because of our Asian identity (meaning the constant questioning of where we are “really from”) and also not fitting into our specific “homelands”  because of our US-born or US-citizenship-holding status and privileges, what does queerness in gender, sexuality or both, then do to our senses of belonging?

When thinking about the transnational flows of culture between the US and Asia, how might US understandings of queer identities affect the cultural understandings of queer identities in Asia? If we think about the historical influence of Western civilisation on understandings of gender and sexuality due to imperialism/colonialism, how might we undo the Western-centric narrative of a “ backwards East”  and a “progressive West”?

Perhaps an answer will come should I get the chance to read Eng’s or Gopinath’s work.

Sources:

Lee, Christopher. “Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Asian American Studies: Positions and Debates.” Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas. Ed. Wanni W. Anderson and Robert G. Lee. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 23-38. Print.

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