Week 4_Raymond Trinh_ASA 114

Raymond Trinh

Prof. Valverde

ASA 114

In Asians on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local Community in the Making of Contemporary Asian America, Arif Dirlik explores the contradictions to grasping contemporary Asian America as socio-ideological formation. Dirlik states, “A spatial contradiction has shaped the history of Asian America from the arrival of significant numbers of Asians on Pacific shores in the mid-nineteenth century. For the larger part of this history, this contradiction was expressed in the language of racist Orientalism”. The term “Asian” was an invention of this Orientalism. The people who immigrated from across the Pacific did not think of themselves in continental until the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, Dirlik states that the emergence of Pacific Asian economies in the global economy has had a transformative effect on the Asian American self-image causing Asian Americans to see themselves as either grounded in local communities or as diasporic Pacific Rim people. 

Why has “Self-Orientalization” reappear in discussions of Asian American populations? 

Arif Dirlik, “Asians on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local Community in the Making of Contemporary Asian America”