Forget Asian America!: Towards Methodological Transnationalism in Asian American Studies

Abstract

This paper has twin foci. First, I suggest “methodological transnationalism” as a new analytical tool in the era of transnationalism in which every single contradiction is globally overdetermined. Many Asian American cultural critics have so far drawn a fictional line between the domestic and the global. And they have remained within the arbitrary boundary of American studies, which results in consolidating the hegemony of American ideology. In this situation, methodological transnationalism boldly proposes that Asian American studies should transnationalize itself in terms of its methodology and practice, breaking down every fictional boundary. The ultimate goal of this methodological transnationalism is to forget Asian America and to bring an end to what we call identity politics. In fact, according to George Agamben's conceptualization in Homo Sacer, Asian Americans' identity politics can be seen to have the same origin with Nazi's death camp. And this death camp has the same root with the modern nation-state, whose discovery of the irrevocable link between birth and nation gives a concrete form to modern biopolitics. The methodological transnationalism strategically attempts to abolish the link between birth, nation and territory by relocating every text in the global context to create a discursive space on which we can stand neither as an Asian nor as an American, neither as a man nor as a woman, but as a human being.