Asian
by
“Orientals are carpets!” is a common Asian American retort today, one that rejects the linkage between objects of desire—whether hand-woven carpets made in central and western Asia or porcelains made in China—and the people who make them. During the late-1960s phase of the civil rights movement, second- and third-generation, college-age, mainly Chinese and Japanese Americans from the United States and Canada protested the term “Oriental,” seeking to replace it with the seemingly less fraught term “Asian.” But as in any debate about naming practices, the names rejected and defended reflect differing points of view, as groups trouble certain terms and adopt others in order to shape and reshape meanings for themselves. “Asia,” “Asian,” and “Asiatic” are still common, though the latter is far less preferred. Variations such as “Asianic,” “Asiaticism,” “Asiatise,” “Asiatall,” “Asiatican,” and “Asiatically” are now archaic. Each of these terms comes loaded with particular spatial orientations rooted in temporal relationships. “Asia” has Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopian, and Greek origins signifying “was or became beautiful,” “to rise” (said of the sun), “burst forth” or “went out,” and “to go out.” Demetrius J. Georgacas (1969, 33) speculates that “Asia” comes from the ancient Greeks, who adopted a cuneiform Hittite word assuva...
This essay may be found on page 18 of the printed volume.