Postcolonialism

Emerging from literary studies, postcolonial criticism initially examined how the experience of, negotiation with, and resistance to formal colonialism have shaped national cultures and literatures emerging from the former British empire (Ashcroft 1989). The consideration of subjects and subjectivity impacted by imperial incursions and fantasies, as explored in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), has resonance for multiple populations from Asia with varied colonial legacies that have come to enter the political coalition called Asian America. The postcolonial signals the colonial legacy as part of the cultural heterogeneity and hybridity lived by ethnic groups such as South Asians from the different parts of the British empire and Filipinos emerging from Spanish, Japanese, and U.S. occupations, as well as Koreans and Southeast Asians who have undergone palpable, and oftentimes devastating, U.S. and European military interventions (Gopinath 2005; L. Lowe 1996; Shankar and Srikanth 1998; Schlund-Vials 2012b). As Asian Americanists extend the field of study to the Americas as a hemispheric unit, the postcolonial approach also makes visible the geography of colonialism and ways by which Asians have entered the Americas from other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean (M. Jung 2006; Yun 2008; Lee-Loy 2010; Khan 2004; López 2013; L. Lowe 2006). Decentering North America as the privileged site and voluntary immigration as the dominant trope for Asian American studies, the postcolonial maps the uneven flows of capital, goods, cultures, fantasies, and displacement of peoples across the continents. Thus, postcolonialism is intimately tied to concepts of diaspora, transnationalism, migration, and globalization.