by Junaid Rana
Terror
“Terror” is a complex word that refers both to physical violence and to the emotional response produced by that violence. While this dual meaning has persisted for centuries, the term’s connotations have shifted in the modern era in relation to the perceived source of such force. In contrast to earlier usages that reference punitive measures of the state, such as political violence and persecution, terror is now used to name threats posed by nonstate actors. Though amplified in the United States after 9/11, this shift began in the context of conflict with militant left and liberation struggles throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rearticulation of radicalism with anti-Americanism and terrorism during the 1970s, and the advent of wars on drugs, crime, and terror in recent decades. The result is a notion of terror that is shorthand for an abstract, state-sanctioned war against a multivalent idea (terrorism) and an ambiguous actor (the terrorist). This meaning obscures the history of state violence administered in the United States, and increasingly across the globe, to control and dominate particular populations. As such, the rhetoric of terror narrows the discourse of dissent and debate toward state-sanctioned ideologies and otherwise permissible views, beliefs, and actions.
Race
Race is a key concept in the formation of Asian American studies as a political project and an intellectual field. Throughout U.S. history, Asians have been racially cast through the narratives of empire, war, and migration. The racial logic of yellow peril, enemy aliens, model minority, and now the enemy combatant are part of a genealogy that represents Asian Americans as potential threats to the American way of life—a euphemism for modernity, capitalism, and white supremacy (e.g.,Okihiro 1994, 118–47). Similarly, race in relationship to representations of gender and sexuality has historically been used to demean Asian Americans, rendering them as inferior. While perpetuating racial inequality, these portrayals often situate norms of gender and sexuality that are potential sites of political critique and social transformation (Eng 2001; Marchetti 1993; Shimizu 2007). Race is a social construction in which biology and culture are often conflated as a rhetorical logic and material practice in a system of domination. Inasmuch as race is used for subjugation, it is also a productive category used by subaltern groups in opposition to racism. Asian American studies was born out of the struggle to critique and oppose racism. As a politics of protest organized around social justice and in solidarity with communities of color, race became a pivotal organizing tool to foster the Asian American movement. Alongside the Black, Brown, and Red power movements, Asian American radicalism grew in the post-1968 era as part of an antiwar, anti-imperialist, and feminist agenda (Maeda 2009; Pulido 2006; J. Wu 2013). While Asian American politics was connected to left critiques of capitalism and war in this formative period, the Asian American movement would not launch onto the national stage until the 1980s as a panethnic alliance in response to the brutal murder of Vincent Chin and subsequent antiracist organizing (Y. Espiritu 1992).