Aff - Oriental Paradox - Michigan 7 2023 CFLMP

Oriental Paradox Aff-Neg
Notes
This is the Model Minority Aff!
The model minority myth is commonly categorized as simply thinking that “Asian Americans are always smart”, but in the context of the literature base, it goes much deeper. The 1AC makes a thesis claim about how the status quo economic system is built upon the racialization of Asian labor. The topic links list a few examples i.e how Asian Americans have “consistently acted as ‘both labor and capital’ in the emergence of transnational economies”, thus the “Oriental Paradox”. This is further backed up by the “Racial Triangulation” thesis which attempts to describe how Asian Americanness has an ontological identity relates to other racialized groups, i.e how Asian American laborers are valorized as “hard-working and productive” in contrast to Black and Latinx laborers who are coded as “lazy, pathological, and inefficient”, or how during the civil rights movement, whiteness pointed to certain instances of Asian economic mobility and relative success to suggest to Black Americans that they as well could escape oppression if they just “worked harder”. The aff goes further to say not only does this make Asianness complicit in other forms of racialized suffering (and thus must be the starting point of racial struggle), but also claims that by valorizing the Model Minority Myth, Asian racial suffering is hidden, and culture is homogenized and thus erased.
Thanks to Mira Baba, Joseph Hong, and Jun Kwon for all their hard work on this file
Rishi
P.S. – thanks seiji for the poetry
Aff
1AC
1AC---Oriental Paradox
Asianness exists not as a contingent identity but rather as an ontological pathology whose crime is its very existence – fiscal redistribution and the resolutions language of “pursuing mobility” and “escaping inequality” via the topic areas are structured by racializing logics of Asian economic success and assimilation that cannot be delinked from the juxtaposition of Asianness between both labor and capital
Cheng 13(Wendy Cheng, Strategic orientalism: racial capitalism and the problem of ‘Asianness’, May 13 2013, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2013.797284)//BRownRice
***Modifications for gendered language indicated in [brackets]
***If you are not asian, do not say “coolie” or “oriental” in reference to asian folk
***read the not underlined portions of this evidence as well, I think it makes good warrants for why analyzing “racial triangulation”/the thesis of the aff can explain all other forms of violence which is useful in kvk debates
In Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism ([1983] 2000), a central component of Robinson’s elucidation of racial capitalism is the idea of Blackness as an ontological totality. An Ontological totality refers to a way of being that emerged from the terms of 500 years of Western domination and exploitation, but also eludes these and makes its own terms of history. Robinson writes of the ontological totality of Blackness as a revolutionary consciousness that has never been destroyed or subsumed by world systems dominated by imperialism and capitalism. Robinson’s articulation of a Black radical tradition infused with the resilience and elusiveness of Blackness as ontological totality constitutes an important set of intellectual and political provocations not only for Black and African diaspora studies, but also for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between racial identity, racial capitalism, and the development of oppositional consciousness. In American studies and American ethnic studies, the past 20 years have seen a shift from a concern with primarily national-(American) based ontologies to transnational, postcolonial, and comparative approaches that center immigration, US imperialism, and the interdependent formation of racial categories. In Asian American studies more specifically, which had tended to privilege earlier, Chinese and Japanese immigration, scholars adopting transnational and postcolonial orientations have grappled with the complexity and heterogeneity of Asian immigration to the USA as well as the question of how to situate Asian Americans within broader global histories of diasporic movement.1 Lisa Lowe’s work has been both formative and exemplary of this shift (see especially Lowe, 1996; Lowe, 2006). In Lowe’s essay ‘Epistemological Shifts: National Ontology and the New Asian Immigrant’ (2001), she summarized the state of the field and laid out the task still at hand, arguing that the influx of new Asian immigrants over the past two decades has made it more or less axiomatic to state that Asian Americans and Asian immigrants are a ‘heterogeneous’ group ... . This has led scholars within the field to be critical of racial essentialism and cultural nationalist formations of identity within the context of a single nation-state, and led activists to question whether ethnic identity always and in every instance leads to a progressive politics aimed at social and economic transformation. Yet it is imperative that Asian American studies push this critique even further in order to consider different Asian formations within the global or neocolonial framework of transnational capitalism ... in order to inquire into the significance of the ‘Asian American’ within local situations and material conditions... . (273) Like other ethnic studies programs, Asian American studies as a field evolved in a context of progressive post-Civil Rights Movement-era political commitments. As Lowe and others have suggested, these political imperatives have posed particular limitations on the possible symbolic and political properties of ‘Asian’ racial identity (Lowe, 1998; Lowe, 2001; Nguyen, 2002). More specifically, the symbolic possibilities of ‘Asianness’ have been limited by preoccupation with nation-based identities and a reductive idea of shared oppression based on a white-nonwhite binary. In order to ‘redefin[e] ... the political project for Asian American studies’ in the current moment, Lowe argues: we need to move past ‘an assumption of the political subject along lines of racial, ethnic, or cultural identity’ and to ‘develop ... a shared language about exploitation within transnational capitalism, a language about economic and social justice rather than cultural or nationalist identity’ (Lowe, 2001, p. 74). In other words, to fully reckon with the historical conditions of their being, diasporic Asians – including Asian Americans – must break free from the ideological constraints of nation-based ontologies. We must look back in time and around the world and develop ‘a shared language about exploitation within transnational capitalism’ – that is, a racial capitalism framework. Asians represent a compelling problem when considering Robinson’s notion of ontological totality, since out of the crucible of European imperialism and racial capitalism, diasporic Asians have consistently acted as ‘both labor and capital’ in the emergence of transnational economies (Lowe, 2001, p. 273). Considering a wide panoply of Asian groups in colonial societies from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean to the Americas, from ‘coolies’ and sharecroppers to shopkeepers, merchants, and entrepreneurs,2 it becomes apparent that Asians have more often than not occupied intermediary strata – in many cases consciously constructed and maintained by European imperialist powers – between a white ruling class and other subordinated, nonwhite groups. Indeed, the first colonial encounter between Chinese laborers and the ‘New World’ occurred at the moment of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1807. Chinese laborers sent to Trinidad were explicitly conceived of as a racial solution to the continued need for labor as well as a means to suppress Black rebellion. No measure would be so effective, a British colonial administrator wrote in a ‘Secret Memorandum’ to the East India Company in 1803, as that of introducing a free race of cultivators... who, from habits and feelings could be kept distant from the Negroes, and who from interest would be inseparably attached to the European proprietors... The Chinese people ... unite the qualities which constitute this double recommendation. (Lowe, 2006, p. 193) The ‘newly raced’ figure of the Chinese laborer inaugurated ‘a new racial mode of managing and dividing laboring groups’; yet, Lowe argues, this figure has remained relatively obscure and its presence unmarked in dominant narratives and understandings of the emergence of the modern world. How and why should we ruminate on the ‘collective being’ of such a group in a world order dominated by racial capitalism? As Lowe’s scholarship suggests, in order to fully understand how capitalist, imperialist, and neoimperialist domination functions, we must develop a theory that accounts for the interdependence of articulations of difference between racialized ‘minority’ groups: what scholars in US ethnic studies refer to as differential, or comparative, racialization. Claire Jean Kim has outlined how such an approach works out in a US context, proposing as an analytical model a ‘field of racial positions’ in which Asians are ‘racially triangulated’ – simultaneously ‘valorized’ relative to Black people, and ostracized as perpetual outsiders (Kim, 1999, 2000). What would such a field look like in a global historical context? What and how can we learn from the racial triangulation of Asians across broader swaths of time and space? Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism (based on the proposition that racialism and social structures emergent from capitalism mutually inform one another), interwoven with ideas about discourse and power stemming from Edward Said’s influential text Orientalism (1978), together provides a strong theoretical framework for shining a light on this obscure and contradictory figure of ‘Asianness,’ toward a broader understanding of how racial capitalism operates. The present in which we live has been shaped by the legacies and continuing realities of imperialism and capitalism, which have flourished on an inextricable binding together of the racial and the economic. Looking at the operations of discourse across time and place helps us to see how this was, and remains, so. Linking Black Marxism and Orientalism Two aspects of Black Marxism are especially significant here: first, its recasting of the dynamics of modern world history via a critique of Western Marxism and assertion of a Black Radical tradition; and second, its revolutionary politics. Robinson argues that the development of the modern world has been shaped and is continually reshaped by ‘racial capitalism,’ the idea that racial ideologies and the social structures emergent from capitalism mutually constitute one another. Assessing ‘two programs for revolutionary change,’ Marxism and Black Radicalism, he critiques Marxism’s enmeshment in European systems of domination and asserts the roots of Black Radicalism back hundreds of years, claiming an African cultural core to resistance quite apart from Western models of oppression and reaction – a kind of collective racial ‘being’ that is defined by yet subsumes a particular relation to capitalism: ‘it had been as an emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement’ (245). With this counter-ideology, an identitarian position based not in opposition but in its own deep, historical essence, a new theory of history emerges even within the capitalist, whitesupremacist underpinnings of this global modernity. Robinson traces this insight back through the works of both W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James. In Black Reconstruction Du Bois saw that ‘The oppositions that had struck most deeply at capitalist domination and imperialism had been those formed outside of the logic of bourgeois hegemony’ and that Black struggle and ‘collective action had achieved the force of a historical antilogic to racism, slavery, and capitalism’ (240). In The Black 150 W. Cheng Downloaded by [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] at 06:43 02 December 2014 Jacobins ([1963] 1989), James argued that although the slaves of Haiti were not an industrial proletariat, the processes of revolutionary social formation were nonetheless the same; (imperialist) primitive accumulation deposited the social base for revolutionary masses in the peripheries; this insight ‘broke the [European-centered] evolutionist chain’ and closed dialectic of historical materialism (275–6). This new theory of history – a theory of how radical change occurs – redirects historical focus from the core to the periphery (the demographically and geographically marginalized, whom are nonetheless central to operations of imperial power), and forces acknowledgment of the persistent interlinkage of bourgeois capitalism, imperialism, and slavery. If Robinson recast history in order to see where and how imperialist systems of domination break down, Said’s interest in Orientalism was in showing how these systems were constructed and maintained. He argued that a fundamental means through which this occurred in the Near (or Middle) East was via orientalist discourse, and indeed there was a complete ‘coincidence between geography, knowledge, and power’ (216). ‘Orientalism,’ Said wrote, ‘is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and ... “the Occident”’ (2); ‘since one cannot ontologically obliterate the Orient ... one does have the means to capture it ... describe it, improve it, radically alter it’ (95). The ‘Oriental’ as constituted by orientalist discourse constituted a kind of ontological pathology: merely to exist was his or her [their] crime ‘The crime was that the Oriental was an Oriental, and it is an accurate sign of how commonly acceptable such a tautology was that it could be written without even an appeal to European logic or symmetry of mind’ (39). The ‘oriental’ was seen not as a citizen or even as a person but as a racial form (cf. Lye, 2005): ‘rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed ... as problems to be solved or confined or – as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory – taken over’ (207). Paralleling Robinson’s argument about racialism and capitalism, one of Said’s key points is that Orientalist discourse was not simply a rationalization of colonial rule after the fact but a justification in advance of it (39). Thus, this systematic making of ontological and epistemological distinctions in discourse had a ‘fatal tendency,’ enabling ‘the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories’ (123). Although Orientalism was written about European involvement in and with the Middle East, the term ‘oriental’ and the reach of this discourse have enveloped people of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent. Since theirs has been such a highly heterogeneous and in some cases contradictory history in terms of imperialism, colonialism, and revolution,3 it has been common discourses more than any other commonalities – the idea of a shared ‘crime’ of existence – which have delineated the terms of their racialized group status. Said’s exegesis of orientalist discourse showed that in Western modernity, whether one is labor or capital, rich or poor, to be Asian is to be an aberration. Indeed, the utility of the ‘figure’ of Asianness depended upon its otherness or foreignness, its ‘distance’ or triangulation from both Black and White. Imperial, colonial, and neocolonial power depended upon the continued production and presence of this racial aberration in order to reproduce its necessary hierarchies and divisions. Racial capitalism and the problem of Asianness Reading Black Marxism and Orientalism together shows us what might be gained from deconstructing the dialectic of knowledge production and power and unearthing the histories and meanings of revolutionary struggles for liberation. How, then, to approach a history and analysis of this complex, contradictory, and in many senses unmanageable racial grouping, ‘Asian’? When we look at the history of various Asian groups through this racial–economic discursive lens, clear patterns emerge across different imperial, colonial, and capitalist contexts – all having to do with the interlinking of the racial and the economic. A number of scholars have already done extensive work along these lines. Yet, the project and its commitments might be made explicit in order to articulate an intellectual and political tradition of work upon which to build. Based on the dual concerns of Said and Robinson – the imbrication of the racial and the economic, and the fateful ‘racial figuring’ of discourse – a few ways to implement a racial capitalism approach for looking at the problem of Asianness are given in the following: 1. Focus on figurings of Asianness. These figurings, or perceived outlines or silhouettes of human forms, include among them lazy natives,4 coolies, shopkeepers, middleman minorities, entrepreneurs, and model minorities. The work to be done is to parse each of them to understand how they have congealed as racial–economic tropes within historically and geographically specific relations of power that are political, economic, and interethnic. An example of this kind of thinking is Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia (2005), in which Lye employs the idea of an Asiatic ‘racial form’ to elucidate how global capitalism is implicated in racial formation.5 Through deconstructive readings of early twentieth-century literature, Lye illustrates how economic tropes function as racial forms and vice versa, and the interplay between esthetic concerns and historical and political–economic contexts. An earlier example is Malaysian scholar Syed Hussein Alatas’s Myth of the Lazy Native (1977), in which Alatas argues that the depiction of Malays as ‘indolent’ by colonial powers stemmed not from any actual support for this claim but from Malays’ general avoidance of direct participation in the capitalist economy (i.e., work as cheap labor in mines and plantations) – what colonial officials perceived as a ‘lack of acquisitiveness.’6 Important to Alatas’s analysis is that this trope of the lazy native was formed in contrast to representations of Chinese immigrants as reliable, hardworking, and more intelligent than the native Malays. 2. Look to the ‘peripheries’ of erstwhile empires and neo-empires (the Caribbean, the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Africa). Under European colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, East Africa, and parts of Latin America Chinese and Indian immigrants worked as cheap ‘coolie’ labor on mines and plantations and served as plantation overseers, owners, and entrepreneurs; they covered the whole range of racial–economic figurings of Asianness still prevalent today. In Myth of the Lazy Native, Alatas points out that European colonial powers facilitated the rise of the Chinese as the dominant trading class in Southeast Asia after destroying the indigenous Malay, Filipino, and Javanese trading classes.7 On the question of Chinese in Latin America, Evelyn Hu-DeHart has contrasted the experiences of Chinese contract laborers in Cuba and Peru with the emergence of a Chinese petite bourgeoisie in Mexico from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries (Hu-DeHart, 2005).8 Regarding the Caribbean, Walton Look Lai has chronicled a century of shifts in representations of Chinese immigrants in the West Indies, from ‘foreign sugar worker to peripheral minority petite bourgeoisie to prized multicultural citizen’ (Look Lai, 2005). Moon-Ho Jung’s Coolies and Cane (2006) connects the development of American ideas about Asian labor to the sugar economy of the Caribbean, during attempts to incorporate Chinese ‘coolie’ labor into the post-Civil War labor structure of the American South (see also Jun, 2006; Loewen, 1988). 152 3. Tackle the question of middle-classness and heterogeneity of ‘Asian’ raci

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