FROM GENEALOGY TO INVENTORY: THE SITUATION OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE AGE OF THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL FINANCE CAPITAL

The onset of global capitalism s crisis has exposed the fragile theoretical underpinnings of Asian American Studies as an academic discipline. Spellbound by deconstructive, rhetorical assumptions, all symptomatic of commodity-fetishism and alienation, mainstream Asian American critics continue to validate neoliberal pluralism while claiming to value difference and singularity. While rejecting American Exceptionalism, they ignore historical specificities and endorse individualist norms, affects, genealogical plurality, and performative discourses uncritical of free-market reification. What is needed is a return to a mode of critical inventory that takes account of historical capitalism, imperialist geopolitics, and the notion of collective agency necessary to destroy racialised ideological practices and institutions that maintain the exploitative capitalist division of labor, social injustice, and inequality of peoples based on private appropriation of social wealth.