In line with this year’s AAR presidential theme of “Freedom,” this panel brings together four papers to discuss the manifold ways that Asian American communities have utilized and/or complicated US national myths about freedom through their unique religio-racial experiences. From Chinese American Exclusion to Japanese American Incarceration and Korean American pro-democracy movements to Vietnamese American movements for Trump--how has religion, especially Christianity, shaped these pivotal moments in US history? How has religion not only shaped Asian American racialization but also movements to build a more perfect union, including inclusionary citizenship, the fight for religious freedom, the formation of multiracial democracy, and healing from intergenerational trauma? Building on US and transnational archives, ethnographic research and multi-lingual interviews, these panelists uncover research that delves deeply into the ethnic diversity of Asian American religious communities, from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment.
In 1856, Chinese Americans successfully lobbied against the Foreign Miners’ License Tax, a discriminatory law aimed at driving out Chinese miners. The Chinese argued that they were free and cheap labor relative to enslaved Black people, casting themselves alongside free White men. Essential to their political success was the support of Presbyterian missionary William Speer, a liberal advocate for Chinese inclusion into California’s labor market from 1852 to 1857. Drawing from primarily Speer’s writings, political work, and correspondence with Walter Lowrie, organizer of Presbyterian foreign missions, and future secretary of state William H. Seward, I introduce "inclusionary Protestantism," an abolitionist and transnational movement for opening borders and incorporating Chinese immigrants based on their economic and moral value. Inclusionary Protestantism produced images of Asia that dovetailed with Lincoln’s emancipatory “Civil War faith" to form what Andrew Preston calls the ideological core of postwar American foreign policy in the twentieth century.
This paper explores how Nikkei (Japanese immigrants and their descendants) Christians’ incarceration experiences challenged U.S. national myths about religious freedom within the transnational power dynamics during World War II. Duncan Ryūken Williams’ American Sutra persuasively contends that the U.S. incarceration policy sought to assimilate Nikkei internees into white American society through Christianization, thereby undermining the religious freedom of Nikkei Buddhists. Building on this discussion, this paper shifts to the infringement on Nikkei Christians’ freedom of worship and their resistance, examining Japanese documents of Nikkei Christian internees and English documents about the U.S. incarceration religious policy. In response to the Japanese empire’s criticism of the U.S. racism, white American Protestants, alongside the U.S. empire, sought to integrate Nikkei into white American society, thereby urging Nikkei Christians to cease their Japanese vernacular worship and join white American churches. However, Nikkei Christians safeguarded their spiritual liberty by maintaining their ethno-racial identity and churches.
This paper argues for a reconceptualization of freedom by drawing from my ethnographic field research on a transnational social movement network in the Korean diaspora in the U.S. that originated from the 1980 South Korean pro-democracy movement. The story of this intergenerational movement network, which has built solidarity with other communities of color, demonstrates the limits of narrowly defined freedom as individual liberty and disrupts the hegemony that restricts Asian American social belongings based on meritocracy. By analyzing their stories, I provide an expansive conceptualization of freedom in the context of marginalized people—as the capacity for imagining the collective self as the protagonist for freedom-building and transformative social change and building communal capacity to pursue them. These memories of our ancestors’ collective moral agency restore ethical dignity and radical hope in the process of freedom-building. This freedom enables us to pursue democracy by re-membering the marginalized as a center.
The generational divide over Donald Trump has been well-documented in Vietnamese American communities, with the first generation highly supportive of Trump, while the younger generation tends to lean more liberal. To outside observers, that a generation of refugees would support a white nationalist, anti-immigration administration might seem both inconceivable and counterintuitive. But to those familiar with Vietnamese American politics, support for Donald Trump fits within a larger conservative culture among Vietnamese American communities. Scholars and activists attribute this to a number of reasons, but primary among them is anti-communist sentiment and conservative religious values. In this paper, however, I argue that all of these factors must be understood within the larger context of intergenerational trauma and the collective impact this has on group identity. Furthermore, I suggest that the generational divide of Vietnamese American communities might be read as a transmission of both intergenerational trauma and evidence of this trauma being repaired.