Sinophobia + Sinocentrism— An AsianCrit Analysis of the US Military's Wartime Curricular [Re]racialization of Chinese [Americans]

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the author uses an AsianCrit analysis of US Department of War Educational Manual No. 42, Our Chinese Ally (EM42), a document of military curriculum from WWII. Their argues that EM42 demonstrates both a state-sanctioned [re]racialization of Chinese and Chinese Americans through simultaneous technologies of Sinophobia and Sinocentrism. Their analysis of EM42 has implications for the construction of Asian Americans as a ‘model minority’ in the United States, and highlights EM42’s contemporary reverberations on the construction of Asian American identity, as well as how nation-states challenged stereotypes of Chinese people without decentring whiteness.KEYWORDS: Asian AmericansChinese AmericansAsianCritcurriculumrace AcknowledgmentsI would like to express my deepest thanks to Alexandra Allweiss, Dorinda Carter Andrews, Kyle Greenwalt, and Christina Schwarz for their support for this work and for me as a scholar.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.Notes1. In this paper, I use the term ‘China’ to refer to a geographic context, rather than synonymous with a particular iteration of a nation-state. I distinguish between referring to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the nation-state and China as the geographical context.2. Ironically, Deng Xiaoping subsequently used Chinese characteristics as a technology of authoritarian nationalism by the PRC as part of the supposedly reparative statecraft that asserts the PRC’s sovereignty after Unequal Treaties that marked the start of China’s Century of Humiliation (1839–1949) (Harvey, Citation2005; Wang, Citation2012).3. Han Supremacy critiques the conflation of Han ethnic identity and cultural practices with Chinese identity which emerges from the fluidity of the term Chinese as a reference to a cultural, linguistic, and national identity in Western contexts partly due to epistemological differences in Western concepts of race (Leibold, Citation2010; Louie, Citation2004).Additional informationFundingThe author(s) received financial support for this research from the Asian Pacific American Studies Program at Michigan State University (Graduate Fellowship Program), the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University (Chinese Student Endowment), and the College of Education at Michigan State University (Summer Research Fellowship).