Aspirations of Relationality: Asian American Studies, American Studies, East Asian Studies, and the Global Anglophone

Abstract

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another.