From Yosemite to the Cold War: Decomposing Settler Mythologies in the Asian American Outdoors

Abstract:In a moment of rising East Asian global tourism and heightened anti-Asian violence in public space, what does it mean for Asian bodies to see and be seen in the outdoors? Analyzing Dinh Q. Le's daguerreotypes of Yosemite alongside C. Pam Zhang's novel How Much of These Hills is Gold, this article traces an emerging archive of contemporary Asian American literature and visual art that imagines Asian American entanglements with the fraught settler racial histories of US national parks. The article outlines decomposition as a reading practice to propose new ways to read Asian American presence in the environment that do not rely on the recovery or reenactment of settler mythologies of vacant land. Rather, I posit an Asian Americanist ecological approach that turns toward the materialist histories of more-than-human landscapes to reckon with the charged presence of Asian Americans in unceded Native lands. Ultimately, this article illuminates understandings of Asian American relationships to land that further attend to the obscured militarized and settler colonial conditions shaping these environmental relations.