Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at New York University.

Alien Encounters

Popular Culture in Asian America

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3910-6

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………viiIntroduction Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1one Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC Oliver Wang………………………………………………………………………………35two Silenced but Not Silent: Asian Americans and Jazz Kevin Fellezs…………………………………………………………………………………………………69three Homicidal Tendencies: Violence and the Global Economy in Asian American Pulp Fiction Christopher A. Shinn………………………………………………………….111four Visual Reconnaissance Joan Kee……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..130five Chinese Restaurant Drive-Thru Indigo Som…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….150six The Guru and the Cultural Politics of Placelessness Sukhdev Sandhu………………………………………………………………………………………………161seven Cooking up the Senses: A Critical Embodied Approach to the Study of Food and Asian American Television] Audiences Martin F. Manalansan IV……………………………..179eight Performing Culture in Diaspora: Assimilation and Hybridity in Paris by Night Videos and Vietnamese American Niche Media Nhi T. Lieu…………………………………..194nine Indo-Chic: Late Capitalist Orientalism and Imperial Culture Sunaina Maira……………………………………………………………………………………….221ten Asian American Auto/Biographies: The Gendered Limits of Consumer Citizenship in Import Subcultures Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Vernadette Vicua Gonzalez…………………247eleven Bruce Lee I Love You: Discourses of Race and Masculinity in the Queer Superstardom of JJ Chinois Mimi Thi Nguyen…………………………………………………..271twelve Race and Software Wendy Hui Kyong Chun…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….305Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………335Contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………355Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….359

Chapter One

Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC

Oliver Wang

The first song recorded by a rapper of Asian American descent was the 1979 single “Rap-O, Clap-O” by the Latin soul singer Joe Bataan. Born to a Filipino father and African American mother, Bataan was a veritable giant in New York’s Latin scene, having been at the forefront of Latin soul in the late 1960s and then scoring a crossover hit with his 1975 cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Bottle.” That single appeared on an album (also in 1975) entitled Afro-Filipino, thereby settling any ambiguity as to how Bataan self-identified. The album’s version of Bataan’s best-known composition, “Ordinary Guy,” changed the lyrics to reflect his ethnic state of mind: “I’m an ordinary guy … Afro Filipino … ordinary guy.”

Produced by Arthur Baker-a seminal hip hop figure who later produced Afrika Bambataa’s “Planet Rock” and other old-school rap hits-“Rap-O, Clap-O” was Bataan’s first foray into hip hop, recorded at the very beginning of the music’s recorded history. In fact, Bataan himself has claimed that the song was recorded prior to the release of both the Fatback Band’s “King Tim III (Personality Jock)”-recognized as the first rap record-and the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” the first breakout rap hit. However, Bataan was unable to release the song first, and in the end, “Rap-O, Clap-O” failed to make much of an impact in the United States, although it did become a high-charting hit in Europe. For the next twenty-five years, Bataan would be one of the first and last Asian American rappers to find such a popular welcome. Although Asian Americans have taken leading roles throughout the rest of the hip hop industry-as disc jockeys, producers, journalists, designers, and so on-within the ranks of recorded rappers they remain a scant presence.

Becoming a rapper, like any professional musician or entertainer, is a highly competitive process. Out of thousands of aspirants, only a handful will see a recording contract, let alone a commercially produced and distributed album. However, Asian American rappers face more than the challenge of climbing up through a corporate meritocracy-race is also a force that can hamper their efforts. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, almost no rappers of Asian American descent were signed to any of the recording industry’s major labels despite numerous success stories by Latino (Cypress Hill, Big Pun) and white (Beastie Boys, Eminem) rappers.

The common excuse given is that “it’s a matter of talent,” meaning that there are no Asian Americans of recording caliber. “Talent” is an ill-defined and ambiguous concept most often deployed after the fact (i.e., success supposedly confirms the existence of talent, yet not every talented artist is successful). In the past, this red herring of talent has been used to explain the relatively poor sales of female rappers rather than to acknowledge that sexism may play a role. As with women, in the case of Asian American rappers it is unlikely that their relative invisibility is a result of a lack of talent. Rather, it comes down to the issues of marketability and, intimately related to that, how racially inauthentic Asian Americans are in a social world of fans, artists, media, and industry, where blackness is normative.

Although the concept of authenticity girds most Western music cultures, from classical to pop, the idea finds its apotheosis within hip hop. “Realness,” even more than lyrical acumen or musical talent, is often praised and rewarded, whereas “fakeness” can discredit an artist beyond redemption. There are various kinds of authenticity based around social identities such as class, gender, and race. For Asian American rappers, their racial difference creates a crisis of racial inauthenticity that supersedes other factors. As noted, this reflects the ways in which blackness is a normative reality in hip hop, though not one that goes uncontested.

In Imani Perry’s Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, she writes about hip hop’s indelible relationship to blackness.

The assertion that hip hop is a form of black American music is in some ways radical (and unpopular) given current trends in hip hop scholarship that emphasize the multiracial origins of the music, in particular the significant contributions of Caribbean, white, and Latino communities and artists. Many critics have resisted the description of hip hop as black American music because they quite appropriately contest any suggestion that it is “100 percent black” given the active participation of other groups in the world of hip hop since the nascent days of the music. Critiques of the description of hip hop as black music also often stand as critiques of racial essentialism, or critiques of the way in which culture is marketed through race at the same time that it is fundamentally hybrid.

However, Perry argues that despite hip hop’s syncretism the music and culture must still be understood within the context of American blackness: “Even with its hybridity, the consistent contributions from nonblack artists, and the borrowings from cultural forms of other communities, it is nevertheless black American music.” Like others, Perry cites the roots of hip hop in cultural practices created by disenfranchised black and Puerto Rican youth within the postindustrial urban ghettos of 1970s New York. Few dispute this history or the power of its narrative. The idea of black and brown youth crafting a vibrant subculture from the burned-out streets of urban America has helped hip hop fuel the imaginations of marginalized youth across the world as they come to identify hip hop with their own alterity. However, this origin myth can lead to an authenticity paradigm in which African Americans are normative while other ethnic groups find their presence marginalized if not entirely missing.

The absence of hip hop’s hybrid histories is not a deliberate act of erasure-though some have argued otherwise-but it is certainly a by-product of how powerfully hip hop’s Afro-diasporic roots dominate conversations around rap and race. Scholars have raised concerns over this phenomenon, notably those writing on the Latino contribution to hip hop. Others challenge the centrism that posits the United States as the sole country with a legitimate hip hop narrative. Despite these attempts to diversify hip hop within scholarly discourse, consumption habits by mainstream rap consumers, which are often cited as the rationale behind industry decisions, are still vastly tilted toward African American artists. Nonblack rappers, especially Asian Americans, face a dilemma since their racial difference does not meet the standard of black authenticity held by rap fans and music executives alike.

This challenge poses a paradox to Asian American artists. There are few Asian American rappers in the mainstream because most record labels are wary of signing them out of concern for their commercial viability. However, Asian American artists are unlikely to attain commercial viability until more record labels are willing to put their marketing and promotions resources behind them. In the meantime, the continued absence of Asian American rappers within mainstream media contributes to the perception of their inauthenticity, which further hinders their chances of finding commercial support. In this instance, the marginalization of Asian Americans within the hip hop recording industry becomes a self-perpetuating cycle that is difficult to break.

The following pages explore how select rappers of Asian American descent have dealt with their racial difference through self-conscious deployments of racial and ethnic signifiers in their lyrics, videos, and press material. On one level, I am engaging what I perceive to be these artists’ identity politics, that is, the kind of ethnic and racial identities they take on themselves and what their motives are for doing so. At the same time, I am also interested in looking at the wider issue of hip hop and its politics of identity and how racialized bodies fit into a matrix of power within the hip hop industry and fan community.

While I cover a span of approximately fifteen years, my intent is not to present a traditional, narrative history of Asian American rappers. Instead, I historicize one particular aspect-how they position a politics of racial identity within their music. The essay examines if, how, why, and to what ends Asian American rappers deploy ethnic and racial identities in their songs. The choice to express these identities is an individual one, but I argue that there have also been larger trends in the way Asian American rappers choose to deal with race in their marketing and music.

In quick summary, I chart how Asian American rappers in the early 1990s made race a central part of their image production and songwriting. In the mid-1990s, race and ethnicity became much more muted and were replaced with a rhetoric of universalism. In the early 2000s, race was deployed publicly again but as a strategic, “preemptive strike” against potential critics rather than an explicit, politicized embrace of racial identity. I suggest that these changes are reflective of both individual perceptions of race and identity and a general consciousness of racial difference within American hip hop culture at large.

“The Afrocentric Asian”: Negotiating Blackness and Asianness

In New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone, Raquel Z. Rivera’s exceptional history and analysis of Puerto Ricans and hip hop, she posits that, “Puerto Ricans who have taken part in New York’s hip hop culture have constructed their identities, participated and created art through a process of negotiation with the dominant notions of Blackness and latinidad.” The term latinidad represents “Latino-ness” in the same way that blackness functions in African American public culture. It is meant to represent the core essence of what it is to be a Latino. Rivera writes that “caught between latinidad and Blackness, Puerto Ricans may fit in both categories and yet also in neither,” an explicit acknowledgment that the struggle to define oneself is difficult in the face of dueling politics of identity that force people to choose between identities rather than finding a syncretic middle ground. Rivera’s basic argument is that this tension between the two identity poles-blackness and latinidad-has dominated the ways in which Puerto Ricans have to negotiate their position within hip hop. Neither completely black or brown-in the simplified discourse of hip hop’s racial politics-Puerto Ricans have had to fight against a racial binary that rarely offers a middle ground. In her words, “Puerto Ricans who participate in hip hop culture have sought to acknowledge their Afro-diasporic Caribbeanness without wholly submerging themselves under the reigning Hispanocentric definition of latinidad as nonblack, or under a Blackness that takes only African Americans into account.” In other words, forced to choose between worlds, some Puerto Ricans have instead sought to reject the binary logic of declaring one’s allegiance to either blackness or latinidad at the expense of the other.

In New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone, Rivera traces the complex paths this tension has followed. She convincingly documents, for example, how Puerto Ricans were assimilated into the pan-latinidad category of “Latin rap” that was in vogue in the early 1990s-an attempt at creating a subcategory of hip hop that was meant to acknowledge Latino contributions but also had the effect of erasing differences. Under this pan-latinidad rubric, Puerto Ricans were lumped in with Dominican, Cuban, and especially Chicano rappers, despite the significant social differences that exist between these ethnic communities. Most important, Rivera notes that pan-latinidad‘s “Hispanocentric bent” distanced Latinos from the African diaspora even though many Latinos, especially those from the West Indies (including Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) trace their roots directly back to the slave trade, which brought African slaves to both North America and the Caribbean. Rivera argues that the pan-latinidad label, quickly seized on in the media, flourished through people’s popular imaginations and as a result effectively remarginalized Puerto Rican identities by denying a unique social history that could embrace both blackness and latinidad without contradiction.

Rivera’s analysis offers much to this essay’s engagement with how Asian American rappers have had to deal with the question of race and identity in their own careers. In her work, Rivera traces the fluid ethnic identities that Puerto Ricans have had to negotiate over time, contextualizing how these change with shifting understandings of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. In similar ways, Asian American rappers have changed their subject positions in relation to race over the last fifteen years.

Of course, this does not suggest that an analysis of Asian Americans in hip hop will reveal similar issues and challenges facing the Puerto Rican community. To begin with, there is no equivalent to latinidad, let alone blackness, within Asian American cultural discourse. While the very ideas of blackness, latinidad, and Asianness are reflective of imagined communities, with Asianness in particular the ties that bind different Asian communities together are far more tenuous.

As many scholars have expressed, most notably the sociologist Yen Le Espiritu in Asian American Panethnicity, the possibility of forging a uniform Asian American identity is rent by any number of contrasting, sometimes hostile differences in history, language, culture, class, and so on. While all panethnic identities involve a certain amount of glossing over of difference-this is one of Rivera’s key points of criticism as well in the case of pan-latinidad-Asian American panethnicity especially is held together by a very fragile thread of political necessity rather than cultural, historical, or social similarity. To put it another way, the concept of blackness is being increasingly problematized, but the concept of Asianness has been problematic from its inception.

However, Asianness is real enough insofar as Asian Americans have to contend with a racialized identity placed on them by external forces. Groups as diverse as Taiwanese, Hmong, and Filipinos have effectively been lumped together and fixed as unchanging others-positioning them in opposition to, or at least separate from, the rest of American society, including both whiteness and blackness. The historian Gary Okihiro rhetorically poses the question, “Is Yellow Black or White?” to acknowledge that Asian Americans are expected to cast their allegiance with one of the two dominant American racial poles while erasing their own subjectivity as Asian Americans. Yet the contradiction is that Asian Americans are always already othered; even if they are racialized in white or black tones, the presumption of their Asianness/ otherness makes it difficult for them to be accepted as either.

(Continues…)

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