AASI is proud to announce the publication of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (Temple University Press, 2011) by Asian American Studies and English (then) Assistant Professor, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials.

Prof. Schlund-Vials is currently Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She has served as the Faculty Director for the university’s Humanities House living and learning community.

AASI’s Fe Delos-Santos conducted this email interview to spotlight Dr. Schlund-Vials’ book and other works in progress, her views on the field of Asian American Studies as well as, her hopes and aspirations for Asian American Studies at UCONN.

FE DELOS-SANTOS: A few words before we ease into the questions – I am more comfortable conducting interviews face to face and not with all of the questions prepared ahead of time, so this email interview will not fully capture the spirit [and rhythm of spontaneous] reciprocal exchange that motivates this inquiry. Please feel free to be as expansive and generous with your reading of the questions presented – I take full responsibility for their limitations.

FDS: Let me start by reproducing a section of the Preface to ease us in: Within the United States, common parlance dictates an understanding of naturalization through multivalent citizenships … in which “U.S. citizenship is conferred upon a foreign citizen or national after he or she fulfills the requirements established by Congress.” Just as important … are its demonstrative, less tangible stipulations. Relying on a convincing public performance, naturalization is equal part repudiation and declaration, affective and legislative, wherein the country of origin is dismissed in favor of the country of settlement. Therefore, naturalization as an identifiable practice produces a legally sanctioned, dismissively transnational “rebirth” via an emotional pledge of nation-state allegiance within a specific location. [xviii]

My first question focuses on the various audience(s) for this work – your intended audience (which I am guessing is primarily the academic community) but hopefully includes a good number of knowledgeable laypeople curious about the novel juxtaposition of Jewish and Asian Americans, and your understanding of what they will take away from it generally and more particularly.

CATHY SCHLUND-VIALS: Modeling Citizenship is admittedly geared towards multiple academic audiences. In particular, the project engages a comparative ethnic studies frame in its exploration of two groups that are discussed as “analogous” but rarely investigated as such in American Studies, Asian American Studies, and ethnic American literary studies. The relevance of this work, vis-à-vis nonacademic audiences, is evident in ongoing “model minority” debates in popular culture. For example, the recent publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother work is, as Gina Barreca noted, similar to the tenets [of] the “Jewish mother” stereotype. In deconstructing the extent to which citizenship is a performance, and a legally-determined one, I hope to create a more concrete foundation upon which to evaluate the relationship between race, ethnicity, and nation.

FDS: How did you become interested in this topic? Aside from the Neil Diamond thing, was there some sort of defining experience, an (pardon the lack of imaginative alternative) “Aha!” moment?

CSV: As someone trained in Asian American Studies, American Studies, and ethnic American literary studies, I was repeatedly struck by the parallel stereotypical constructions between Jewish and Asian American subjects. One book that naturally brought this connection to light is Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land, wherein the eponymous protagonist wants to convert to Judaism and become an ostensible “Changowitz.” In many ways this book pushed me to think about why the idea of a Chinese American becoming a Jewish Chinese American was simultaneously familiar and peculiar. On a more personal level, as a first-generation immigrant, I – like my mother – had to attend naturalization “classes” and a ceremony. Last, but certainly not least, the debate over President Barack Obama’s birth status – as troublingly laid bare by the likes of the Tea Party movement, the “birther” movement, and Donald Trump – makes clear a dominant investment in citizenship yet a lack of actual understanding of how Americans are “made.”

FDS: And who were your influences, mentors, guides – valued elders and supportive contemporaries?

CSV: The wonderful thing about academia is that you are able to interact with a variety of folks from different disciplines, backgrounds, and locations. At UMass-Amherst, I had the opportunity to work with Sunaina Maira, who introduced me to the field of Asian American Studies. Joseph Skerrett, Maria Tymoczko, and Margo Culley proved ideal dissertation advisors who pushed the project’s comparative frames. Within the field of Asian American Studies, I am very much influenced by historians such as Gary Okihiro, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, and K. Scott Wong. Last, but certainly not least, Vijay Prashad’s Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting served as a model for comparative ethnic work.

FDS: A question about your writing/production process – how long did this project take from conception to galley proofs? Some writers have disclosed to me their particular rituals for getting the writing juices flowing – these vary from vacuuming to eating a pint of mint chocolate ice cream (any brand on sale) to writing only between midnight and 5am and so on – you care to share yours? What would you do the same and what would you do differently?

CSV: I am admittedly a very, very slow writer – and, I am not a natural writer, which means I spend a lot of time staring at the page. This project began as a dissertation, but…it bore the mark of a dissertation. Complicating matters was the fact that I had started a new book (which is forthcoming with University of Minnesota press). I spend at least a two hours a day writing, and I spend my time dividing up tasks – rather than look at pages, I look at “sections.” I do, however, have to have a very clean house, which explains the need to vacuum twice a day.

FDS: How hard was it to choose the literary/dramatic works you include? Would you care to talk about the work(s) that didn’t make the cut?

CSV: I had intended to include more contemporary Jewish American authors (such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth). And, the original manuscript contained a chapter focused on Holocaust narratives and Cambodian American memoirs about genocide. This chapter was actually the basis for my second book, which was focused on Cambodian American memory work. Such cuts occurred in an organic fashion – I had a frame and I was interested in authors that spoke to particularly contested moments in immigration law.

FDS: What newfound wisdom did you find if any, from working on this book and publishing that may be useful to pass on?

CSV: I think that most have a tendency to want to hold onto work until the last moment – in many ways, the field assumes perfection. However, one cannot work in a vacuum, and the thing I learned was that one needs to send work out so that you get feedback. This seems so basic, but outside readers have a different investment and alternative perspectives which necessarily make a work stronger.

FDS: Whose work in Asian American Studies are you excited about? Whose work do you anticipate to get traction/mileage in the coming 3-5, 5-8 years? Where do you think these works place within the larger frames of Ethnic Studies, American Studies, or Humanities?

CSV: This is a rather huge question, but a great one. There are so many, but…I am really interested in how the field of Asian American studies is increasingly situated by way of hemisphere and trans-Pacific modes. Jason Oliver Chang’s work on Chinese in Mexico makes visible this turn, as does Lisa Yun’s work on Chinese Cubans. I am drawn to the types of inquiries put forth in Margo Machida’s work, which innovatively examines notions of contact and exchange in Hawai’i. I love the work in food studies and affect, especially Anita Mannur’s Culinary Fictions and Mark Padoongpatt’s work on Thai restaurants. Such explorations – which decenter place, space, and race by way of different types of transits – presages the increasingly transnational and multidisciplinary frames of Ethnic Studies, American Studies, and the Humanities.

FDS: Please pardon this aside – I note that you chose Fred Korematsu to flesh out the section of Modeling Citizenship entitled “Resistive Acts and Progressive Conclusions” [172-175] which wonderfully includes Palestinian American Suheir Hammad (I was not aware of her until I read your book). I’m wondering if you know (and of course you probably already do and I am wasting space here) of Wajahat Ali, a playwright, identifies as Muslim American based in California.

CSV: I DIDN’T !!! THIS IS A GREAT LEAD!!

FDS: As more and more Asian American scholars mine the archives in a deeper/more nuanced engagement of transnational or hemispheric studies, often uncovering novel material accessed through facility with the “native/Asian” language (I am thinking here for example of Lisa Mar’s work on the Chinese Canadian community leaders that strongly shaped their “model minority” status) – what’s your take on the rising salience of language facility to access primary documents for original research?

CSV: This is a huge issue, and Lisa Mar’s work highlights both how much the field has grown but how much work still has yet to be done. As evidenced by my previous answer, I take seriously the transnational and the hemispheric, but there is a need for a deeper engagement between area studies and ethnic studies. Language is one aspect of this engagement, but I think that religion and culture are another. I would encourage more intellectual engagements that bring together history, language, and religion in a manner that reframes the very question of American-ness.

FDS: If you would consent to give a general assessment of the field as it stands today and where you think it is headed, then would you also consent to share your hopes and aspirations for AASI at UCONN? What resources in terms of both financial and political capital would you like to see – let’s dream big here – to achieve these goals? How would you justify these allocations were they to come along?

CSV: As budget crises and program cuts make clear, the field of Asian American Studies – especially “east of California” – is at times precariously position. Even so, the types of work that the work privileges – which consistently seeks new paradigms and approaches – remains viable and relevant. I would very much like to see the Institute’s engagement with the research richness of the field continue (as you know, we have done much in this regard). The strength of the Institute depends on the productivity of its faculty, and I think that we are truly lucky in his regard. The “political capital” of Asian American studies is found in its unique location vis-à-vis domestic law and U.S. foreign policy. There is therefore an internationalist register to the field, which makes it necessarily expansive.

FDS: Would you tell us what new scholarly/book projects are you working on? How do these depart from previous work or build on them?

CSV: I had mentioned that I just finished my second book, Cambodian American Memory Work: Genocide Remembrance and Juridical Activism, which marks a bit of a departure from Modeling Citizenship. Whereas Modeling Citizenship is largely shaped by the concerns of a large Civil Rights movement and national law, Cambodian American Memory Work is concentrated on human rights and international law (including the U.N./Khmer Rouge Tribunal).

My third book returns in many ways to the question of U.S. foreign policy and Asian American studies via military bases. Tentatively titled “Imperial Coordinates: War, Containment, and Asian American Critique,” this project examines a heretofore ignored site in Asian American literary studies: the military base. Correspondingly, “Imperial Coordinates” engages a spatial reading of U.S. imperialism through Asian American writing about militarized zones, internment camps, and relocation centers. Expressly, “Imperial Coordinates” evaluates the course of U.S. empire through Asian American narratives about soldiers, prisoners of war, and refugees. Such bodies, born out of collateral campaigns, circulate in distinct contact zones that in turn make possible a sustained critique of American imperialism through civil rights and human rights. From McKinley to FDR, from LBJ to Nixon, “Imperial Coordinates” simultaneously maps the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and Asian American literature. Concentrated on the Philippine-American War (1899-1901), the Japanese American Internment (1942-1946), the Korean War (1950-1953), and the American War in Viet Nam (1964-1975), “Imperial Coordinates” reengages conflict and significantly reevaluates the role of war, militarization, and memory in the making of Asian American literature and critique.

FDS: What do you read for “fun?”

CSV: I actually love reading apocalyptic novels like Margaret Atwood’s recent Oryx and Crake and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The beautiful thing about these novels is that you don’t have to think per se – you just have to react!

FDS: Closing question – What question do you wish I would have asked and should properly have asked? (sneaky way to get you to do my job) And please, answer your own question. Thank you in advance!

CSV: The questions you asked were FANTASTIC!! Perhaps you have done your job too well – I don’t have anything else to add!!

END OF INTERVIEW