APARRI 2004

Pacific and Asian American Religions and Empires

 

Critical Approaches to Text and Memory

  • David Kyuman Kim: "You MUST Remember This: Nostalgia, Critical Memory, and the Religious Imperium"
  • Uriah Kim: "The Realpolitik of Liminality in Josiah's Kingdom and Asian America"
  • Kay-ichi Nagashima: World Television's Portrayal of the Iraq War
  • Henry Morisada Rietz: "Living Past: Remembering Exile and Internment as a hapa"

Contesting Religious Orientalisms

  • Joseph Cheah: "The Empire Lives On: White Supremacy in American Buddhism"
  • Patricia Lin: "Race, Culture and Gender and the Asian American Jewish Experience"
  • Patti Nakai: "This Land is Pure Land: The Rediscovery of Jodo-Shinshu Buddhism in Chicago"
  • Jeffrey Staley: "Building a Home: Methodist Women, Rescued Children and the WHMS Bureau for Chinese Work National Fundraising Tour of 1908-1909"

Asian Empires and Religious Faith

  • Paul Chang: "Differential Impact of Repression on Social Movements: Emergence and Evolution of Christian Organizations and Liberation Theology in South Korea (1972-1979)"
  • Ju Hui Judy Han: "Geography of Missions and the Theology of Empire: Korean Evangelicals and the '10/40 Window'"
  • Shuji Otsuka: "Japanese American Christian Leaders and Student Exchanges Between the United States and Japan (1951-1958)"
  • Jong Hwan Park: "Violence, Anamnesis,and Eucharist"

Asian American Theological Responses to Empire

  • Nami Kim: "Harlem's Hail of Japan: New Empire and Pan-Asianism"
  • Lester Ruiz: "Re-Writing Empire"
  • Roy I Sano: "Earlier Stabs: Wherefores and Therefores"
  • Devin Singh: "Distance and Belonging: Asian American Theology and Empire"

Community and Society Approaches to Faith and Identity

  • Emily Noelle Ignacio: "Filipinos are Nice, but Bolanons are Martyrs: Complicating Assimilation Theories Through an Examination of Religious Practices and Racial Formations"
  • Mahruq Khan: "A Half-Way Trip Back Home: Muslim Immigrants Negotiate Assimilation by Imparting Morality Through an Islamic Parochial School"
  • Rosa Nguyen: "Family of Buddhists: Cultivated Identity of Vietnamese-American Buddhist Youth at Trung Tam Phat Giao Vanb-Hanh Temple"
  • Helene Slessarev-Jamir: "A Place of Refuge and Sustenance: How Faith Institutions Strengthen the Families of Poor Asian Immigrants"

Abstracts:

 

You MUST Remember This: Nostalgia, Critical Memory, and the Religious Imperium

David Kyuman Kim
Connecticut College

The paper discusses nostalgia as a form of critical reflection (in contrast to memory and history). Nostalgia functions as longing and desire for “home” in light of experiences of alienation, displacement, and estrangement, especially given the over-determining influences of religion and other potentially imperial forces. As a means of interrogating the complex and often ambiguous relationship between identity, religion, race, and empire, the paper will ask the following: In an age of migration and mobility, how does home begin with an identification with a particular physical place/space and time/history and evolve into an idea, a metaphor, or even a state of mind? How is the idea of home tied to religious life and experience? How can we begin to understand nostalgia as a form of complicity with as well as resistance to the imperia of discourses of race and religion? Can nostalgia generate creative responses, rather than subjection, to cultural nationalism, diasporas, exile, and racialized religion?

The Realpolitik of Liminality in Josiah’s Kingdom and Asian America

Uriah Kim
Canisius College

This paper critiques the prevailing tendency to construe the Deuteronomistic History — the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings in the Hebrew Bible — as the first and archetypical Western history, describing the creation of an all-Israel state in Palestine as the bringer of proper civilization to the region, a rightful hegemonic culture before which all must yield as being other, or less than, or, in the phrase of Homi Bhabha, “unhomely,” not at home in their own land. This is a modern nationalist reading, a reading consistent with and supportive of the vast pool of covert cultural confirmations of Euro-American imperial, colonizing domination. How is it possible, given the all-encompassing sway of the colonialist reading of the Bible, to understand the Deuteronomistic History in other than colonialist terms? The author argues that Josiah in whose court the Deuteronomistic History took shape and his kingdom were located in a political, ideological landscape shaped by the Neo-Assyrians, where they experienced the realpolitik of liminality, opening the possibility of narrating their history from interstitial space rather than from the center. By mean of an intercontextual reading between Josiah and Asian Americans’ experience of the realpolitik of liminality in North America, the author moves toward a postcolonial reading of the Deuteronomistic History that attempts to decolonize an understanding of Josiah and his kingdom that appeals persistently to the metanarrative of nationalism and that is still affected by the legacy of Orientalism in Biblical studies.

World Television’s Portrayal of the Iraq War

Kay-ichi Nagashima
NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation

How did US and Japanese television report 9/11 and the war in Iraq? A comparative international survey performed by the Broadcasting Research Institute of NHK, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo, contrasts the patriotic reporting style of American broadcasters with the neutral or non-committal reporting in Japan.

What do these differences suggest? This paper examines media attitudes with respect to the fundamental principles and values of the societies in which they arise. Attention is drawn to the AMerican emphasis on principles of freedom, justice, and democracy, and the Japanese esteem for coexistence and compassion.

It is proposed that these high American ideals, while inspiring people around the world, also dangerously suggest a rationale for imperialism, and that he less idealistic Japanese attention to coexistence and compassion may also have something to offer in this era of globalization.

Living Past: Remembering Exile and Internment as a hapa

Henry Morisada Rietz
Grinnell College

In this paper, I consider how memory of the experiences of others may be used in the construction of identity. I suggest that interpretation of others (including history and texts) and identity construction are interrelated processes. I have proposed that a hapa identity and its hermeneutic values both similarity as well as difference, i.e. particularity. In particular, this essay will propose ways that the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and biblical testimony of Israelites’ experience of Exile may be juxtaposed to speak to Americans today.

The Empire Lives On: White Supremacy in American Buddhism

Joseph Cheah
Graduate Theological Union

The colonial empire of Western Europe exploited not only raw materials and other natural resources of Asian countries but also the knowledge and culture of Asians as well. The Orientalists’ representation of Asian Buddhism to Westerners is a prime example of this. As far as the Orientalists were concerned, the categories (scientific methods, social sciences, etc.) by which they examined textual Buddhism were more legitimate for determining the essence of Buddhism than the lived Buddhism of Asians. This was, to be sure, a reflection of the hubris of the Enlightenment presumption of cultural and intellectual superiority of the West over the East. Vestiges of such appropriation of Asian Buddhism can still be found in the adaptation of Asian Buddhist meditation practices to the U.S. context. In this presentation, I will argue that some of the adaptations of Buddhist meditation practices to the American context have been rearticulated by many white Buddhists and sympathizers in specific but deliberately chosen forms that help preserve the racial ideology of white supremacy.

Race, Culture and Gender and the Asian American Jewish Experience

Patricia Lin
Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion, Pacific School of Religion

American Jews of East-Asian descent number between 32,000-60,000 in the United States today. This paper is part of a national study that is exploring the experiences of this population. I will be analyzing in close detail the interviews I conducted with three female Asian American Jews, one a mixed-race Cantonese -American Jewish rabbi who is the daughter of a Cantonese-American woman who converted at the time of marriage to a Jew of Eastern European descent (Ashkenazi Jew), and who is now the parent of two Asian-American Jews; two, a Korean-American woman who was adopted as a child by two Ashkenazi Jews, and three a woman of Cantonese-descent who converted to Judaism when she was pregnant with the child she was having with her Ashkenazi husband. Long before she had met her husband, however, she had immersed herself in the history of the "Near East," with undergraduate and graduate study in the archeology of the area. She is the parent of a college age Asian-American Jewish daughter. This paper will explore the different ways in which these women have negotiated their different identities, particularly, Asian and Jewish, by paying particular attention to issues of race, culture and gender.

This Land is Pure Land: The Rediscovery of Jodo-Shinshu Buddhism in Chicago

Patti Nakai
Buddhist Temple of Chicago

From its beginnings, the teachings of Buddhism have been a source of strength and inspiration for people of all classes, but especially for the “common people,” giving them a sense of self-respect and individual freedom denied to them by the society and culture of their times. In Japanese history, however, Buddhism has been used by the aristocratic and warrior classes to oppress the working classes. One example of this is seen in how the Pure Land (Jodo) teachings were distorted in order to suppress peasant uprisings such as the Buddhist-inspired ikko-ikki movement in medieval Japan.

Finally in the late 19th century, Buddhist scholars educated in Western science and philosophy began to rediscover the true essence (shin-shu) of the Pure Land teachings and its direct connection with the overall teachings of the historical Buddha. For the most part, this revolution in Japanese Buddhism failed to impact the temples being established in North America by Japanese immigrants. One channel of this revitalized Buddhism was the lineage of Manshi Kiyozawa (1863-1903) which in the post-war years was actively involved in presentations to the English-speaking audience at the Buddhist Temple of Chicago. The temple was established in 1944 during the mass resettlement in Chicago of Japanese Americans released from the wartime concentration camps.

Building a Home: Methodist Women, Rescued Children and the WHMS Bureau for Chinese Work National Fundraising Tour of 1908-1909

Jeffrey Staley
Pacific Lutheran University

When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Mission buildings at the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the WHMS Oriental Home for Chinese Women and Girls moved across the Bay to Berkeley and Oakland. The Rescue Home was organized under the Oriental Bureau of the Woman’s Home Missionary Society, and the Bureau intended to rebuild the Home on its original site. But for two and a half years the women struggled to find funding for rebuilding. Finally, in late September 1908, the Home’s Superintendent Carrie G. Davis took eight Chinese “rescued” children on a seven-month fundraising tour of the United States. On November 5, 1908, the children sang for President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House and made the front page of the next day’s New York Times. While a great deal of my work has been directed at reconstructing the untold history of this Methodist work among the immigrant Chinese community, I am also attempting to place this fundraising tour within the ideological context of early twentieth century constructions of childhood, womanhood, home, race, and empire.

Differential Impact of Repression on Social Movements: Emergence and Evolution of Christian Organizations and Liberation Theology in South Korea (1972-1979)

Paul Chang
Stanford University

During the height of authoritarianism in South Korea (1972-1979), Christian activists challenged the State along two dimensions. First, protesting Christians formed formal social movement organizations to better garner the resources to sustain their social movement. Second, they waged a discursive battle that challenged the legitimizing rhetoric of the state. By 1979, Christians developed a social movement industry involving the network of formal organizations as well as systematizing their rhetoric of protest in the guise of a Korean liberation theology; Minjung Theology. Drawing upon archival data and social movement theory, this study traces the origins and evolution of both the Christian social movement industry and Minjung Theology. Findings suggest that the emergence and evolution of mobilizing structures and movement frames were influenced by the state’s repressive apparatuses and legitimizing rhetoric, respectively. Likewise, Christian attempts to mobilize and challenge the legitimizing rhetoric of the state further contributed to the closing of the political opportunity structure. This study highlights the importance of considering the differential impact of repression on not only public protest or collective action but also on mobilizing structures and movement frames.

Geography of Missions and the Theology of Empire: Korean Evangelicals and the "10/40 Window"

Ju Hui Judy Han
UC Berkeley

In April 2004, seven South Korean missionaries were kidnapped and released by Iraqi militias. In June 2004, Sun-il Kim, a 33-year-old South Korean who described his purpose in Iraq as “half business and half missionary,” was held hostage by Iraqi militias for almost three weeks. When the South Korean government refused to cancel its plans to deploy troops to Iraq, he was brutally murdered. These recent events highlight the need for scholars to consider not only how religion shapes immigrant enclaves in the United States, but also how we can make sense of the changing political landscape of religion in the world today.

South Korea has emerged as the second largest sender of missionaries worldwide—second only to the United States. This paper examines how conservative Evangelicals along the US-South Korea axis have been aggressively promoting world evangelization, focusing on the “10/40 Window” which stretches from ten degrees to forty degrees north of the Equator, covering 62 countries in North Africa, Middle East, West to Central Asia, and East Asia. This is precisely the area where we find US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, the entire “Axis of Evil” (Iran, Iraq and North Korea), almost two million ethnic Korean minorities in China, half million ethnic Koreans in the Commonwealth of Independent States including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the majority of the world’s Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist populations. This paper discusses the geography of missions—spatial arrangements and geopolitical alignments behind evangelical missionary enterprises—and the theology of empire that provides the rhetorical basis. Approaching the church as not merely a point of arrival and gathering for (im)migrants, this paper discusses the immigrant Korean American church as an outbound space with far-reaching global agendas, riding on the coat tails of the US empire.

Japanese American Christian Leaders and Student Exchanges Between the United States and Japan (1951-1958)

Shuji Otsuka
Northwestern University

This presentation examines the informal participation of various Japanese American Christian organizations in the U.S.-Japan Fulbright Student Exchange Program during the 1950s. I argue that Japanese American Christian leaders acted as American hosts by reaching out to Japanese Fulbright students in ways that enriched their brief sojourns. In addition to providing church membership opportunities, they organized picnics, tours, sports activities for the students who had arrived from their war torn ancestral land. They also provided free or inexpensive places for Japanese Fulbrighters to stay, such as Nisei run local YMCA’s, and allowed them to use their homes to host the student’s white American sponsors and their families. These activities show that Japanese Americans – mostly Nisei men in this category – walked a fine line between acting as American hosts for Japanese students and acting, unwittingly, as “co-hosts” alongside their Japanese guests for white Americans in the post-internment era. By utilizing the Christian rhetoric of “universal brotherhood,” however, Japanese Americans at this time successfully circumvented this slippage between Japanese and Japanese American; the language of Christianity and friendships based on church membership rather than nationality or ethnic origin provided a freer expression of cultural ties and racial affinities among Japanese Americans in their interactions with Japanese students while still maintaining their integrity as American citizens.

Violence, Anamnesis, and Eucharist

Jong Hwan Park
Graduate Theological Union

The violence has an origin, mimesis in which human being imitate and want to be like God. The more a human has power, the more he/she wants to use his/her power. This was the origin of the first murder and is the origin of current warfare. This is why we are still living in the world full of antagonism and violence. This is why we can easily find political/religious violence – very often the thin line between political and religious is blurred – in many places on this planet. This is why we organize and plan for war, taking war for granted.

In this paper, I have observed, especially, the ambivalence of Eucharistic narrative concerning our violence. This paper focused on the function of Eucharist as a performance and how this aspect of Eucharist is related to current human violence. Eucharist is a ritual performance that remembers the death of Christ. As such it is connected with violence – the violent death of Christ – at its core. Hence we need to revisit this subject of violence and the ambivalence we have about the term. The Eucharist cannot be simply a “pacifier” for the people, putting a gloss over anything that is wrong in society.

Harlem’s Hail of Japan: New Empire and Pan-Asianism

Nami Kim
Harvard Divinity School

With the resurgence of anti-colonial nationalist movements in Asia from the late nineteenth century through early twentieth century, the term Asian, not as a signifier of inferiority or exotic Other, but as an oppositional identity, came into use. It was the context of Japan’s nationalism and colonialism in which the unifying category of Asian began to be used as opposed to another unifying category called the West. Although some anti-colonial nationalists expressed the same and similar thought, the idea of “pan-Asianism” or the “unity of Asia” began to be actualized by Japan as a colonial policy imbued with its imperial ambition in the midst of Western colonial encroachment on various regions of Asia, and was manifested throughout Japan’s colonial expansion until the end of World War II. Later, Japan’s employment of the term Asian as a unifying racial, cultural, and political entity has been used in Bandung Conference that had greatly influenced Christian theological development in Asia and the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theological Association (EATWOT).

This paper aims to rethink cross-racial alliances, learning from a paradoxical history of “African American and Japan alliance” during the first half of the 20th century. By critically examining the use of the unifying term “Asian,” this paper will explore how one form of cross-racial alliance had threatened white supremacy, while overlooking another form of racial hierarchy. This will also shed light on how we should think about cross-racial alliances in this global era.

Re-Writing Empire

Lester Ruiz
New York Theological Seminary

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, an extensive debate has emerged over the prospects and conditions for organizing opposition to the various currents of U .S. policy that advocate imperial rule. These currents share essential ends but differ on the means to achieving and consolidating a system of the U.S. hegemonic primacy. What is notable is the extent to which military power and the role of the state has come to fore, a decade after the state’s eulogy was being heralded worldwide. Prior to 9/11, an emerging focus on globalization as the dominant form of imperial rule (often framed as globalization with adjectives neoliberal, corporate, imperialist). Hardt and Negri’s Empire offered on analysis that was notable for its extensive popular consumption as much as its message of a decentered system of imperial rule. This paper seeks to explore historical practices called ‘empire’ as a personal, political, historical and sacred convergence of (post)modernity, religious fundamentalism and (global) fascism. Reference will be made to various conceptions of U.S. imperial rule – from rising global fascism to various neo-liberal and neoconservative visions for U.S. imperial rule and how contradictions between such visions and approaches offer opportunities and challenges for anti-imperialism organizing efforts in the U.S. and abroad.

Earlier Stabs: Wherefores and Therefores

Roy I Sano
Pacific School of Religion

The paper will rehearse efforts against the neo-colonialism of the “American Empire” during 1970-80s of the Cold War era. The focus will be personal involvements in the human rights struggles in South Korea and the Philippines. I will also summarize discoveries of neglected strands in the biblical and theological witnesses for these efforts which emerged amidst of those activities.

These activities and discoveries provided the bases for additional efforts and further theological work during my Episcopal assignments, 1984-2000, and more recently in teaching and writing against the escalating challenges of Pax Americana in the 21st century. As an illustration, I will explain how the ongoing work runs counter to the Wesleyan and Methodist historical and theological renaissance of the last quarter of the 20th century. I will claim that a good part of the return to the “tradition of the elders” in this theological renaissance, and similar retrenchment in other denominations where Pacific and Asian North Americans Christians hold their membership, are muffling, if not nullifying the word and work of God (Mt 15:6; Mk 7:8). The retrenchment explains the reluctance and resistance to challenging the Pax Americana so widespread among Pacific and Asian North Americans. Finally, I will claim recent recovery of neglected traditions can reformulate theological traditions so that they offer grounds for greater involvement of PANA people which can reshape the thinking and action of their denominations.

Distance and Belonging: Asian American Theology and Empire

Devin Singh
University of Chicago

Interaction with the empire has produced tensions in theologies concerned with social engagement and transformation. Political theologies often either tend toward support and legitimation of structures of domination or lead to a sectarian withdrawal that offers little challenge to the status quo. These extremes are not options for Asian American faith communities. This paper explores the unique social location of Asian Americans within the empire, and examines this sphere as a productive site for Christian theology. The Asian American conflicted existence, that of distance and belonging, offers a new perspective on theological challenges to the powers. Asian American communities continue to be marginalized and seen as the most “other,” while at the same time enjoying levels of access to capital and of social agency at a comparatively higher percentage than other marginal groups. They are at once repulsed and absorbed by the empire. Such a location allows for the creative reformulation of many central Christian symbols, as well as new methods of resisting imperial hegemony. Through an interaction with theological tradition and with resources such as critical theory, this paper explores these potential contributions toward an Asian American political theology.

Filipinos are Nice, but Bolanons are Martyrs: Complicating Assimilation Theories Through an Examination of Religious Practices and Racial Formations

Emily Noelle Ignacio,
Loyola University Chicago

Much has been written about how religious organizations have helped various ethnic communities acclimate to life in the United States. Yet, it is only in recent years that researchers have begun to thoroughly study the impact of racial politics on religious community building experiences. In particular, scholars have yet to systematically show how a congregation actively creates rituals in relation to racial politics, which differentiate themselves from the dominant race and/or culture. In addition, despite the transnational character of many ethnic communities, most scholars of religion have not yet explored how racial politics within the immigrants’ home countries affect the creation of rituals in the host country.

Through interviewing members of the Filipino-Boholano community in the Chicago area and attending many of their "home masses" (i.e, Catholic masses and rituals held at various Filipino-Boholanos' homes), I have begun to investigate how racial politics within the immigrants home countries affect the creation of Filipino and/or Boholono communities in the U.S. In particular, I have seen how members of the Filipino American Catholic community in Chicago simultaneously assert Filipino cultural identity in relation to U.S. racial politics and multiculturalism, as well as, in relation to the racial and multicultural politics in the Philippines. I would like to talk about when these regional differences take precedence over U.S. racial politics and vice versa. In particular, since the current "War on Terrorism" has recently focused on Filipino Muslims in the Southern Philippines with alleged ties to Al-Qaeda, I have been investigating whether if Chicagoan Filipinos will coalesce as Filipino-Americans, Catholic Filipinos, or continue to be largely region-based. So far, I have found that many Boholano Filipinos within the Chicago community switch between being Boholano, Filipino, and American - and that their ideas of Catholicism is central to each identity.

A Half-Way Trip Back Home: Muslim Immigrants Negotiate Assimilation by Imparting Morality Through an Islamic Parochial School

Mahruq Khan
Loyola University Chicago

Drawing on classroom observation and interviews of teachers and administrators, this study examines how students’ religious identities are shaped in an Islamic parochial school by immigrant and American-born Muslim teachers. Both groups of teachers define Islamic morality similarly; they attempt to resist assimilation and instill a religious identity in students through gender segregation, dress codes, development of religious pride, and integration of Islamic concepts into the broader curriculum. However, American-born teachers’ life experiences allow them to convey a more nuanced understanding of American society. They help students negotiate acculturation by personally manifesting the linkage between Muslim and American identities. Isolating students from perceived pitfalls of American adolescence, and shielding them from post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment, are seen as key elements of the school’s mission. While teachers of both groups express concern over the detrimental effects of this isolation, American-born teachers take more initiative to expose their students to the outside world.

Family of Buddhists: Cultivated Identity of Vietnamese-American Buddhist Youth at Trung Tam Phat Giao Vanb-Hanh Temple

Rosa Nguyen
Northwestern University

Trung Tam Phat Giao Van-Hanh is the largest Vietnamese-America Buddhist temple in the New Orleans area. From a cursory observation, the temple seems to be successfully instilling Vietnamese Buddhist traditions in the second generation. Buddhist identity is strengthened by the many and varied institutionalized avenues provided by the temple, such as youth organizations, classes and social activities. Furthermore, as a frequently visited cultural center, the temple is able to provide a strong sense of ethnic/racial identity. However, this does not change the fact that its congregants are both religious as well as racial minorities, a fact that marks them doubly as ‘others’ in American society. This paper discusses how the second generation deals with the conflict between their ‘other’ identities and American social norms, how the immediate environment contributes to this conflict, as well as how this conflict influences their views of the world.

A Place of Refuge and Sustenance: How Faith Institutions Strengthen the Families of Poor Asian Immigrants

Helene Slessarev-Jamir
Wheaton College

The presentation will be a summary of the findings of a report recently published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation on the role faith based institutions play in supporting the resettlement of poor Asian immigrants. The report identifies three groups of poor and disadvantaged Asian immigrants: extended family members who came to the U.S. under the family reunification provisions of the 1965 immigration law, Indochinese refugees, and undocumented immigrants. In contrast to the overall high median incomes found among Asian immigrants, these groups face a precarious future in this country’s hourglass economy where people lacking higher education and English skills are often permanently trapped in low paying occupations.

The reports argues that immigrant faith institutions serve not only as worship centers, but as sources of much needed social and economic support to poorer immigrants. The report identifies the types of services currently being provided by Asian faith institutions. It places them on a continuum from small institutions that primarily provide informal services to those with more formalized services, culminating with those that are independent service providers open to the community as a whole. The report looks at the types of assistance offered, ranging from help in the immediate process of resettlement to programs aimed at encouraging the second generation. It concludes with a set of recommendations for strengthen these critical support structures.