politics and global exchange of goods and cul-
tures. Despite the unease expressed by Wong and
others, more and more critics began to analyze
Asian-American literature not just from an Amer-
ican domestic perspective but from a diasporic
one as well.
The Asian-American movement was soon
joined by Pacific Islanders and Pacific Ameri-
cans. To reflect this geographical expansion,
some Asian-American organizations and projects
changed their names to “Asian Pacific American.”
This coalition, nonetheless, has been tenuous for
a few reasons. First, Native Hawaiian political and
community leaders were often less than enthralled
with the alliance because they had a different
political agenda. Unlike Asian-Americans, they
wanted to have themselves recognized as an indig-
enous people, like Native Americans or Alaska
Natives. They were also concerned with a different
set of issues, such as the environment and coloni-
zation by the United States. Furthermore, Pacific
and Hawaiian issues have rarely been addressed by
Asian-American organizations, prompting critics
like Jonathan Y. Okamura to abandon the use of
the term “Asian Pacific American.” According to
Okamura, “its deployment is a discursive practice
that constitutes a form of Asian American domi-
nation of Pacific Islanders” (187).
Despite these objections, the commonalities
between the two communities have helped to
maintain the coalition. Besides the geographi-
cal overlap and proximity between Asia and the
Pacific Islands, many Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
and Filipino Americans have their American roots
in the sugar plantations of Hawaii, which became
in 1959 the 50th state of the United States. More-
over, a number of canonical Asian-American
authors, such as Cathy Song and Garrett Hongo,
are natives of Hawaii. The increasing geopoliti-
cal and economic significance of the Pacific Rim
will only strengthen the coalition between Asian
America and the Pacific Islands.
Once Asian-American studies successfully
began to establish itself as a vibrant field of inquiry,
resulting in the founding of Asian-American stud-
ies programs or departments in several universities,
other Asian ethnic groups began to join the field.
In just a few decades, the number of ethnic groups
housed in Asian-American studies grew from just
a few to more than 50. Southeast Asian– and South
Asian–American voices became a particularly rec-
ognizable presence. Vietnamese-American authors
such as Le Ly Hayslip and Jade Ngọc Quang Huy`nh,
Filipino-American writers such as Cecilia Brainard
and Jessica Hagedorn, and Indian writers such as
Bharati Mukherjee and Meena Alexander, among
many others, helped expand the Asian-American
literary canon. South Asian diasporic literature,
which was and remains at the center of postcolonial
studies, joined Asian-American studies to focus on
examining the American experience of the South
Asian diaspora and on carving out its own niche
within the field.
These two major developments in the field—
the blurring of boundaries between Asia and
Asian America and the increasing participation
of Southeast and South Asian immigrants—
resulted in cross-pollination between the fields
of Asian-American studies and postcolonial
studies. The commonalities between the two
have allowed scholars to borrow ideas from one
another as they grappled with questions about
race, gender, identity, and representation. As if
to demonstrate the cross-fertilization of the two
fields, what used to be key terms in postcolonial
studies—diaspora, fragmentation, subjectivity,
hybridity, and multiplicity—are now common-
ly used in Asian-American studies as well. As
Moustafa Bayoumi says, South and Southeast
Asian-Americans have changed the “landscape
of study for the discipline” of Asian–American
studies (“Staying Put” 226).
In 2003 Bayoumi predicted that “it may only be
a matter of time for West Asians (Arabs, Iranians,
Afghans, etc.) to carve a place there” (“Staying
Put” 226). Arabs are still legally defined as “white”
in the United States, and West Asians have yet to
wrestle with the question of a coherent group
identity, if there is to be one. However, the impetus
to join Asian-American studies is certainly there.
As Bayoumi insists,Arab Americans and Asian-American studies
have much to learn from each other, and thisviii Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature