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kumarhk's review
4.0
A classic and important study of the development of Asian American panethnicity from the 1960s through the early 1990s. There is a focus to the development of and tensions in panethnic institutions, which is key to the book's defense of ethnicization as simultaneously a reactive and creative process. However, Espiritu does overemphasize the role of racial lumping in panethnic boundary construction, relegating the role of state categorization to one that is primarily relevant in resource distribution rather than also having symbolic importance. Corollary to this, she importantly fails to address powerful differences in the ethnicization of South Asians and Pacific Islanders from that of East and Southeast Asian communities. More attention to these differential ethnicizations would allow the study of panethnicity to better account for race as nuanced and situational beyond Espiritu's "multitiered" model where racial identity categories remain hierarchical and mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, this was a pathbreaking study for its time and is full of sharp and prescient analyses about the political agency of Asian Americans in their own identity formation, and the potentials and limits of various approaches to panethnic organization.
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