Here. Again. Anti-Asian violence in the city

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the course of 2020 and 2021, several Asian-owned businesses were vandalized and individuals of Asian descent were attacked in Tacoma, Washington, part of the alarming increase in anti-Asian violence in the past several years. The incidents occurred in parts of the settler colonial city, which sits on the ancestral territory of the Puyallup nation, that are embedded with histories of privilege, dispossession, and anti-Asian violence. Many of the targeted businesses are just blocks away from where riotous White mobs with torches drove away Chinese residents in 1885, an episode known as the ‘Tacoma Method.' These very same streets were later locations on which Japanese immigrants had businesses and homes prior to being driven out and incarcerated during WWII. This paper excavates the reappearance of racialized violence in the same city spaces through the work of Allan Pred as well as scholars who consider the complexity of belonging in the settler colonial city. This excavation aims to make visible that which is unsaid and silenced in our urban landscapes so that we may counter the reproduction of expulsion/alien status and material violence in the settler colonial city.