Loyalty to Empire

Loyalty to Empire Moon-Ho Jung (bio) In May 2003, shortly after George W. Bush launched the US invasion of Iraq, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn held a public conversation at the Riverside Church in Harlem, the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s remarkable speech against the Vietnam War back in April 1967. Zinn seemed to assume that he and Roy shared similar worldviews, on the left and critical of America's latest war. At one point, Zinn attempted to defend US nationalism by pointing out its different iterations. "And when people–and I have been accused of being anti-American, and I respond to that, you know, by saying, 'You know, we must disagree about what America is,'" Zinn said, to much applause. "America is not Bush. . . . America is not the government." After commenting on the Declaration of Independence and "the basic principles of democracy," he inferred a political and intellectual camaraderie. "So, I know–I know, Arundhati," Zinn declared, "that you are pro-Indian in the best sense, and you are pro-American in the best sense. Yes."1 Roy let out a kind laugh, but she refused to play along. "Well, I try not to think in these categories, actually, you know?" she replied. "I'm actually not a nationalist of any kind. You know, I believe that we–I think it's very important to stop . . . our minds coming up short against these artificial boundaries. And I think nationalism really does lie at the root of a lot of the troubles of this century and the last one. And . . . we really need to question that, because . . ." Zinn interjected at that point to suggest and insist that they shared a critique of US wars. If afforded a chance to elaborate, Roy might have said what she said in a speech the next night. "Speaking for myself, I'm no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state," she said. "So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire?"2 The brief exchange might have appeared jovial and inconsequential, but the difference between Zinn and Roy represented a huge gulf in how we might [End Page 1] approach the United States and US history. Zinn hoped to direct America toward its progressive traditions and inclusive ends; Roy saw no hope in America because it was an empire terrorizing the world. For Zinn, the American nation, beginning with the Declaration of Independence, held a universal promise that wayward leaders like Bush endangered. It may be tempting to believe in Zinn's vision of a better America, to imagine working toward a more perfect union and a more inclusive past, but it is based on a fatally flawed premise: that it is possible to disaggregate the American nation from the US empire. That nationalist impulse has made it perhaps easier to insert Asian American history into dominant narratives of US history, but it has rested on erasing and thereby fortifying the colonial roots of US nationalism. In the process, our field has largely reproduced nationalist histories, hoping against hope that such accounts will make Asians finally into full-fledged Americans. SEARCHING FOR A TEXTBOOK When I prepare for a course, I think long and hard about which books to assign because I know that choosing the right books can transform how students see and engage the world. For me, reading Vincent Harding's There Is a River (1981) as a fledgling undergraduate decades ago awakened me to new possibilities. Harding, who had drafted King's antiwar speech, made studying the past exciting and relevant and motivated me to approach US history critically. He laid out the intellectual and political stakes of Black history, in a kind of urgent prose that I had not encountered in a history course.3 Reading Ronald Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore (1989) in my very first Asian American Studies course, taught by Gary Y. Okihiro in the fall of 1990, likewise left a deep impression. For the very first time in an academic setting, I read about people whose backgrounds resonated with...