The period of the 1960’s and 1970’s was a significant time of social and political agitation and change in the United States. Among African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, there was a growing racial-ethnic consciousness and anger concerning the long histories of racism these groups had encountered not only in the United States but also abroad in terms of colonialism and imperialism. The birth of the Civil Rights, Black power, Third World revolutionary and nationalist movements as well as the anti-Vietnam War, Free Speech, and the women’s movements were part of this social and political turmoil. In recognizing the power of the dominant culture’s influence in the shaping of their personal and collective identity, many racial-ethnic groups began to articulate the need to construct self-defined identities.
In this milieu, Asians in the United States sought to construct and define an “Asian American” racial-ethnic, cultural, and political identity for their ethnic communities, which had been long silenced, marginalized, or appropriated within mainstream American institutions and narratives. Working in alliance with community and political activists, Asian American cultural activists challenged the cultural, ideological, and psychosocial elements that were damaging to their communities from within and without.
In fashioning a new oppositional Asian American identity, cultural nationalists deconstructed the...
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