ABSTRACT
The Pacific turn of transnational Asian American Studies entails new directions for the field, its relation to Asian Studies, and other scholarly disciplines, and new understandings of the place of the Asian American in the US and within broader regional and global frameworks. Conceptualizing a polycentric transpacific addresses many past omissions and contradictions but also generates new potential problems. Once one recognizes the Asia/Pacific “region” as a complex, multilateral and polycentric network of interconnections, one must also attend to new issues, such as intra-Asian tensions, the legacies of the specific histories of Asian/Pacific nations and locations, the risks of overlooking peoples at the margins of Asian America, the pitfalls of US-centric or rigid binary thinking, the dangers of positioning Asian Americans as automatically resistant, and the enduring importance of the emphasis on social justice within Asian American studies.
