Asian American Philosophy and Feminism

This chapter explores the intersection of Asian American philosophy and feminist philosophy. It considers feminist issues within Asian American philosophy and examines Asian American feminist philosophy as an important field in its own right that contributes to Asian American philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of reasons for including Asian American feminist philosophy in the profession and then elaborates a model for thinking about Asian America and Asian American philosophy, with particular consideration of xenophobic racism and Orientalist hypersexualization. The chapter then examines how Asian American feminist philosophy enriches our historical and social ontological understanding of American nation-building, reconceives important normative themes in philosophy of race, deepens our understanding of invisibility, and complicates our thinking about non-Eurocentric or decolonial feminist dialogue.

Introduction: Thinking Comparison with the Politics of Storytelling

This article highlights the overall aims of the special issue, which reconceptualizes island worlds as situated historical places, that is, islands and their networks as spaces that come to life through the multiple and contested meanings constantly attached to them, formed in the milieu of overlapping and competing European, US, and Southeast Asian empires and diasporas. By investigating the forms and politics of storytelling in the island South and Southeast Asia, along with parallel and intersecting formations in the Caribbean and diasporic Asian America, this article underlines the two scholarly interventions of the special issue in the study of world making: (1) it refashions the notion of comparison to move away from the project of “knowing”—habitually constituted through a top-down gaze aimed at assessment and measuring, which consequently leads to the formation of hierarchies, categories of containment, and reductionism—and to unearth forms of comparison emerging from local environments and local knowledge; and (2) in thinking of storytelling events or inscriptions as situated testimonies (i.e., identifying the politics of location of a telling), it centers affect and emotion as the means for unraveling and connecting different, contesting registers of experience.