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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Chang, Michael. "Racial Politics in an Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 'Asian Donorgate' Controversy in Perspective," University of California, Los Angeles, December 2001.
In my dissertation I examine the role of discourses and political practices involving race, nation and citizenship in the 1996 “Asian Donorgate” campaign finance “scandal” within the larger contexts of transnational capital, globalization and racial formation. The role of various prominent Asian Americans (mostly naturalized citizens), indicted and convicted for breaking federal campaign finance laws in the 1996 Clinton Presidential campaign, has been seized upon and made central in the public debate on campaign finance reform. In this particular public discourse Chinese Americans, and by proxy all Asian Americans, were depicted as foreigners attempting to buy influence with U.S. politicians on behalf of foreign governments, specifically the Chinese government. This “shifting discourse” around the “Asian Donorgate scandal” can be understood in the context of larger social and political contexts involving globalization and domestic reaction to its consequences. In particular, there has been a discussion in this discourse, around the “loyalty” of Asian Americans. The emphasis in the media and by various politicians on this factor does not address the complexity of “citizenship” and “belonging” today. Most of the Chinese Americans who have been indicted on charges of campaign finance abuses are first generation and continue to have close ties with their birth countries even as they involve themselves with “Asian American” politics and communities. In fact, some have professed that in accepting illegal or dubious funds for the Democratic National Committee, they were attempting to “empower” the Asian American community, not overseas governments or transnational corporations. This type of complexity in identity is hallmark of the pattern and volume of migrations that have come in an age of globalization. It has brought about heated debate in the Chinese American and Asian American community over what and whom indicted people such as Johnny Chung and Charlie Yah Lin Trie represent. Do they represent grassroots, localized Asian American communities and movements; mainstream Asian American political interest; or the commodification of the American political process via transnational capital? A central concern in this dissertation is what “opposition” and “community” mean in a globalized world.
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