How does space constrict, refuse, conform to, allow, or create opportunities for different kinds of racial reconfigurements? It sounds trite to say that race and geography have long been intertwined, but it is worthwhile repeating. Just as spatial distinctions like ‘West’ and ‘East’ are racialized in their conception and application, so racial categories have been variously spatialized since their inception into continental divides and national localities. In other words, geography has acted as a complicit agent in racial discourses.

[When it comes to experiences that cross racial lines, we need to] pay particular attention to the personal and political geographies that multiracial people create in relation to others’ perceptions about their racialized bodies. We need to look at the cartographies of multiraciality—not at the objectifying “What are you?” question, but at the “Where are you from?” question, which invites us to go beyond the superficial by paying attention to those complex diasporic life histories that inform the process of identifying across race.

Minelle Mahtani, Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality (Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2014)

Racializing Space, Spatializing Race

As Mahtani reminds us above, both historians and geographers working in the fields of culture and society have long observed that space and race are mutually constituted in the modern era. The invention of race to delimit bodies that were believed to correspond with spaces on a global map went hand-in-hand with the naturalization of racial social structures as objective physical formations. While the world may seem more connected today then at the time these concepts were proposed, its division into raced groups of people and bounded territories of space remains very much with us. Moreover, the association between race and space persists in spite of the prolific movements of people far beyond the borders of their so-called “natural” homes and the production of bodies that confound homogenized racial categories.

Beyond Asia, Almost Asian

For those who associate or are associated with Asian identity, the bond between race and space is all too familiar. As Ken Tanaka’s skit “Where are you From?” wryly observes, Asians outside Asia are racialized as perpetual foreigners—unassimilable others forever bound to a limited, static, and foreclosed conception of their natural space. The binding of Asianness to Asia as a region, however, is belied by the diversity of Asia as a socio-cultural space, the historic mobility of Asian-identified peoples beyond Asia, and the mixed-, trans-, and multi-racial Asian experiences that proliferate in excess of a singular “Asian” identity. What does “Asianness” mean in a diaspora untethered from place and bodies that confound conventional categories of race? How can we map “Almost Asian” experiences and, in so doing, challenge the racialization of space and spatialization of race?

Mapping Asian-Adjacence

Students enrolled in HI349 “Almost Asian: Race Mixing and Trans-Racialism Across Asian Diasporas” produced individual, original digital humanities project that map individuals and/or communities that have historically complicated, expanded, and enriched our understanding of who is Asian. For this project, they identified research subjects, researched relevant historical background and collected critical data, composed original text and storyboarded these with locations, images, and media to create a final Story Map hosted on this “Almost Asian” ArcGIS website. Each project can be accessed by toggling through the composite map above, which visualizes the global scope of interconnections of Asian adjacence. Together, their contributions build toward on ongoing, archived, digital repository that offers a rich resource to students and researchers while also posing an epistemological challenge to the racialization of Asia as a space, the spatialization of Asians as a race, and the homogenization of Asianness as an individual and collective form of identification.