Part Three: “Solidarity/Disavowal,” looks at how Asian Americans developed a distinct political subjectivity during the Asian American movement, against the backdrop of emergent Black Power and the nation’s imminent turn toward mass incarceration. Asian American activists and thinkers denounced white supremacy and expressed solidarity with Black people under the Third World rubric, but they did not theorize structural anti-Blackness or recognize their own not-Blackness. Reproducing the fallacy of minority equivalence, their half-finished critique has hampered Asian Americans’ ability to understand and respond to numerous Asian–Black conflicts that have unfolded in the post-movement era—including the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, the controversy around NYPD Officer Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley in New York City in 2014, and protracted tensions over race-conscious admissions in secondary and higher education, culminating in the anti-affirmative action lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard. With the dramatic rise of a right-wing Chinese immigrant politics that seeks to dismantle affirmative action once and for all, the ethical–political crisis that has always faced Asian Americans—namely, what they should do about being participant–beneficiaries in an anti-Black order—has become more urgent than ever.

Chapter 5 discusses the rise of US survivors’ cross-national memory, identity, and activism in the 1970s. Working with younger non-survivors, older survivors, women in particular, broke silence and helped create a collective identity. This identity-making began as a handful of US survivors gathered in 1965 to share their bomb memories. Several years later, they worked with major Asian American organizations including the Japanese American Citizens Leagues, politicians of color such as Thomas Noguchi, Mervyn Dymally, and Edward Roybal, and antinuclear activists such as Yuji Ichioka and Karl G. Yoneda. This expansion of activism was possible because of US survivors’ memory-sharing. Female survivors, by serving as public faces of US survivors, challenged gender boundaries; male survivors, who formerly told stories of their bravery, began to tell how powerless they had felt on the ground. These developments were broadly relevant to Asian America of the era, which witnessed the rising critique of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, the Vietnam War that Asian Americans deemed America’s aggression against Asia, and an imminent use of nuclear weaponry in the Pacific region.

The Vietnam War and the anti-war movement are oftentimes discussed as foundational in the formation of Asian American political consciousness and representation during the late 1960s and 1970s. However, Asian American literature of that time offers very little engagement with the war or the anti-war movement. This chapter offers an overview of representations of the Vietnam War in Asian American literature and examines the possible reasons for the sparse representations of the war. In doing so, this chapter turns to an archive of ephemera: radical Asian American periodicals that represented the Asian American movement, and the first Asian American readers and anthologies, Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971) and Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (1976).