Abstract
US imperialism and state-sanctioned racism must be systematically and rigorously understood in the analysis of Vietnamese American gang formation and how young Southeast Asian youth negotiate, maneuver, and make sense of the world around them—a world that has made them objects of history and, upon their arrival on US soil, restricts and constricts them legally, punitively, and psychologically. In his statement on the violence of the oppressed, Sartre contends:
They are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of their humanity.1
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Notes
Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 18.
Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1979).
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (London: Routledge, 1975).
James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988).
Wendy Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California. (Minneapolis: Minnesota of University Press, 2013).
Timothy Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994);
Leland Saito, Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998); and Cheng, Changs Next Door to the Diazes.
Tony Wong, Alpine Recreation Center (Los Angeles: City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, 2011);
Bangele Alsaybar, “Deconstructing Deviance: Filipino American Youth Gangs, ‘Party Culture,’ and Ethnic Identity in Los Angeles,” Amerasia Journal 25, no. 1 (1999): 116–138.
Roy Nakano, “Them Bad Cats: Images and Asian American Street Gangs,” Gidra 5, January 1973; Jeff Furumoto, Tom Okabe, and Roy Nakano, “Them Bad Cats: Part II,” Gidra 5, June 1973; Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
T. J. English, Born to Kill: America’s Most Notorious Vietnamese Gang, and the Changing Face of Organized Crime (New York: William Morrow, 1995).
Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres, After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism. (New York: New York University Press, 2004);
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999).
Paul Ong and Suzanne J. Lee, “The Growth of the Asian Pacific American Population: Twenty Million in 2020,” in The State of Asian Pacific America: A Public Policy Report: Policy Issues to the Year 2020 (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993), 11–23.
Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 72.
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© 2015 Kevin D. Lam
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Lam, K.D. (2015). “Theater of the Oppressed”: Vietnamese and Asian American Youth Violence. In: Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling. Palgrave Macmillan’s Postcolonial Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475596_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475596_4
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