From Class Formation to Racial Formation: Marxism and the Development of Asian American Studies

This paper reconstructs 1970s and 1980s debates over the relationship between race and class among Asian American Studies scholars, focusing on the work of sociologists Lucie Cheng and Michael Omi. A Marxist and the director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center for many years, Cheng co-edited, with Edna Bonacich, what was then the most ambitious attempt to interpret Asian American historical experiences: Labor Immigration Under Capitalism (1984). In the anthology, Cheng proposed that class politics shaped the forms of ethnic identity politics within both anticolonial movements and racial justice struggles. At the same time, Michael Omi was developing, with Howard Winant, a theory of racial formation that argued for an understanding of racial politics that was relatively autonomous from class. Placing Omi and Winant’s intellectual work within the context of the Socialist Review editorial collective, of which both were members, and the collective’s response to Ronald Reagan’s election, I explain how racial formation theory became the more influential paradigm for understanding race within Asian American Studies and ethnic studies more generally. In particular, I challenge accounts of the rise of liberal multiculturalism that sees the shift away from Marxist accounts of racial inequality as a means of distracting from increasing economic inequality. Omi envisaged that racial identity politics would play a role in advancing a politics of economic redistribution, and even anti-capitalism. However, racial formation theory’s insistence on the autonomy of racial politics from class politics also sidelined frameworks that emphasized intra-racial class polarization as a determinant of group interest.