Abstract
Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt by Rebecca Jo Kinney presents an interdisciplinary study of Cleveland’s Asian American communities from the late 19th century to the present. Employing newspapers, government documents, oral histories, and personal reflection, Kinney convincingly demonstrates how the study of Asian American Cleveland reveals “the interconnectivity between local understandings of race, place, and belonging, in relationship to larger national narratives” (p. 2). Across five chapters, she maneuvers arguments regarding the resettlement of Japanese Americans during World War II, city planning politics and the dismissal of Asian Clevelanders in representative committees, and the transformations of Asian American settlements from survival to celebration, to ultimately elucidate how Cleveland, as part of the Midwest, has its own specific contexts for understanding race, place, and belonging in Asian America.
In this way, Kinney’s work contributes to what she refers to as “the Midwest turn” in Asian American studies. Rather than emphasizing how coastal events inform the Midwest, this regional racial formation is not limited by smaller populations or a lack of a traditional ethnic enclave. Placing Asian migration narratives in the history of Cleveland’s development throughout the 20th century, as in Chapter 1, Kinney rightfully confronts the uncritical emphasis on growth and decline narratives in urban upper Midwestern cities. Notably, she points out how, for Asian and Asian American communities, the population demographics and community development patterns often run opposite to the economic development of Cleveland. For example, while the general Cleveland population as a whole declined 24% between 1970 and 1980, the Asian population of Cleveland increased 82.7% during the same period (p. 14). Although the Asian community amounted to less than 4,000 of roughly 574,000 total residents in 1980, this significant growth illustrates the need for scholarly interrogations that encompass the diversity of experiences within urban communities.
To attend to these needs, Kinney calls on scholars of urban planning and development to consider placekeeping over placemaking. Unlike placemaking, which emphasizes creating or defining a place, placekeeping focuses on acknowledging a place as it is and seeing what already exists (e.g., neighborhoods, memories, thriving communities). Placekeeping, in other words, attends to the neoliberal multiculturalism that binds racism to narratives of demolition, division, destruction, and rebirth in urban cities. Kinney makes clear, however, that this process is not without tensions. In a loose chronological structure, the four chapters that follow examine these efforts and their accompanying challenges to present the process of placekeeping and how “community members define, engage, shape, and keep Asian American place” in Cleveland (p. 17).
Chapter 2, “Wartime Resettlement to the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’: Japanese American Neighbors and the Cleveland Color Line,” analyzes how wartime production and labor demands in the industrial Midwest spurred the movement of over 3,000 Japanese Americans to Cleveland between 1942 and 1946. Labeled as “enemy aliens” by the government and forcibly incarcerated, Japanese American re-settlers challenged the city’s existing housing and economic infrastructures. Here, Kinney traces the regional racial formation that emphasized racial divides between urban White and Black residents in these wartime industries. In some cases, Kinney notes, Japanese Americans were able to “break into spaces that had previously been ‘whites only,’” which reveals how they “experienced less discrimination in employment in comparison to the West Coast climate and also in regard to their Black peers in the Midwest” (p. 35, p. 30). Kinney argues this highlights the spatial rendering of the model minority myth as it pertains to the Asian “ethnic enclave” and the Black “ghetto.”
While many Japanese Americans returned to their homes after the close of World War II, the Chinese and Chinese American community established what Clevelanders now recognize as AsiaTown. Chapter 3, “The Provision of Life: Restaurants, Grocery Stores, and the Anchors of Community Development,” traces Chinese American entrepreneurs and small business owners from the 19th century to the present. What once were isolated industries meant to serve Asian businesses and the Asian community became part of Cleveland’s diversity marketing and branding by the 21st century (p. 53). Food, she argues, is the industry that best demonstrates this transformation. Featuring oral histories and interviews with community business owners, Kinney illustrates in this chapter how restaurants and grocery stores serve as spatial and community anchors, linking the historical and contemporary formation of the Asian American community of Cleveland.
Despite the vibrant and persistent community, AsiaTown’s formation remained effectively invisible to Cleveland’s leaders, community development corporation (CDC) leaders, city planners, and real estate developers. To combat this, the AsianTown Advisory Committee (ATAC), which consisted of community stakeholders (e.g., business owners, nonprofit leaders, community volunteers, and residents), was organized in 2017 to demand formal representation. Kinney traces these actions in Chapter 4, “The Politics of Visibility: AsiaTown Advisory Committee as Organizing Hub,” through interviews with ATAC organizers and through her own attendance at community meetings. This chapter, which presents a traditional urban studies analysis, charts how AsiaTown came to be as a neighborhood, in terms of name and brand. Here, Kinney interrogates the challenges of flattening ethnic identities and histories into a broad concept of “Asian” and the necessities of such panethnic collaboration for better representation in city planning and politics.
The final chapter, Chapter 5 “The Cleveland Asian Festival as Scenario: Performing and Unsettling Racial Scripts,” arguably is most convincing in presenting these contradictions. Kinney weaves her personal investments in the community and involvement with the Cleveland AsiaTown Festival (CAF) to exhibithow “the festival as both location and performance of Asian American place” helps “understand how the pervasive racial scripts–Asians as model citizens and cultural other–continue to circulate, even as the festival works to unsettle anti-Asian discrimination in its mission for education” (p. 100-101). The CAF, which began in 2010, combats the invisibility (detailed in Chapter 4) through the education and promotion of Asian culture and tradition, while strengthening the identity of AsiaTown and supporting its economic growth (p. 105). Hundreds of vendors and community members gather during a weekend in May to sell food, perform music, and share their histories through tables, stalls, and tours. Kinney explains how the performance of multicultural and economic contributions represents a double bind of visibility; it suggests that the Asian American community must be “good” – good citizens, good laborers, good neighbors with good food – to belong.
Each chapter of Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland presents the inherent tensions felt in the economic desire to expand business and clientele, city infrastructures, and community placekeeping. What are the prices of this economic development and political visibility? Kinney states the answer is complex, but even in the contradictions–the redevelopment, festivals, and branding–are “themselves acts of placekeeping” (p. 126). Kinney calls scholars interested in Asian American Midwests, urban studies, and economic development to not focus on creating something new, but rather on keeping and growing what is already there. After all, she concludes, the future of Cleveland is still “being built each day by residents, neighbors, city planners, and community volunteers” (p. 125).
