The Controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging CANDACE FUJIKANE wh varying historical, economic, and political pressures and locations, it is important to recognize that local Japanese and local Filipinos are racialized as distinct groups in Hawai'i.Although local Japanese have negotiated a past history of anti-Japanese racism (Okihiro 1991), they now dominate state institutions and apparatuses like the State Legislature and the Department of Education, and they author state and federal legislation and other forms of public policy. By contrast, while local Filipinos do participate in the State Legislature and in other state and administrative offices, Filipinos as a group continue to be subjected to racial discrimination and racial profiling in Hawai'i (Chang 1996). In a study of educational, economic, and occupational status from the 1990 Census data for Hawai'i, University of Hawai'i Ethnic Studies professor Jonathan Okamura concludes that "an overall ranking of groups in the ethnic/racial stratification order would have Caucasians, Chinese, and Japanese holding dominant positions," while "the lower levels of the ethnic/racial stratification order continue to be occupied by Filipinos, Hawaiians, and Samoans" (1998a:200-201).The erasure of systemic local Japanese racism in the Blu's Hanging controversy was performed through a language of rights and freedoms that attempted to foreclose a discussion of racism. Such arguments protecting "artistic freedom" assert that fiction is free from and unfettered by any connections to the material conditions of our lives, thereby rendering the realm of fiction exempt from any charges of racism. It is precisely, however, Blu's Hanging's status as fiction that allows it to perform the work of ideology. As Asian American writers and critics have shown, fictional representations of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and Madama Butterfly/Miss Saigon do have discriminatory effects on Asian Americans. In their critiques of the ideological and discursive nature of fiction, these writers and critics illustrate that fictional representations circulate through and beyond any attempts to cordon literature off from our everyday lives.'primarily an issue about how to protect settlers against each other and against
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