Editorial Note: This interview feature was curated as part of Sociological Inquiry’s “Meet the Authors” campaign with a goal of celebrating and publicizing the scholarship of Sociological Inquiry (SI) authors. This feature was made possible through a collaboration between AKD’s Media Editor, Dr. Stephanie Wilson, and the following SI author:
- Michael Nishimura, PhD Candidate, UC Santa Barbara
Thank you to Michael Nishimura for his participation in this campaign!
Lifetimes of Punishment: The Imperial Feedback Loop of Anti-Asian Violence
What is anti-Asian violence? Michael Nishimura’s article from Sociological Inquiry’s latest Special Issue on Transculturality of Anti-Asian Racism tackled this question to better understand how state-perpetuated anti-Asian violence unfolds within the context of broader U.S. imperialism. In the article, Nishimura analyzes life history interviews from two criminalized Cambodian American organizers to trace their pathways on the migration-to-school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline, and in doing so theorized the concept “imperial feedback loop.” The term “imperial feedback” was first used by Julian Go “to describe how modern U.S. policing was born out of imported techniques learned from the Philippine-American War.” By introducing the feedback loop, Nishimura “emphasizes the recurrence of imperial interventions,” such as the “after effects of the U.S. destabilization of Cambodia during the Cold War.”
Continue reading for more exclusive insights from this analysis!
Meet the Author
The following is an exclusive interview with the article author and PhD Candidate, Michael Nishimura. Below, Nishimura shares behind-the-scenes insights into his article “Lifetimes of Punishment: The Imperial Feedback Loop of Anti-Asian Violence.“
Can you briefly describe your most recent publication in Sociological Inquiry, including its purpose and a summary of major insights or findings?
My recent article follows the pathways of Cambodian American refugees along the migration-to-school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. Extending Julian Go’s concept of “imperial feedback,” it theorizes an “imperial feedback loop” that emphasizes the human cost of multiple forced migrations and displacement for criminalized refugee communities. I find that how my interlocutors understand their criminalization from youth, their deportability as criminalized non-U.S. citizens, and the cyclical nature of intergenerational trauma sheds light on how circuits of war-making and imperialism are continuous through overlapping regimes of punishment.
How were you introduced to the topic of the publication discussed above and what motivated you to study the topic as a social scientist?
Beyond being a researcher, I am an organizer and part of communities that are subject to and fight against state violence. So I come to this line of study from a place of struggling to abolish prisons, policing, and the global migration punishment system. For me, the way to think about this was to talk to my comrades about their experiences in order to inform the depths of the depravity of the violence that they experience as well as how to struggle against systems of domination. So in order to contextualize and draw out the meaning of these experiences, I connect interviews with previous scholarship (from both the social sciences and humanities) on criminalization, racialization, and imperialism, hopefully making clear the linkages between individual experience and global systems of punishment.
How does your publication challenge social scientists to look anew at traditional areas or identify novel areas for investigation?
There has been an extremely rich engagement with Du Boisian thought in recent sociological scholarship by scholars like Karida L. Brown and José Itzigsohn, Ali Meghji, Matthew Clair, and Aldon Morris, to name a few. Because Du Bois was such a prolific thinker and actively involved in anti-imperialist praxis, there are many lines of inquiry that his work provides for contemporary scholars. For my study, I extend a particular nexus that Du Boisian scholarship offers between imperialism, racialization, and criminalization that helped bridge the many concepts that arose from my interviews.
How does your publication challenge members of society more broadly to deepen their understanding of the topic of your paper?
There is very little scholarship on how Asian Americans experience criminalization and deportation—many people do not think of Asian Americans as criminalized or deportable. But there is an additional crucial aspect here of who we think about when we consider the term “Asian American.” In this case, South East Asian Americans are particularly vulnerable to cyclical state violence of policing, incarceration, and deportation due to the structural conditions of their original displacement due to U.S. military intervention and their eventual “resettlement”. So it remains important to not only challenge model minority subjectivity but to understand the different modalities of power and technologies of punishment through which people are dominated, particularly for Asian Americans who do not necessarily fit that subjectivity.
If you had to choose one major takeaway from your paper to share, what would it be?
The major takeaway from this work is that the immense stakes and costs of recurring forms of imperialism are found in both the overarching histories of war-making and capitalist accumulation but also in the everyday stories of people who are rendered multiply displaced, dispossessed, and expelled. But, while communities are being ravaged by this exploitation and everyday forms of deprivation, they are also constantly struggling against them towards a disruption of imperial violence. We are then called to join this fight by following the lead of directly-impacted peoples in our struggle towards collective liberation.
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