“What an India He’d Found!”: An Ethics of Betrayal in Afro-Asian Studies

As tensions rise to a climax in Ralph Ellison’s monumental 1952 novel The Invisible Man, characters rapidly begin to reproach one another as traitors: Ras the Exhorter accuses Tod Clifton for joining the communist Brotherhood; the narrator feels betrayed when he comes upon Clifton performing on the street with a Sambo doll; the narrator wonders – after Clifton is shot and killed by a police officer – whether Clifton believed him to be the sellout; the Brotherhood deems Clifton a traitor for abandoning the movement; the narrator informs the Brotherhood that the people of Harlem feel betrayed by the organization’s abandonment of them; and the Brotherhood suspects the narrator to be an opportunist when he organizes Clifton’s funeral on his own “personal responsibility.” In defending Clifton to Brother Jack and his organization, the narrator angrily asks: “What is a traitor, Brother? … He was a man and a Negro; a man and brother; a man and a traitor, as you say; then he was a dead man, and alive or dead he was jam-full of contradictions.” ¹

Here, as Ellison poses the politics of betrayal as a central thematic concern, his narrator takes stock of his own invisibility to the Brotherhood – the way in which the members “not-see” him (famously symbolized by the glass eye that Jack dislodges from his face) – and becomes fascinated with the mysterious con man Rinehart’s “multiple personalities” and the “freedom” that such multiplicity affords (499). In the midst of these complications and contradictions, the narrator offers a brief, seemingly anomalous interlude: “I recalled a report of a shoeshine who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing … Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn’t see us. It was a hell of a state of affairs, we were nowhere … Getting up to go, I looked at the wall map and laughed at Columbus. What an India he’d found!” (477, 499–500). ²

In this moment, “playing Indian” provides an emblem of making “yourself anew”: “The notion was frightening, for now the world seemed to flow before my eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility” (499). ³ If Rinehart represents, as Anne Cheng describes it, a “parable for plurality,” then the elusive shoeshine momentarily signifies a racially specific transformation amongst the array of possible identifications to be made. ⁴ While the “changeability” that Rinehart embodies is distinctly limited by segregation – he is “never mistaken for a white man” – the shoeshine unexpectedly eludes the color line by conjuring a South Asian presence that permits him not only to disappear under the cloak of exotic otherness, but also to enjoy the hospitalities afforded visiting foreign dignitaries. ⁵ The shoeshine’s gambit depends on the construction of the South Asian as, in Mae Ngai’s terms, an “impossible subject” in the United States, barred from immigration beginning with the institution of the Asiatic Barred Zone by Congress in 1917 and designated ineligible for naturalized citizenship by the 1923 Supreme Court decision in United States v Bhagat Singh Thind. ⁶ The long racializing effect of such immigration and case law was to render any South Asian presence in the United States seemingly transitory, temporary, and, as such, possibly even deserving of a diplomatic welcome (although this last was certainly never guaranteed).

For the narrator, the anecdote reveals that “necessity” might simultaneously offer up “possibility,” in this case bypassing the domestic construction of race as a binary between propertied whiteness and dispossessed blackness as the South Asian’s impossible subjecthood yields for the African American an altogether different kind of social existence, one crafted on his own, inventive terms. ⁷ As the shoeshine slips away, he prefigures the narrator’s own disappearance at the end of the novel into the underworld, a conclusion that has so often been dismissed as Ellison’s disavowal of politics. Ross Posnock more recently urges readers to consider the narrator’s removal as a “hibernation,” that is, in the narrator’s words, “a covert preparation for a more overt action” (13). ⁸ Reading this alternate political temporality of suspended, expectant waiting back into the novel’s allusion to “India,” we might discern its looking forward to a possibility of transracial and transnational alliance between people of color that exceeds and rearticulates the options that the plot allegorizes: the entrenched white supremacy in which the narrator as a young man is raised and educated, Bledsoe’s realist power politics, Ras’s militant nationalism, and the Brotherhood’s deracinated Marxism.

On the one hand, Columbus’s “India” serves as a metonym for how (as Lisa Lowe demonstrates in The Intimacies of Four Continents) settler colonialism, chattel slavery, imperial expansion, and racial capital together constitute the disavowed but fundamental conditions of possibility for the liberal nation-state. Yet the narrator’s recognition of possibility also indicates that racialized peoples need not only be subject to Columbus’s historic “con,” but also constitute subjects of it, forging ways of life that go misrecognized and unseen by social convention and the law. As the editors of this journal’s special issue explain in the introduction, the critical impulse to recover such an alternative politics has remarkably animated recent comparative American and U.S. race and ethnic studies. By way of comparative and transnational perspectives and methods, scholars have set out to recover histories of transracial inspiration and influence, collaboration, and exchange between peoples of color in the United States and elsewhere. ⁹ Nevertheless, Ellison’s situating of the shoeshine’s story in the midst of a tangle of betrayals incites a host of questions for which positivist or vanguardist approaches prove less helpful for clarifying the political stakes, methodological priorities, and “stranger intimacies” that the Afro-Asian encounter might entail. ¹⁰

In this essay, then, I consider an ethico-politics of betrayal at the heart of such comparative projects in American studies. To do so, I consider documentary films by and about Asian Americans from the turn of the twenty-first century, the 1993 film Sa-I-Gu about the Los Angeles unrest of 1992, and the 2008 film The Betrayal, an autobiographical account by co-director Thavisouk Phrasavaths about his family’s flight from Laos to the United States following the Vietnam War and U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia during the 1970s. When read through the parable of ethical betrayal that The Invisible Man stages, I argue, these films elucidate the conditions of recognition and visibility that structure comparative and affiliative critical politics across the “Afro-Asian Century.” ¹¹

Not America?

Despite their very distinct subject matters, Sa-I-Gu and The Betrayal share two strikingly similar moments. In the former, filmmakers Dai Sil Kim-Gibson and Christine Choy interview the Korean immigrant women whose families bore the economic and material brunt of the violence in South Central Los Angeles – carried out largely by African American and Latino residents – that followed upon the now-famous acquittal of four police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King. One of these interviewees describes her family’s impression upon arriving in the United States many years earlier:

We dreamed about America just like we saw in the movies. There would be flower pots on windowsills … the streets would be clean. People in America would all have big noses. Their faces would be white and their hair blond. It did not feel like America. I thought it was Mexico. It made more sense to call it Mexico. We hardly came in contact with white people. Even in the schools most teachers were second-generation Japanese and Mexican.

Sa-I-Gu (1993)

In The Betrayal, Phrasavaths recounts how his family fled Laos after the Communist government, the Pathet Laos, arrested his father for serving with U.S. forces and aiding in the execution of a secret air-war from bases in Laos. Describing their application for asylum in the United States while refugees in Thailand, Thavi’s mother recalls: “I heard some talk about America. People said, ‘if you make it this far you are one step away from heaven. Water flows in every house, light shines in every room.’ … I was so excited to come to this land … America.” Thavi describes their arrival in the United States and resettlement in Brooklyn:

When we got to Flatbush Avenue, my family and I started to panic. We thought that we had gotten on the wrong plane and landed on the wrong continent. We were sure that we were in Africa somewhere because back in our home country, we had learned that the black man live in Africa, and the white man live in Europe and America. I never realized what America was all about. How America was such a melting pot, all the people of all races. It was totally unexpected.

The Betrayal (2008)

Both films thus underscore their subjects’ disenchantment with the “American dream” by way of a striking visual shorthand, screening black and brown bodies in densely populated urban spaces. They both accordingly articulate an overdetermined racial commonsense that the immigrant has acquired about economic destitution, criminalized activity, and explosive violence, one that recalls the conditions of the Harlem riots depicted in The Invisible Man. If Ellison’s narrator agonizes over the Brotherhood’s “not-seeing” of himself and the Harlem residents, Sa-I-Gu and The Betrayal return to that betrayal through the eyes of Asian immigrants who know exactly how to read these racialized bodies against the promise of the American dream. Neither film needs to explicitly state the material deprivation and downward mobility that their subjects undergo, but they instead communicate that reality precisely through the visual absence of white people and their Asian subjects’ proximity to African Americans and Latinos.

In the case of Sa-I-Gu, that silent in/visibility is notably foreboding, since the Los Angeles riots absolutely compel Korean Americans (and the audience) to face up to what remains unsaid in the immigrant dreams of America. Indeed, the mainstream representations of that violence as a black/Korean affair is precisely what generated a good deal of comparative research in Afro-Asian relations by scholars of U.S. racial and ethnic formations beginning in the mid-1990s. But, as Jared Sexton argues about that early scholarship, “to situate Korean American merchants as ‘victims’ of the black poor, innocent and ignorant of a struggle that simply precedes them, that does not involve them, that is not of their making, that is beyond their comprehension and, hence, ‘not their fault’ is, quite plainly, to circumvent ethics and to excise a population from time and space and the power relations they unavoidably inhabit.” ¹² As Sexton trenchantly charges, “the suffering endured by Korean American merchants in the wake of the Los Angeles uprising” amounts to a “relatively privileged experience” insofar as it “involves the mourning of conservative ideological commitments and the divestment of ill-gotten value (‘ill-gotten’ insofar as the realization of value under capitalism is premised on exploitation.)” ¹³

But, while Sexton’s appraisal of the political and structural advantages enjoyed by Korean (and more generally, Asian) Americans raises the question of ethics only in glancing terms, I suggest that the ethics of betrayal on which The Invisible Man insists is vital to a thick account of the complex losses and desires that drive all the subjects involved. In particular, when he characterizes a traitor as being “jam-full of contradictions,” Ellison’s narrator tenders a shrewd warning as to how we should theorize “Afro-Asian encounters,” reminding us that any comparative approach based on discretely bounded but critically commensurable categories of race, nation, and ethnicity depends constitutively upon the foreclosure of political and critical alliances that (might) have been otherwise available to minoritarian subjects. Beyond arguing, as other scholars, have that this in/visibility is constructed and managed by a regime of truth that reproduces white supremacy, I contend that such betrayals have been and always are endemic to the pursuit of any minoritarian representational project. ¹⁴ An ethical inquiry is therefore critically essential for thinking through the possibilities of Asian American politics as something other than only or always “conservative ideological commitments” and the desire for multiracial coalition as something other than, again in Sexton’s terms, an always already “second hand emotion” that “look[s] for love (in all the wrong places).” ¹⁵

These other possibilities emerge at key moments in Sa-I-Gu, where the interviewees articulate their dawning recognition of the structural conditions from which the L.A. riots erupted. While one woman observes that she “felt betrayed by the black kids. All my love for them turned to nothing. Beyond that nothing,” she also concedes: “I wish Koreans would treat black people as their own children. They are also God’s children.” Another woman explains that, looking back on the events of 1992, she came to understand that the riots happened because of the “gap between rich and poor,” and that her anger would be more rightfully aimed at the LAPD. Even the mother of the one Korean American man, Edward Jae Song Lee, killed during the riots comes to the realization that “it wasn’t an individual who shot him,” “it was not just an individual matter … something was terribly wrong.”

At the same time, however, the film concludes not with a portrait of a political alliance between African and Korean Americans, but instead with the ongoing struggle by the latter to secure reparations from the state who, as the interviewees see it, deliberately sacrificed Korean Americans by directing police efforts to wealthier, white neighborhoods. Likewise, and perhaps even more tellingly, The Betrayal never returns to the possibility of interracial collaboration between urban residents. Indeed, Thavi’s family finds itself instead steeped in fears over Southeast Asian gang violence in their neighborhood and the discovery that Thavi’s father not only survived his tenure at a Laotian “re-education” camp, but escaped across the border to Thailand where he became part of a guerilla resistance movement, before moving to Florida with his new wife and their children. The Betrayal therefore concludes with the cautious reconciliation between Thavi and his father, as well as Thavi’s return to Laos to reunite with two sisters who had been inadvertently left behind, and his acceptance of his role as a proxy father to his siblings in the United States.

Both films thus shunt Asian American subjects away from the Afro-Asian encounter, as they seemingly discard the possibility of coalitional politics for a more inward-turning meditation on personal and communal loss. When read through an ethics of betrayal, however, I suggest that these choices do not manifest false consciousness, misplaced priorities, or insufficient political radicalization in any simple manner. Rather, an ethics of betrayal might induce us to consider how loyalties to “other others” avert minority subjects from the political possibilities inherent in the terrain they share with other people of color. That is to say, we must acknowledge the responsibility of minoritarian subjects in the affiliative and representational politics they choose to pursue and those they disavow – albeit within obviously constrained histories of racial and national formation – if we are to grant them the complex personhood that modern subjectivity avers. ¹⁶ As such, the films illuminate the difficult enactment of the subject’s agency where competing loyalties demand concrete, materially grounded, and singular choices.

This is a formulation of responsibility – consonant with the ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas, and which I elaborate at length in An Ethics of Betrayal – that recurs throughout The Invisible Man (in, for example, “The Battle Royal” chapter and the narrator’s confrontation with the Brotherhood). ¹⁷ Here, an ethics of betrayal conveys that it is responsiveness in the face of weighty and multiple obligations to others that defines the agency of the subject’s existence. A response cannot be pre-scripted, or we slip into the totalizing impulses that the novel assigns to dead-end political alternatives; to expect that the subject will behave in a politically programmed fashion is to relegate her to the realm of unfreedom. At the same time, the novel cautions against notions of liberal, apolitical freedom, and instead underscores that, for the subject implicated in multiple obligations to others – as all subjects are – every response she makes proves inadequate for, if not even a betrayal of, those other others to whom she is responsible. Both films cast these affiliations and losses by way of diasporic history and familial memories, but as I discuss below, such diasporic desires in Sa-I-Gu and The Betrayal cannot be satisfied by a simple return to or restoration of the past. Rather, diasporic desire tracks how the self is unmade and remade by ethical responsibility in ways that are unpredictable. ¹⁸

Ellison’s Clifton stands as a haunting figure for such ethical conditionality of every political gesture. Clifton’s deliberate decision to plunge out of history – his first name signifying the othering limits that death imposes on any historical subject – sparks the narrator’s ethical reorientation toward the political actors with whom he has allied himself. Clifton’s own decision remains completely opaque; it responds to the mysterious call of some other the narrator cannot make intelligible, except through the amorphous feeling that he has been betrayed. Clifton’s death thus poses a necessary qualification on the radical freedom that the narrator glimpses through his own masquerade as Rinehart. As Michael LeBlanc surmises about the con man’s performance of social identity, it is not an invisible absence from which the performance distracts, but an “invisible excess”: “The con man succeeds in concealing the fact that he could be something other than the assumed identity. What is rendered invisible then by every con game is the excess of other possible identifications hidden under the assumed identity.” ¹⁹ As seemingly emancipatory as this excess might initially appear to be, when channeled through the affective register of betrayal, the con man’s seemingly unfettered freedom always entails an encounter with the loss that obligates the subject to the other. The motif of betrayal shows us that freedom does not transcend or obviate responsibility, but rather that responsibility is precisely what constitutes us as subjective beings called to (freely) respond to the other for our own existence.

1. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1947), 467. Subsequent citations are noted parenthetically within the text.[↑]
2. For discussion of historical precedents to Ellison’s anecdote, see Manan Desai, “The ‘Tan Stranger’ from Ceylon,” South Asian American Digital Archive, https://www.saada.org/tides/article/20140708-3618, and Paul A. Kramer, “The Importance of Being Turbaned,” Antioch Review 69, 2 (2011): 208–21.[↑]
3. Ellison’s “India” offers a pointed rejoinder to the traditions of “playing Indian,” which Philip J. Deloria identifies as central to the evolving constructions of American national culture, politics, and identity. The shoeshine’s masquerade as an (East) Indian returns to the material history of settler colonialism and the conquest and genocide of indigenous Americans that provided the literal terrain for the construction of “new world” national and racial identities. See Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).[↑]
4. Anne Anlin Cheng, Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 132. See also Michael LeBlanc, “The Color of Confidence: Racial Con Games and the Logic of Gold,” Cultural Critique 73 (Fall 2009): 1–46.[↑]
5. LeBlanc, “The Color of Confidence,” 14. [↑]
6. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 37–8, 42–9.[↑]
7. The shoeshine’s presence recalls the unlikely appearance of the “Chinaman” in early twentieth-century law and literature, most famously Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v Ferguson. As Sanda Lwin explains, configured as both an alien who is neither black nor white and, as such, an exceptionally mobile subject (for Harlan treacherously so), the figure of the Asian supplements the binary of the black/white color line with one of the citizen/foreigner, which continues to organize U.S. racial politics today. See Sanda Lwin, “‘A Race so Different from Our Own’: Segregation, Exclusion and the Myth of Mobility,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture History Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 28–9.[↑]
8. Ross Posnock, “Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, and the Meaning of Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Ross Posnock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 204.[↑]
9. A few early examples of such work in Asian American and African American studies include the special issue of positions journal on the “Afro-Asian Century”; Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University, 2008); Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004); and Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounters.[↑]
10. Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California, 2012). [↑]
11. Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, “Guest Editors’ Introduction,” positions 11, 1 (Spring 2003): 8.[↑]
12. Jared Sexton, “Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing,” Critical Sociology 36, 1 (2010): 98. In a different but related vein, Laura Pulido explains about radical activism, where residential and other spatial proximity between communities of color exist (for example, in Pulido’s case study, in post-1945 Los Angeles), cooperation is never automatic: “Despite the possibility of close relations, those connections had to be carefully articulated and cultivated by political activists and leaders – by no means were they inevitable.” See Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 58, 153.[↑]
13. Sexton, “Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing,” 98.[↑]
14. For example, Ho and Mullens describe the reproduction of racist stereotypes by Asian and African Americans as evidence that “oppressed people often ape and mimic their oppressors and the stereotypes foisted upon them.” See Ho and Mullens, Afro Asia, 10. [↑]
15. Ibid., 100.[↑]
16. As Mullens describes in regards to its institutionalization, despite the various paradigms that have emerged since the 1960s for black studies, none “took the form that many black, Chicano, and Asian activists of that period were calling for, namely, a Third World or internationalist studies.” Instead, a “more essentialist” orientation to Africana studies has largely mirrored a liberal pluralist paradigm of race and ethnicity, instituting disciplinary divisions within ethnic studies that in turn create the black subject of study. See Mullens, Afro-Orientalism, xl.[↑]
17. Crystal Parikh, An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2009).[↑]
18. Ibid., 128.[↑]
19. LeBlanc, “The Color of Confidence,” 12.[↑]