As opposed to limiting the scope of anti-Asian violence to “hate,” this article frames anti-Asian violence as inextricable from U.S. empire. Building on Go (2020) American Journal of Sociology 125 (5):1193, I theorize what I call the “imperial feedback loop” to conceptualize anti-Asian violence within a postcolonial and transnational context. Using a series of life history interviews, I chart the pathways of two Cambodian American refugees along the migration-to-school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. I find that cyclical and intergenerational trauma, the criminalization of Cambodian youth, and refugee deportability sustains the psychological and structural violence of the imperial feedback loop. I relate these findings to Du Boisian scholarship on criminality and imperialism and Asian Americanist scholarship on refugee subjectivity. I conclude by suggesting the interruption of the imperial feedback loop through anti-PIC and anti-border organizing and scholarship that critiques the roots of imperial violence and builds toward abolitionist democratic futures.
United States, Sociological Inquiry. 2023, 22pg