The Task of Asian/Asian North American Theologies

1. It is certain that globalization and localization have dramatically intensified in the past several decades. It is also true that this intensification challenges binary ways of understanding our world. While many today inhabit multiple worlds and fluidly live a cosmopolitan life and thus provide a privilege or vantage point in critical-reflexivity, we need to be mindful that not all people, especially women, experience mobility in the same way. Aihwa Ong notes that certain theoretical frameworks valorize the figure of the migrants as cosmopolitan “progressive political figures” who are able to “resist the pillaging of global capitalism.”1 However, what is not accounted for, as Ong argues, is how migrants forge new ways of living through “flexible citizenship” that embody all the complex constellation of negotiation, resistance and transformation. While binary thinking is questionable given the rapidly hybridized world in which many worlds are coterminous, we still inhabit worlds structured on binary worldviews that contribute to an uneven world. Globalization and localization bring about reterritorialized subjects who are also translocal subjects in the globalized networks of cultures, economies and politics.