Atomic Hospitality: Asian Migrant Scientists Meet the U.S. South

Abstract

This multidisciplinary project concerns the racialization of Asian Americans in the U.S. South, especially in the wake of the 1965 immigration act that recruited scientists to the U.S. nation-state. Specifically, the Asian American presence in east Tennessee involves regional, national, and international discourses surrounding two primary sites of tension: the constructs of national security and of spoken accent. Now home of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the "secret city" of Oak Ridge was created in the 1940s to aid the construction of the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima. Drawing from interviews with over thirty individuals, I argue that the post-1965 Asian migrant scientists at ORNL are part of what I call "national security migration," which involves individuals recruited to work on projects of interest to the national security of a nation-state not of their birth. <italic>Asian</italic> national security migrants inherit a particular history in which race, migration, citizenship, and science are inextricably tied, reproducing and complicating the narrative of Asians as perpetual foreigners particularly in the context of the U.S. national security state. HASH(0x7f93a252ca38) This project also features an historical analysis of a controversy in east Tennessee about a public monument, the Oak Ridge International Friendship Bell. Revolving around memory and the bomb, the debate was highly racialized, with anti-Asian (particularly anti-Japanese) sentiment front and center. Thus, I contend that discourses of "yellow peril" and national security are historically perpetuated and infused in the South. The second site of tension involves language and accent. If Asian migrants are often perceived to be speaking with a foreign accent, then southerners are marked by their southern accents, too: analyzing the interplay of these accents reveals the way Asian Americans disrupt traditional understandings of the South as a region. This disruption emerges in the experiences of Asian migrant scientists (at work and in the surrounding community) and also in the experiences of the U.S.-born second generation, as seen through my close reading of a performance by comedian Henry Cho, a Korean American Tennessean. HASH(0x7f93a31951d0) Finally, questions around language emerge methodologically as well. Interrupting the organizational writing structure of this project, I insert an extended discussion of the possibility of a feminist, Asian Americanist transcription methodology to be employed when researching multilingual Asian migrant communities in the U.S. nation-state. Taken together, these sites of tension speak to the nuances of the contemporary Asian American South.