Surviving the Witch-Hunt: Battle Notes from Portland’s 82nd Avenue, 2007-2010

By Emi Koyama
Confluere Publications

Surviving the Witch-Hunt is collection of artifacts and commentary from 2007 to the present and catalogues the community forces that emerged after the City of Portland removed its controversial Prostitution Free Zones (PFZ). These zones had allowed the police to issue exclusion orders for those who had been arrested for sex work, even if they had never been charged. For ninety days, anyone arrested for prostitution in the designated area was not allowed to return without submitting an appeal, segregating public space and criminalizing behavior without actual legal indictment.

The uproar from community figures after the removal of the PFZs demonstrated the discriminatory sentiments of many of those living in the 82nd Avenue neighborhood. Those who opposed the end of the PFZs claimed that there was an increase in crime and a correlating decrease in their property value, and they united to fight the “problem” of sex work in their communities. Emi Koyama collected documents that demonstrate their anger toward sex workers and bolsters these artifacts with some social justice commentary, raising arguments that protect the rights of all women and advance a more holistic view of community development. This booklet uses the 82nd Avenue case study as an example of how multifaceted problems cannot be solved via law enforcement but through broader advances in social and economic justice.

Countering the arguments of outraged neighbors near 82nd Avenue, Koyama’s documents describe the harm PFZs do to women who work in the sex industry. The fliers in the collection address the underlying causes of sex work, and explain that improved access to housing, employment, and treatment services are a better response than criminalization. The documents also catalogue the efforts of anti-prostitution advocates who focus on educating men about the social dangers of purchasing sex. This was the most interesting part of the compilation to me, since many anti-prostitution feminists are pushing educational programs as a way to end sex work. Koyama’s work shows that decreasing the demand for sex work, while a seemingly laudable goal, actually harms women. Decreasing demand also reduces the price for services, so sex workers have to do more acts for less money, and it pushes sex work to more remote areas, causing potential dangers for workers. Also, johns who are rational regarding risk taking will be taken out of the pool, leaving a group of riskier men purchasing the services of sex workers. These men are more likely to act violently towards sex workers and are less likely to take safe precautions during sex.

As someone who recognizes that the problems associated with sex work have no simple solutions, I am thankful that Koyama lays out these rebuttals to anti-prostitution groups. Criminalizing and even reducing the amount of sex work will do little to address the more serious problems in our communities. Sadly, the deeply rooted social, racial, and gendered inequities that necessitate sex work too often go unnoticed by policymakers, concerned citizens, and others trying to improve their communities.

As a human rights lawyer, I am personally outraged at the discriminatory attitudes of too many in the 82nd Avenue community regarding the end of PFZs, and I am somewhat embarrassed that I had not known about these events before reading this collection. Many local stories of civil rights conflict, of discrimination, and of survival often don’t reach further than the affected community. By effectively curating a compilation of documents from the 82nd Avenue community, Koyama demonstrates the importance of capturing a historical moment in the trajectory towards justice. The fliers, newspaper articles, notices about community meetings, and email messages Koyama collected were probably designed to be temporary, but in this small archive they combine to tell a powerful story of the strength of community activism.

Review by Andrea Gittleman

Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

By Eleanor Ty
University Of Minnesota Press

In a similar vein as Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination and Rocío Davis' Begin Here, the monograph Unfastened has been a treat to read for the simple fact that author Eleanor Ty forefronts a wide range of readings that demonstrate the continued evidence of the heterogeneity that embodies the field of Asian North American literature. Ty’s book is called unfastened, precisely because it is a descriptive that designates the continuing complexity that has been emerging with the textual terrains around concepts of mobility, displacement, and diaspora that make fastening Asian North American literature to any one place practically impossible.

In the primary texts that Ty so elegantly analyzes, multiple nations, multiple local spaces, and multiple subjectivities are always imagined, such that her readings flow contextually, specific to particular aesthetic forms and contexts, but always linked by the notion of “globality.” Ty is careful about her terminology. She purposefully does not use the term Asian American precisely because she carves out a specific place for Asian Canadian cultural production in her work, which has had a long history of being too reductively classified within Asian American more broadly.

She also distinguishes globality from the globalization, rendering globality the more salient feature of her critical reading practice precisely because it is more connected to issues of economic differentials and power inequities that arise as bodies, cultures, ideas, technologies, etc. migrate to new locations and establish new spatial configurations. As Ty clarifies, “Issues of globality include concern for earth and our environment, health and the spread of disease across national borders, the globalization of markets, and the production of goods.”

The wide range of primary text readings are truly astonishing and we see what a fan of Asian North American narrative Ty is as she meticulously crafts her analyses to continually point to the ways that Asian North American writers are thinking about globality and routing that issue directly within their textual terrains. Taken together, Ty concentrates on Brian Roley’s American Son, Han Ong’s Fixer Chao, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, Sunil Kuruvilla’s Rice Boy, and Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence, among others. Many of these authors are ones that have received very little critical attention, even though their works present such rich terrains upon which to consider the complexities of globalization.

While all the chapters provide sprightly interpretative readings in which texts cannot be fastened within one context or sociocultural moment, some standouts include chapter two’s “Recuperating Wretched Lives: Asian Sex Workers and the Underside of Nation Building” and chapter five’s “Shape-shifters and Disciplined Bodies: Feminist Tactics, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.” Given the astonishing range of writings being produced, Ty’s conclusion offers a corrective to the concept of Asian American literature, offering that the rubric of “global novelist and global writing are more accurate for terms and for works,” especially with respect to the increasingly non-domestic contexts of many narratives.

Ty leaves us then with the concept of the “Asian global,” conceptualized in part because such narratives “arise out of and are contingent upon globalization—the movement of people, capital, and production across the north and south—and because they are no longer located just in North America or Britain.” In ending this brief review, it would seem the possibility that Ty is pushing for a potentially new field rubric in which Asian global texts written in English appear front and center. In this way, the move to diasporic and transnational critiques which typically and traditionally have not shifted beyond a two-country paradigm can be supplanted with this Asian global literary studies model that pushes scholars to contextualize texts from multi-focal spatial axes.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans