Those who have experienced disempowerment and marginalization help us understand and gain insight into the ways reality is constructed and policies are formulated. This insight, when cultivated with deeper historical, cultural, social, and political analysis, restructures what we understand and how we understand it. In addition, it enables the recognition and translation of diverse and dynamic economic, cultural, and political developments in various parts of “east,” “southeast,” “south,” “central,” and “western” Asia (all these directional terms are partial and misleading). This rethinking can begin with the available literature of those Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Asian Americans writing and being translated into English, but must be extended to help U.S. Americans understand the local struggles of grain farmers in Kazakhstan or female Nike factory workers in Bangladesh in terms truthful to those peoples’ own worldviews. This requires dialogue and the insistence that disempowered peoples gain the capacity to “name” their own world.

This is an excerpt from John Kuo Wei Tchen’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (pp 25-26).