Asian American participation in the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State College revealed the nascent Asian American movement's commitment to self-determination for Asian American communities and solidarity with other non-white groups in the United States. It was appropriate that the first large-scale Asian American actions took place at San Francisco State, which had been roiled in student activism throughout the early to middle 1960s. Opposition to the US war in Vietnam contributed greatly to the emergence and growth of the Asian American movement, which was deeply influenced by some segments of the mainstream antiwar movement. The liberation of women also proved to be an important and complex aspect of the Asian American movement's struggle. The social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s created spaces in which multiethnic Asian American arts, culture and literature arose as a distinct body of works.

This chapter examines how conceptions of Asian American were formulated in the early twentieth century through the categorization of Asians as Orientals and their construction as a racial problem and a racial solution within mainstream American culture. The Chicago School of Sociology was instrumental in shifting the focus from biological notions of race, grounded in physicality and exemplified by eugenic theories, to culture-based concepts that included developmental theories of consciousness. The Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast was the most extensive sociological study of the Oriental Problem in the twentieth century. The drive to assert the significance of race over cultural notions of ethnicity has animated Asian American activism, writing, and scholarship for almost half a century. The Chicago School of Sociology has had a formative impact on Asian American literature over the course of the twentieth century. Asian American activists of the 1960s and 1970s valued early sociological accounts for their 'authentic voices'.

Asian American poetry has always been interested in both polarities, but in varying proportions and to varying degrees of success. With Pound, Asia came to function as central to the West's conception of itself, which relied on an imaginary idealization of the East in orientalizing terms. From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, Asian American poetry developed and diversified rapidly and, for the first time, embraced the term Asian American as an organizing rubric. The legacies of the labor and internment experiences of the first half of the twentieth century were invisibility and silence for Asian Americans, who were marked as perpetually foreign and marginalized from representational politics. This chapter highlights the characteristics of avant-garde art. The avant-garde art work typically engages in some kind of theoretical work, which is frequently staged by the formal and stylistic properties of the work.