Asian American Studies

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Objective: Discrimination against nonnative speakers is widespread and largely socially acceptable. Nonnative speakers are evaluated negatively because accent is a sign that they belong to an outgroup and because understanding their speech requires unusual effort from listeners. The present research investigated intergroup bias, based on stronger support for hierarchical relations between groups (social dominance orientation [SDO]), as a predictor of hiring recommendations of nonnative speakers. Method: In an online experiment using an adaptation of the thin-slices methodology, 65 U.S. adults (54% women; 80% White; M age 35.91, range 18 – 67) heard a recording of a job applicant speaking with an Asian (Mandarin Chinese) or a Latino (Spanish) accent. Participants indicated how likely they would be to recommend hiring the speaker, answered questions about the text, and indicated how difficult it was to understand the applicant. Results: Independent of objective comprehension, participants high in SDO reported that it was more difficult to understand a Latino speaker than an Asian speaker. SDO predicted hiring recommendations of the speakers, but this relationship was mediated by the perception that nonnative speakers were difficult to understand. This effect was stronger for speakers from lower status groups (Latinos relative to Asians) and was not related to objective comprehension. Conclusions: These findings suggest a cycle of prejudice toward nonnative speakers: Not only do perceptions of difficulty in understanding cause prejudice toward them, but also prejudice toward low-status groups can lead to perceived difficulty in understanding members of these groups.

[By Christopher Lotis and Michel D. Lee; Foreword by P.M. Taylor. This full book is uploaded here while the Smithsonian website, where it was published online, is being revised.]

An important theme of this volume is the relationship between ceramics and cultural identity, especially as it relates to a particular family’s collection, and also to the broader study of the personal and social aspects of collecting. The book thus forms a contribution not only to the study of Korea’s material heritage but also to Korean-American or Asian-American studies, and to the
history of collecting. It will surely be of interest to art as well as social historians, and to all those who appreciate the aesthetic quality of Korea’s ceramic art.

The authors’ “behind-the-scenes” study of this private collection included the creation of an extensive research database about it, not only the ceramics included in this volume but also paintings, costumes, bronze works, and many other objects that could form the basis for subsequent studies. The collection includes some important twentieth-century ceramics that have not been included within this volume; these await study alongside other works by contemporary artists in this wide-ranging
collection. As the authors emphasize, the component of the Chang collection selected for publication here has been extensively tested using thermoluminescence testing. For this reason, these objects constitute an important “type collection” of tested pieces for this type of materials analysis, against which other ceramic works may be compared.

This book should therefore serve as an important reference for work on its topic, as a unique and well-illustrated introduction to this private collection and its significance; and hopefully also as a stimulus for other studies within this and related private collections.

[NOTE: 2 photos, available in the print edition (p. 12), have been extracted from this online book because the copyright holder disallows online publication of those photos.]

"A collection like a circus of daredevils. . . . A bravura debut.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

https://www.amazon.com/Foley-Artist-Ricco-Villanueva-Siasoco/dp/0982814267

A compelling debut for fans of the Filipino America brought to life in fiction by Elaine Castillo and Mia Alvar. At once deliciously bizarre and painfully familiar, The Foley Artist introduces a vital new voice to Asian American literature. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco’s powerful debut collection opens new regions of American feeling and thought as it interrogates intimacy, foreignness, and silence in an absurd world. These nine stories give voice to the intersectional identities of women and men in the Filipino diaspora in America: a straight woman attends her ex-boyfriend’s same-sex marriage in coastal Maine; a college-bound teenager encounters his deaf uncle in Manila; Asian American drag queens duke it out in the annual Iowa State Fair; a seventy-nine-year-old Foley artist recreates the sounds of life, but is finally unable to save himself.

Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, they use a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems that surround them. This essay explores the unconventional ways through which Otto and B.D.G.’s intimacies are depicted, and analyzes the performance styles they use to express critical perspectives on racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. I argue that Otto and B.D.G.’s performances offer alternative ways to think through contemporary conversations around cultural appropriation and interracial desire in ways that decenter whiteness or a white desiring subject. However, I also observe how their critical deployments of hypermasculinity potentially skew public conversations about racialized violence.

Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play.

Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology.

Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or protest.

Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among others. In so doing, it advances a model of the nineteenth-century US state-in-formation that demonstrates how the legal status of the transatlantic Famine Irish took on greater significance than any cultural differences with White Anglo Saxon Protestant America. Key concepts are explored, such as citizenship, nationality, race, ethnicity, the fractional state, the racial state, and the Black and Green Atlantic. Introduced, moreover, is one of the most important yet most overlooked American patriots of the nineteenth century, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes of New York, whose efforts helped to mold the corporate Catholic Church into a major ideological apparatus of the US state.

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31989
Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post–civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today.

Read together, Asian American and Latinx literatures convey astonishing diversity and untapped possibilities for coalition within the United States' fastest-growing immigrant and minority communities; to understand the changing shape of these communities we must see how they have formed in relation to each other. As the U.S. population approaches a minority-majority threshold, we urgently need methods that can look across the divisions and unequal positions of the racial system. Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America leads the way with a vision for the future built on panethnic and cross-racial solidarity.

https://tinyurl.com/queergfb

Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina K. Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization.

Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the Philippine nation? Integrating a transnational feminist analysis of globalized gendered labor with a consideration of queer cultural politics, Velasco envisions forms of feminist and queer diasporic belonging, while simultaneously foregrounding nationalist movements as vital instruments of struggle.

This short essay, for the volume _Keywords for Asian American Studies_ edited by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Linda Vo and K. Scott Wong, examines the history and significance of the term "orientalism" for Asian American Studies, from its initial deployment by Edward Said in postcolonial studies as a critique of knowledge formation, to a more capacious understanding of orientalism as encompassing racial formations and coalitions beyond Asian Americans, with radical potential for Third World, Afro-Asian, and internationalist politics.

Well known for his spoken word poetry, Bao Phi has long articulated the violences and possibilities folded into the Asian American experience to a national audience hungry for stories about and for us. When Phi finally gave us a collection of poetry, Sông I Sing in 2011, the celebration was loud and long. Now, six years later Phi is releasing two new books within a month of each other: his second book of poetry Thousand Star Hotel (Coffee House Press), due out on the 4th of July, and his first children’s book A Different Pond (Capstone Young Readers), illustrated by Thi Bui, available August 1st.

So many of us yearn for role models, fearless storytellers to reflect the truths of our experiences. For me and countless others, Bao Phi is among these voices. I had the opportunity to speak to Phi about both texts’ lessons and themes, how writing allows him to reflect on difficult moments in the past and present, and what galvanized him to tackle a children’s book.

http://www.kartikareview.com/18/apia-kang.html

This toolkit supports viewers in discussing what it means to be an American, community choices, civil rights and civil liberties, the role of media during times of war, and connecting the Korematsu v. United States Supreme Court case to contemporary issues. *Includes an op-ed written by Fred Korematsu on September 16, 2004, titled “Do we really need to relearn the lessons of Japanese American internment?” Can support learning about Asian American history, connections between history and the present, what it means to be a responsible citizen, and how to get involved in defending civil rights.

FILM SYNOPSIS: Of Civil Wrongs and Rights is the untold history of the 40-year legal fight to vindicate Fred Korematsu — who resisted the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — one that finally turned a civil injustice into a civil rights victory.

*Served as one of the guide producers.

The twenty-first century observes a seemingly paradoxical but increasingly evident twinned phenomenon: the proliferated modes of visibility and celebratory narratives around queer (of color) youth in tandem with the prevalent but not always remarked on violence and violation inflicted upon queer bodies. Meanwhile, common narratives around growing up often articulate development through heteronormative milestones while devaluing queerness as weird, immature, and childish. What if any role does or should US ethnic literary studies and scholars of literature play in addressing how queer youth survive in this world? This essay formulates the minor minor as a positionality that apprehends the queer-of-color youth and proliferates spaces for their flourishing within our scholarly practices. It calls for enacting a childish methodology that is playfully precocious and naïve toward orthodox critical approaches, remaining willfully undisciplined and undisciplinary.

Eng follows the lead of Kiran Sharma, fearless protagonist of Rakesh Satyal’s novel Blue Boy (2009), to conceptualize the queer-of-color youth as a disruptive minoritarian figure that cultivates possibilities for queerness within and against normative demands of growing up. Relaying his experiences of bullying and shaming, Kiran observes how the “American” and “Indian” worlds that he navigates as a preadolescent come together through what they hold in common, which requires the disciplining of his queer desires as signaling a deformity that threatens their socialities. Imagining himself as the reincarnation of Krishna, Kiran engages in modes of disidentification, fantasy, and play to recast his wayward desires as delectable modes of uncommon beauty that transform his deformity into divinity.

There is a rich body of literature on the experience of Japanese immigrants in the United States, and there are also numerous accounts of the cultural dislocation felt by American expats in Japan. But what happens when Japanese Americans, born and raised in the United States, are the ones living abroad in Japan?

Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan navigate and complicate the categories of Japanese and “foreigner.” Drawing from extensive interviews and fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Jane H. Yamashiro tracks the multiple ways these migrants strategically negotiate and interpret their daily interactions. Following a diverse group of subjects—some of only Japanese ancestry and others of mixed heritage, some fluent in Japanese and others struggling with the language, some from Hawaii and others from the US continent—her study reveals wide variations in how Japanese Americans perceive both Japaneseness and Americanness.

Making an important contribution to both Asian American studies and scholarship on transnational migration, Redefining Japaneseness critically interrogates the common assumption that people of Japanese ancestry identify as members of a global diaspora. Furthermore, through its close examination of subjects who migrate from one highly-industrialized nation to another, it dramatically expands our picture of the migrant experience.

Check out the website https://redefiningjapaneseness.com
Like the book on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/redefiningjapaneseness/
Watch a short interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0u43MQWZAg
See a book talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGC3D9M6GUk&feature=youtu.be

Co-curated event, "A Pilgrimage to WWII Japanese-American Internment Camps." An exhibit at the Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester, Nov. 17 -  Dec.11, 2017, with photographs by Margaret Miyake, commentary by Notch Miyake, and historical ephemera from the Re-Envisioning Japan Collection (J. Bernardi). Sponsored by the University of Rochester Humanities Project, the Dept. of Modern Languages and Cultures, The Hartnett Gallery, The RIver Campus Libraries Digital Humanities Center, the American Studies Program, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of English, and the Film and Media Studies Program. A University of Rochester Humanities Project event.

Tiger Mom. Asian patriarchy. Model minority children. Generation gap. The many images used to describe the prototypical Asian family have given rise to two versions of the Asian immigrant family myth. The first celebrates Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative ideal of the “normal (white) American family” based on a hard-working male breadwinner and a devoted wife and mother who raises obedient children. The other demonizes Asian families around these very same cultural values by highlighting the dangers of excessive parenting, oppressive hierarchies, and emotionless pragmatism in Asian cultures.

Saving Face cuts through these myths, offering a more nuanced portrait of Asian immigrant families in a changing world as recalled by the people who lived them first-hand: the grown children of Chinese and Korean immigrants. Drawing on extensive interviews, sociologist Angie Y. Chung examines how these second-generation children negotiate the complex and conflicted feelings they have toward their family responsibilities and upbringing. Although they know little about their parents’ lives, she reveals how Korean and Chinese Americans assemble fragments of their childhood memories, kinship narratives, and racial myths to make sense of their family experiences. However, Chung also finds that these adaptive strategies come at a considerable social and psychological cost and do less to reconcile the social stresses that minority immigrant families endure today.

Saving Face not only gives readers a new appreciation for the often painful generation gap between immigrants and their children, it also reveals the love, empathy, and communication strategies families use to help bridge those rifts.

In this article, I consider the emergence of the term Asian American as a political and racial identifier in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and survey the meanings that are associated with the term today. Through the analysis of in-depth interviews, I examine how Asian American prospective teachers, who were enrolled in a master’s and credential program that had an explicit focus on social justice and on teaching in urban communities of color, appropriated and challenged these multiple meanings. The interview data highlight the relationship between these teachers’ understandings of their racial identity and the responsibil- ities and challenges they anticipated for themselves as Asian American teachers of other students of color. I conclude the article by exploring the implications of these findings for teacher education programs, particularly programs that enroll high proportions of Asian Americans.

The formation of queer psychology has been a critical intervention in breaking apart the psychological tendency of reifying categories of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, latent Orientalism and white-centered epistemologies in psychology have continued to produce culturally essentialist depictions of a repressive "Chinese sexuality" and "backward Asian culture." In this article, I present three main problems in psychological representations of Sinophone queers: (a) "cultural colorblindness" resulting from the conflation of race and culture, (b) the problematic analytical category of "Chineseness," and (c) race and culture being theorized as a burden for Sinophone and Asian queers. In order for psychology and queer studies scholars to destabilize these epistemologically violent interpretations, this article argues that we must engage with Sinophone critique and shift away from a framework of culture to one of "concerns" in order to capture the heterogeneity of queer Sinophone subjectivities.