Model Minority Theory

This special issue, intentionally focused on Southeast Asian Americans and the model minority myth, is important because Southeast Asian Americans have been “politically invisible” and because a disproportionate number have found it difficult to succeed academically. Asian Americans are not passive people. The model minority stereotype didn’t develop only because journalists made them out to be models or exemplars. This special issue shares 4 articles.

The model minority stereotype of Asian Americans suggests that they are overrepre-sented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. This article considers 16 years of Intel Westinghouse Science Award finalists (n = 640) data procured online. The data are analyzed to determine whether there are racial/ethnic or gender patterns among the finalists. Social Network Theory informs data analysis and interpretation of results. Findings suggest that homophily, the tendency for people/insti-tutions to interact with similar others, contributes to the demographic patterns of the Intel Westinghouse finalists. Contrary to the expectation that White males from private boarding schools are the most likely to be Intel Westinghouse Science Award finalists, the data indicate that Asian American males who attend public schools are significantly more likely to be finalists.

Asian American literary criticism shares with Asian American cultural studies an investment in the critical potential of Asian American aesthetic forms. 1 Owing to the origins of the field identity in the antiwar movement and revolutionary third world nationalisms of the global sixties, there can be no Asian American literary criticism without a commitment to some form of critique. And at the core of Asian American cultural critique is a political opposition to US nationalism and imperialism whose contradictions the history of Asian American racialization-and the literary iterations of Asian American identity-are thought to make visible. These waning days of US empire, however, challenge the fundamental premises of the purpose of Asian American cultural critique, and thus the political function of Asian American literary criticism. Long after the end of the Asian American Movement (AAM), its 1960s utopian spirit enjoyed a refuge in Asian American literary studies. Here the anticapitalist longings of the 1960s did not have to be constrained by the modesty of actually existing post 1960s Asian American politics. The flipside of this freedom was that the political content critics ascribed to Asian American literary identity depended upon the cultural capital of a prior age's activism. 2 Claims for literature's politics of resistance or subversion were understandably criticized for bad faith or romanticism so long as they dodged the question of literature and art's social mediation. 3 A recent building interest among Asian American literary critics in Marxist aesthetic theory shows how we might confront the limitations of fictional *Colleen Lye teaches English at UC Berkeley. She is the author of America's Asia (Princeton, 2005) and the coeditor with Christopher Nealon of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value (Cambridge, 2021). She has coedited several special journal issues on the topics of financialization and the culture industry, peripheral realisms, forms of Asia, and the humanities and the crisis of the public university.

The discourse of multiculturalism disguises complicated racial dynamics in nations such as Canada. Although white privilege persists, it tends to be mediated through non-white figures who can engender consent from other minority members. These figures have been called model minorities, a role that is well-tailored to celebrated athletes. Athletes who fill the role of model minority represent the ideal immigrant citizen: English-speaking, middle class/bourgeois, disciplined, and hard-working. As such, they serve a disciplinary function for other immigrants by demonstrating how it is they should act and producing a standard against which they are evaluated. The model minority has become a crucial representational figure for multicultural nations like Canada because the political economy of these states requires cheap labour that can be hyper-exploited through the dehumanization of racialization. Drawing on articles in Toronto's most prominent newspapers, I argue that Toronto Blue Jays baseball star Jose Bautista has recently assumed the status of a model minority. I elaborate the functions of the model minority through a reading of Bautista's representation.

(*Please note: Actual session time is 10:35am-12:05pm)
Chair: Nicholas Daniel Hartlep (Illinois State University)
Discussant: Robert T. Teranishi (New York University)
Participants: Benji Chang (Teachers College, Columbia University), Dina C. Maramba (Binghamton University - SUNY), John D. Palmer (Colgate University), Valerie Ooka Pang (San Diego State University), Yoon K. Pak (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Daryl Maeda (University of Colorado - Boulder)

In this two-part series, I share reflections on how stories of self-killing as “suicide” are employed differentially to “read” racialized communities. A part of this discussion involves accepting that suicide is not merely a word used in our everyday language. Suicide indexes an array of medical, legal, and educational texts and procedures to deal with self-killing, such as the fire department’s routine response to a potential “jumper” or a social worker’s obligation to institutionalize a client who expresses the intention to die. These complicated work practices are not arbitrary, but have developed over time with input from all kinds of people.

This conversation also requires that we think about how mental health, education, and the media emphasize particular ways of “spinning” the story of death, while other explanations are rendered irrelevant. I am, in short, asking how certain stories of self-killing function publicly to educate different “ethnic groups” on (1) who they are and (2) how they need to behave.

The narrative vectors of ethnic minority mental illness and suicide are not natural, but patterns in thinking, popularized as official knowledge over decades in the American consciousness by actual people working in disciplines such as sociology and psychology. How is self-killing not only considered unreasonable, but pathological? How is that dysfunction then associated with the generalized traits of a whole group of people -- with culture?

Although there are many tactics, pedagogies, and strategies for supporting marginalized students in the multicultural, anti-racist classroom, the emphasis of these practices is often on students' individual conceptions of self (an important site of positive identity development), and not on the ways that students of color treat each other. I believe that an important aspect of anti-racist pedagogy is to support students in not internalizing oppression that may result in lower selfesteem and/or negative self-image, but because race is a socially-negotiated construct , students' 1 social interactions with each other is a less examined site of identity construction that may also inform students' self-regard, especially in relation to race. Quijano and Wallerstein argue that the Americas were fundamental to the formation of the modern (colonial) world-system, and that Americanity is a fundamental element of modernity, identifying four categories in the so-called discovery of the Americas: coloniality, ethnicity, racism and the concept of newness itself (Salvidar 2007, 344). The way we as'Americans' group people by ethno-racial classification is what Saldivar calls the "embalming of identities" (346). Within the limits of a short paper like this, I will name my frameworks and constraints for investigating this problem: As a mixed race (Asian, White) person with specific ethnicities (Thai-Chinese, Scots-Irish,) my "lane," so to speak, would be to address interactions between and among Asian, White, and mixed Asian-White people. However, as a pro-Black anti-racist, I want to name anti-blackness in Asian communities as a problem and examine ways researchers have Jose David Salvidar (2007) notes helpfully 'against an understanding of all aspects of identity being 1 "socially constructed" (which many colloquially understand as 'not real'), "Identities anchor power in some areas of the social structure, and build their resistance or their offensives in the informational struggle about the cultural codes constructing behavior and, thus, new institutions" (Castells 1997).'

Chair: Nicholas Daniel Hartlep (University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee), Participant: Robert T. Teranishi (New York University), Participant: Dina C. Maramba (Binghamton University - SUNY), Participant: Stacey J. Lee (University of Wisconsin - Madison), Participant: Kevin K. Kumashiro (University of Illinois at Chicago), Participant: Yoon K. Pak (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Participant: Gilbert C. Park (Ball State University), Participant: Benji Chang (Teachers College, Columbia University);


Prima facie Asian American students are believed to be doing extremely well in terms of their levels of academic achievement and attainment despite research that indicates otherwise. In addition to Asian’s supposed extraordinary educational accomplishments, they are believed to exhibit uniformly high expectations and come from families that value education. The panelists in this session help to interrogate these impressions by sharing their knowledge and expertise with attendees, namely the importance of understanding that the Asian American population is bimodal, and extremely heterogeneous. Thus, in order to avoid ecological fallacious beliefs, the purpose of this panel is to examine the model minority stereotype through critical discussions regarding the many different subgroups of this population.