Afterword: Transnational Asian Studies—Toward More Inclusive Theory and Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 1033-1044
Author(s):  
Sonia Ryang
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The One

Based on the articles in this “Global Asias” forum, this essay proposes that in order to build a meaningful bridge between Asian studies and Asian American studies, we must first face what needs to be critically overcome in Asian studies itself: persistent white male domination of the field, on the one hand, and historical role that the United States has played in Asia, on the other. One possibility is to adopt a transnational Asian studies approach, which advocates bringing Asian studies and Asian American studies together while also envisioning radical interdisciplinarity across Asian studies and African American studies, Latino/a studies, and Asian American studies. The key to pursuing such an approach would be to create a teaching and research environment of inclusion and collaboration.

Empire after Liberalism: The Transatlantic Right and Identitarian War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER VIALS
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
American Studies ◽  
White Male ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The One

American studies has developed excellent critiques of post-1945 imperial modes that are grounded in human rights and Enlightenment liberalism. But to fully gauge US violence in the twenty-first century, we also need to more closely consider antiliberal cultural logics. This essay traces an emergent mode of white nationalist militarism that it calls Identitarian war. It consists, on the one hand, of a formal ideology informed by Identitarian ethno-pluralism and Carl Schmitt, and, on the other, an openly violent white male “structure of feeling” embodied by the film and graphic novel 300, a key source text for the transatlantic far right.

Introduction: Transnationalism, Race, and the Links between Asian and Asian American Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-137
Author(s):  
K. Scott Wong
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Guest Editor ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Great Pleasure ◽  
Pomona College ◽  
Conference Papers ◽  
Do So

AbstractThe three essays that comprise this section of this issue began as conference papers delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2008, Washington, D.C. The panel was organized by Professor Samuel Yamashita of Pomona College, a longtime advocate of forging links between the fields of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. In his usual gentle way, Sam Yamashita brought the panelists together, took care of the panel proposal, and then stepped aside and let these younger scholars take the floor. Over drinks after the panel, we all came to realize that Madeline Hsu and Catherine Ceniza Choy had both been students of Sam's as undergraduates. Charles Hayford approached Sam about creating a special issue of this journal based on the panel, and I, as the panel's discussant would serve as guest editor. Charles later suggested that we dedicate this issue to Sam as a token of our appreciation for his scholarship and mentorship. And we do so with great pleasure.

Comedy, Humor, and Asian American Representation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Kyungah Hong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Culturally Different ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

Asian Americans have had and continue to have a complicated relationship with comedy and humor. On the one hand, comedy and humor have always been a vital and dynamic part of Asian American culture and history, even if they have rarely been discussed as such. On the other hand, in mainstream US culture, Asian Americans are often represented as unfunny, unless they are being mocked for being physically, socially, or culturally different. Asian Americans have thus been both objects and agents of humor, a paradox that reflects the sociocultural positioning of Asian Americans in the United States. Examples of how Asian Americans have been dehumanized and rendered abject through comedy and humor, even as they also negotiate and resist their abjection, reach as far back as the 19th century and continue through the 21st. The sheer volume of such instances—of Asian Americans both being made fun of and being funny on their own terms—demonstrates that comedy and humor are essential, not incidental, to every part of Asian American culture and history.

Teaching Asian American Studies in Japan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masumi Izumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
University Students ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
American University ◽  
Cultural Movements

This chapter juxtaposes Asian American scholarship in Japan and the United States, and explores ways in which the field can be pedagogically useful for deconstructing hegemonic social discourses on race, culture, ethnicity and justice both for Japanese and American university students and scholars. Teaching the history of Japanese emigration to the Pan-Pacific region not only helps Japanese students to overcome the historical amnesia about their country’s imperial past, but also helps American students to contextualize the migration from Japan to the US within the overall Japanese emigration history. Structural analyses of race lead to students’ better understanding of different ways in which race has historically created, naturalized and perpetuated social and economic hierarchy within the United States and Japan. Furthermore, learning about the social protest and cultural movements that led to the birth of Asian American studies can promote positive views among university students toward political engagement and social activism.

Japanese Americans in Academia and Political Discourse in Japan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Okiyoshi Takeda
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The U.S

I am a political scientist specializing in Asian American politics. Although I earned my PhD in the United States, my initial interest was in the U.S. Congress and not in Japanese American studies or Asian American studies. What shifted my interest toward Asian American studies was that I had witnessed firsthand a campus sit-in at the Princeton University president’s office, where students were fighting for the establishment of an Asian American studies program. Witnessing such an incident, I realized that Asian Americans were an understudied topic in the field of political science. There is also a tendency for scholars from Japan to focus exclusively on Japanese Americans and to disregard other Asian American ethnic groups. Since I did not start out my study on Asian Americans in a graduate school in Japan with an interest in Japanese Americans, I have been able to avoid taking that kind of path....

Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Indigenous Epistemologies ◽  
Transnational American Studies ◽  
Pacific Studies ◽  
Colonial Archives

As part of the paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific in transnational American studies, this volume not only offers critical ways in which we rethink American exceptionalism, but it also engages the critical visions represented by New American studies, Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Pacific studies. By calling attention to the “oceanic archives” and indigenous epistemologies, the volume addresses colonialism and imperialism at their roots from both sides of the colonizer and the colonized and articulates what has been central to de-colonial thinking—indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, non-Western knowledge production and dissemination. As the transpacific continues to hold the global spotlight as moments of military, cultural, and geopolitical contentions as well as spaces of economic integration, negotiation, and resistance on national and global scales, we develop transpacificAmerican studies as the new cutting-edge in transnational American studies, global studies, and postcolonial studies.The essays collected in the volume recover the early oceanic archives to remap transpacific movements in different directions and at different moments, interrogate the colonial archives to reinvent indigenous ontologies and epistemologies,explore alternative oceanic archives to develop competing visions and forms of the transpacific. Above all, it speculates upon new directions in which transpacific American studies may pursue.

Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949

1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 306-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam McKeown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transnational Families ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Primary Research ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Chinese Migration

Each of these epigrams is from an exemplary work of primary research. While not entirely exclusive—potential for overlap appears in the ideas of “mutual development” and “transfer” of culture—they each exemplify different research agendas that result in competing narratives of Chinese migration. Sucheng Chan's work is part of a larger project of contemporary Asian American studies to incorporate Chinese as important actors in American history. It emphasizes the adaptations of Chinese social organization in the United States, and explains them as necessary and unprecedented responses to unfamiliar challenges. Although Chan pays more attention than many Asian American historians to Chinese nationalism, transnational families, and continued links to China, she does not follow the implications of these descriptions so far as to reformulate her narrative of migration as a monodirectional relocation followed by locally conditioned transformation (see also S. Chan 1991, 63–66,96–97; 1990). In their most extremely America-centered versions, Asian American histories have treated these extra-American phenomena as little more than byproducts of exclusion and racism, and denounced the idea of the temporary Chinese sojourner as an orientalist construction (A. Chan 1981).

Hemispheric Approaches to Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Goellnicht
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Asian American ◽  
North American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian North American

Hemispheric approaches to Asian American literature disrupt, supplement, and interrogate the cultural nationalist focus of early Asian American studies, transpacific and transnational approaches to Asian American studies that came to prominence in the 1990s, and the overall dominance of the United States in Asian American studies. These approaches have largely been championed by scholars working in Canada or on Canadian material, by feminist and queer scholars, and by those working on interethnic or interracial approaches between “Asian American” and black/African American, Latinx, and/or Native/Indigenous communities. The term “hemispheric” was preceded by Asian North American, which has been employed from fairly early in the maturing of Asian American literary and cultural criticism. Key also is the scholarly history of hemispheric approaches to Asian North American literature and culture (and to a lesser extent Asian Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture), the cross-border relations between artists and activists of Asian descent in North America, and the U.S. cultural imperialism inherent in this approach as well as its potential to diversify and open up the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies. The hemispheric approach also uncovers some of the limitations of the “transnational” and “diaspora” approaches that currently dominate Asian American studies and emphasize an east-west, transpacific spatiality.

Asian American Literary Reception and Readership

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Bhalla
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Literary Reception

Asian American literary studies, and multi-ethnic literatures more broadly, have maintained a constant faith in the power of literature as a potential tool of anti-racist education. This faith in literature’s potential is not naïve, since it also recognizes how even the most diverse and ideal literary education can be co-opted by the workings of capitalism and neoliberalism. These fields are founded in an enduring and powerful belief that literature affects the social, cultural, and political esteem of a minority group in the United States. Within the field of Asian American studies, academics, activists, and cultural critics have sought to harness the power of various forms of cultural discourse and literature by mediating the stories told about (and at times by) Asian Americans. As Asian American literature has grown in popularity, there has been increasing attention to questions of who is represented within Asian American literature and who is deemed worthy to produce these representations. Such concerns have over time produced an abiding if somewhat tacit interest in questions of literary reception in the field. In fact, although many of the major literary controversies in Asian American studies have circulated around questions of representation and reception and ushered in paradigm shifts in how the field has conceptualized itself, it is an area that remains understudied. Asian American literary reception study and studies of readership are still emerging and crucial areas of analysis that could pose and posit answers to questions of literature’s possibilities and limitations as a tool of anti-racism in 21st-century America.

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