Marxism, Economic Theory, and Asian American Literary Studies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Chiang
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Cheap Labor ◽  
Japanese Internment ◽  
Money Economy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Inquiry ◽  
And Gender

As migrants who were drawn to North America to serve as cheap labor, questions of money, economy, and class have been central to Asian American experiences from the mid-19th century, and Marx’s critique of capitalism has circulated almost as long among Asian Americans and anticolonial, nationalist movements in Asia. However, the long history in the communist movement of the subordination of racial and gender inequality to a narrowly defined class struggle alienated many in US racialized communities. Subsequent interventions in Marxist theory leading to non-economically determinist accounts of social transformation have resulted in a post-Marxist Asian American literary and cultural studies. This is a theory, though, that is largely devoid of specifically economic inquiry, and this has led to the marginalization of questions of class, labor, and whiteness that might complicate questions about resistance to domination and capitalist hegemony. These elisions are only exacerbated in the turn to global and transnational frames of analysis, since the complexities of local racial dynamics are often lost in more abstract narratives and conceptual paradigms. The history of Japanese internment provides a case study that exemplifies some of the difficulties of evaluating the multiple forces motivating racial discrimination.

Surviving the Bomb in America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoko Wake
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian America ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Costs ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
And Gender

This article explores the little-known history of Japanese American survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By focusing on this particular group of survivors with a careful attention to their layered citizenship, national belonging, and gender identity, the article makes important connections between the history of the bomb and the history of immigration across the Pacific. U.S. survivors were both American citizens and immigrants with deep ties to Japan. Their stories expand our understanding of the bomb by taking it out of the context of the clash between nations and placing it in the lives of people who were not within a victors-or-victims dichotomy. Using oral histories with U.S. survivors, their families, and their supporters, the article reveals experiences, memories, and activism that have connected U.S. survivors to both Japan and the United States in person-centered, relatable ways. Moreover, the article brings to light under-explored aspects of Asian America, namely, significant intersections of former internees’ and bomb survivors’ experiences and the role of older women’s agency in the making of Asian American identity. In so doing, the article destabilizes the rigidly nation-bound understanding of the bomb and its human costs that has prevailed in the Pacific region.

scholarly journals The female memory factory: How the gendered labour of memory creates mnemonic capital

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-312
Author(s):  
Anna Reading
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Women Survivors ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Sydney Australia

Within feminist memory studies the economy has largely been overlooked, despite the fact that the economic analysis of culture and society has long featured in research on women and gender. This article addresses that gap, arguing that the global economy matters in understanding the gender of memory and memories of gender. It models the conceptual basis for the consideration of a feminist economic analysis of memory that can reveal the dimensions of mnemonic transformation, accumulation and exchange through gendered mnemonic labour, gendered mnemonic value and gendered mnemonic capital. The article then applies the concepts of mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital in more detail through a case study of memory activism examining the work of the Parragirls and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project (PFFP) in Sydney, Australia. The campaigns have worked to recognize the memory and history of the longest continuous site of female containment in Australia built to support the British invasion. The site in Parramatta, which dates from the 1820s, was a female factory for transported convicts, a female prison, an asylum for women and girls, an orphanage and then Parramatta Girls Home. The Burramattagal People of Darug Clan are the Traditional Owners of the land and the site is of practical and spiritual importance to indigenous women. This local struggle is representative of a global economic system of gendered institutionalized violence and forgetting, The analysis shows how the mnemonic labour of women survivors accumulates as mnemonic value that is then transformed into institutional mnemonic capital. Focusing on how mnemonic labour creates lasting mnemonic capital reveals the gendered dimensions of memory which are critical for ongoing memory work.

Gendering the History of Race and Religion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Jemison
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Scholarly Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
History Of Race

This chapter shows how recent scholarly writing is bringing gender from the margin to the center of scholarship on race and religion and proposes new areas for research in American Indian, Latina/o, Asian American, and African American histories. These recent and future publications use intersectional and interdisciplinary methods to transform categories of scholarly analysis, namely those of religion, racial violence, and politics. This chapter broadly examines the state of this field of gender, race, and religion in American history and then turns to a case study of one of the field’s best developed areas, African American religious history, to show how attention to gender is changing the terms of scholarly conversation.

Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time: Arishima Cooperative Farm in Hokkaido, 1922–1935

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1845-1887
Author(s):  
SHO KONISHI
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Dual Purpose ◽  
New Era ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Tenant Farmer ◽  
Agricultural Laborers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tenant Farmers

AbstractThis paper offers a fresh anarchist history of modern rural experience at the heart of Japan's modernization project in Hokkaido. The rationalization of agricultural methods and the establishment of big farms in Hokkaido worked by tenant farmers served the dual purpose of both colonizing and modernizing Japan's northern frontier. Against the idea of progress imbued in that colonial project, the anarchist and celebrity writer, Arishima Takeo, liberated his tenant farmers by dissolving his tenant farm in Niseko in 1922. The farmers were made the new cooperative owners. Members of the farm, made famous during widespread tenant-farmer disputes, believed they stood at the heart of progress. ‘Sōgo fujō’ (mutual aid) was viewed as an ethic for social transformation, democracy and elimination of hierarchy that linked the farmers with the wider world. It was the farmers’ consciousness of working in a new era, better than ever before, that made them modern. Their community offers us a case study of the imagination and experience of modern temporality amongst the most unlikely subjects of the modern, ordinary agricultural laborers in rural Asia in the early twentieth century. This anarchist history challenges the conceptual framework that has categorized rural Japan as the seat of conservative politics, nativism and traditionalism, and the antithesis of modernity.

scholarly journals Trees, people, food and soil: A case study of participatory development in Malawi

1997 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Park
Keyword(s):  
Action Plan ◽  
Participatory Development ◽  
Participatory Rural Appraisal ◽  
Maize Production ◽  
Forestry Extension ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indigenous Trees ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Rural Appraisal

In rural Malawi, rapid population growth has contributed to deforestation, land and other chronic resource scarcities. In 1995, a team of Canadian graduate students and Malawian extension workers investigated and attempted to find solutions to specific local resource scarcities. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) was used to assess total resource supply, evaluate food security and gender issues, facilitate village fuelwood action plan and inquire into the non-adoption of a tree nursery scheme. This article relates the team's experiences and insights against reviews of the history of forestry in Malawi, recent initiatives in forestry extension, and the current condition of Malawi's indigenous woodlands. It is concluded that villagers are willing to plant trees provided their costs are minimized and maize production is not compromised. Key words: Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), participatory development, refugee affected areas, deforestation; indigenous trees, fuelwood

Women, Gender and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and its Frontier Zones, c. 1806–70

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Bradford
Keyword(s):  
Women And Gender ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Representations Of Women

That many studies in African and imperial history neglect women and gender is a commonplace. Using a case-study – the British Cape Colony and its frontier zones – this article attempts to demonstrate some consequences of this neglect. It argues, firstly, that it generates empirical inaccuracies as a result of the insignificance accorded to gender differentiation and to women themselves. Secondly, representations of women as unimportant, and men as ungendered, result in flawed analysis of both men and the colonial encounter. This view is argued in detail for two events: an 1825 slave rebellion and an 1856–7 millenarian movement. The article concludes that if gender and half the adult populace are marginalized in this way, the price is frequently interpretations which have limited purchase on the past.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Zack
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Iq Testing ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Race ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

The philosophy of race, progressively understood, is new to academic philosophy, although figures in the canon, including Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Hegel, expressed and influenced scientific ideas of human races in terms that would today be considered racist. Changes in the biological and social sciences and historical anti-oppression movements during the twentieth century led first to African American philosophy and today more broadly to the philosophy of race. This volume contains leading twenty-first-century thought in this new philosophical subfield, including the following: ideas of race in the history of philosophy; pluralistic historical ideas of race from Indigenous, Latin American, and Asian American traditions; philosophy of science and race; ideas of race in American philosophy and continental philosophy; racism and neo-racism; race as social construction; contemporary social issues in education, medicine, sports, IQ testing, and police profiling; public policy, law, and political philosophy; and race and gender.

Sisters and Sisterhood

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Social Reforms ◽  
Political Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Politically Active

This is a book about the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It uses the Kenney family as a case study through which to understand who these women were, what they wanted, and what the vote meant to them. It identifies why they became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicized, why they prioritized the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives in order to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. It addresses questions of class and gender, politics and activism, and agency and identity in the early twentieth century, engaging with recent historiographical research around politicization, networks, and transnationalism. It is a history of education, faith, and social mobility as well of suffrage, and of teachers, theosophists, political activists, social reforms, friends and sisters, as well as suffragettes.

Female Roles and the Rise of Actresses, 1915–c. 1950

Huju ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan P. J. Stock
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Central Element ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Music And Gender

A central element of the history of huju in the 20th century is the emergence of female performers: this in a tradition formerly dominated by men, some of whom impersonated female roles. This chapter focuses on issues pertaining to and associated with these new performers. Treated as a case study in the field of music and gender, and drawing on theoretical proposals from several fields, the chapter begins in the same historical area as that discussed in Chapter 1 but ranges beyond the former chapter's historical confines to consider some later data also.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Sueyoshi
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

The introduction presents the book’s main argument that San Francisco writers, illustrators, public officials, and community leaders at the turn of the century avidly discussing new freedoms in middle-class gender and sexuality framed white women as provocateurs while fueling racialized characterizations of Chinese and Japanese. A mountain of sex acts that often traversed boundaries of race and gender thus testified to more than just the power of individual will in a magnanimous city. They cohered to tell a provocative tale of misogyny and white supremacy. This chapter additionally contextualizes the book within San Francisco history; traces its intervention in the history of leisure, sexuality studies, whiteness studies, and Asian American studies; discusses its methods; and offers a chapter outline.

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