Comedy, Humor, and Asian American Representation

Author(s):  
Caroline Kyungah Hong

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.

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the “other” within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the “other,” and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been.


2000 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 347-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles N. Weaver

Analysis of the responses of Asian American ( n = 178), African American ( n = 1,026), and European American ( n = 8,118) full-time workers to 21 nationwide surveys representative of the U.S. labor force from 1972 through 1996 showed the job satisfaction of Asian Americans compared to that of the other two groups was affected by whether subjects were born in the United States. In addition, there were no gender differences in job satisfaction among African Americans and European Americans who were and were not born in the U.S., but there were such differences among Asian Americans.


Author(s):  
Stewart Chang

The place of Asian Americans in the American national narrative has always been mediated through the laws, particularly relating to citizenship and immigration. In the 19th century, Asian Americans were marginalized and omitted from the national narrative through discriminatory laws that excluded them from naturalized citizenship, civic participation, and eventually immigration. During this era, Asians were stereotyped in literature and popular culture as threatening menaces that required restriction and surveillance, which was later exacerbated by the hostilities between the United States and Japan during World War II. Asian American writers during this era sought to challenge the stereotypical representations of Asians and provided voice to the silences produced by the discriminatory laws. Following World War II, as the United States redefined itself as the leader of the free world during the Cold War, the discriminatory laws were reformed, and Asian Americans were reconstructed into a model minority that now served the dominant narrative of America as a nation of equality and opportunity. Asian American authors in this era resisted such co-opting of Asian American experiences by writing counter-histories that challenge the grand narrative of American exceptionalism produced by seemingly progressive laws that these authors critique as reifying and perpetuating racist and xenophobic biases that continue to be applied to not only Asian Americans but also other minority groups.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Scerri

<span>The very nature of chemistry presents us with a tension. A tension between the exhilaration of diversity of substances and forms on the one hand and the safety of fundamental unity on the other. Even just the recent history of chemistry has been al1 about this tension, from the debates about Prout's hypothesis as to whether there is a primary matter in the 19th century to the more recent speculations as to whether computers will enable us to virtually dispense with experimental chemistry.</span>


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 328-328
Author(s):  
Simona Kwon ◽  
Deborah Min ◽  
Stella Chong

Abstract Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial and ethnic minority group in the United States, whose population is aging considerably. Previous studies indicate that social isolation and loneliness disproportionately affects older adults and predicts greater physical, mental, and cognitive decline. A systematic literature review using PRISMA guidelines was conducted to address this emerging need to understand the scope of research focused on social isolation and loneliness among the disparity population of older Asian Americans. Four interdisciplinary databases were searched: PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and AgeLine; search terms included variations on social isolation, loneliness, Asian Americans, and older adults. Articles were reviewed based on six eligibility criteria: (1) research topic relevance, (2) study participants aged &gt;60 years, (3) Asian immigrants as main participants, (4) conducted in the United States, (5) published between 1995-2019, and (6) printed in the English language. The search yielded 799 articles across the four databases and 61 duplicate articles were removed. Abstracts were screened for the 738 remaining studies, 107 of which underwent full-text review. A total of 56 articles met the eligibility criteria. Synthesis of our review indicates that existing research focuses heavily on Chinese and Korean American immigrant communities, despite the heterogeneity of the diverse Asian American population. Studies were largely observational and employed community-based sampling. Critical literature gaps exist surrounding social isolation and loneliness in Asian American older adults, including the lack of studies on South Asian populations. Future studies should prioritize health promotion intervention research and focus on diverse understudied Asian subgroups.


2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-56
Author(s):  
Christian Schmitt

Abstract The discrepancy between common temporary expectations of Switzerland as idyll on the one hand, and the reality of its industrially organized tourism on the other, imposes irritations upon the touristic gaze. This article, then, traces the origins of this discrepancy and examines the relationship between Swiss idyll and tourism in the 19th century. The analyses of Ida Hahn-Hahn’s Eine Idylle and Hans Christian Andersen’s Iisjomfruen showcase different ways of relating idyll and tourism to one another as well as the aesthetic merit produced by this constellation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Author(s):  
Riva Kastoryano ◽  
Alejandro Portes

Pascal Delisle (American Center in Sciences Po Director): Professor Kastoryano and Professor Portes, your respective studies invite to a comparison between the situations of the United States on the one hand, and of Europe on the other.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (128) ◽  
pp. 401-417
Author(s):  
Paul van Tongeren

Is friendship still possible under nihilistic conditions? Kant and Nietzsche are important stages in the history of the idealization of friendship, which leads inevitably to the problem of nihilism. Nietzsche himself claims on the one hand that only something like friendship can save us in our nihilistic condition, but on the other hand that precisely friendship has been unmasked and become impossible by these very conditions. It seems we are struck in the nihilistic paradox of not being allowed to believe in the possibility of what we cannot do without. Literary imagination since the 19th century seems to make us even more skeptical. Maybe Beckett provides an illustration of a way out that fits well to Nietzsche's claim that only "the most moderate, those who do not require any extreme articles of faith" will be able to cope with nihilism.


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