Hmong American Literature and Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aline Lo ◽  
Kong Pheng Pha
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hmong American

Hmong American literature is an emerging field within Asian American literature, seeing a steep rise in production starting in the early 2000s. In collective and individual publication efforts, the literature includes mostly memoirs, short stories, and poetry. Essays, personal narratives, transcribed oral folktales, and plays have also been published in anthologies, including two that are edited by Hmong American writers. Although there has been an upsurge in publication and a wide representation in terms of genres, there is still no widely published Hmong American novel. Coming from an orality-based culture and a long history of marginalization both in Asia and the United States, many Hmong American narratives contend with issues related to silence and secrecy. In the context of 20th-century French imperialism and US neocolonialism, much of the literature also touches on the subjects of displacement, refugee resettlement, trauma, and cultural shifts. Of the latter, there is a definite preoccupation with religion and changes in gender roles and sexuality, particularly as many of the writers have been born or largely raised in the United States and are therefore interested in representing Hmong American identities and experiences. Hmong American literature can also be characterized by a sense of regionalism; many of the narratives and publications take place in heavily Hmong-populated areas like the Central Valley of California and Upper Midwest states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. While the move toward textuality comes with its own problems, it also presents Hmong Americans with a new method of self-representation. Historically studied by outsiders and exoticized for belonging to a culture that has resisted assimilation and maintained a unique language, religion, and cultural practices, Hmong writers are producing their own narratives, and altogether, the literature is rich with complex characters, speakers, and stories that represent and explore Hmong American experiences.

Japanese American Buddhism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michihiro Ama ◽  
Michael Masatsugu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
American Buddhism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jodo Shinshu

Japanese Buddhism was introduced to the United States at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, but the development of Japanese American Buddhism, also known as Nikkei Buddhism, really began when Japanese migrants brought Buddhism with them to Hawaii and the continental United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been influenced by, and has reflected, America’s sociopolitical and religious climate and the US relationship to Japan, to which generations of Japanese Americans, such as Issei (literally, first generation, referring to Japanese immigrants), Nisei (second-generation American-born offspring of the Issei), and Sansei (third generation), responded differently. While adapting to American society, Japanese American Buddhists maintained their cultural practices and ethnoreligious identity. The history of Japanese American Buddhism discussed in this article spans from the late-19th Century to the 1970s and is divided into three major periods: the pre-World War II, World War II, and the postwar eras. Japanese American Buddhism is derived from the various Buddhist organizations in Japan. The Nishi Hongwanji denomination of Jōdo Shinshū, a form of Pure Land Buddhism known as Shin Buddhism in the West, is the oldest and largest form of ethnic Japanese Buddhism in the United States. In Hawaii, Nishi Hongwanji founded the Hompa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii (HHMH) in Honolulu in 1897. On the continental United States, it established the Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA) in San Francisco in 1898, currently known as the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA). Other Japanese Buddhist organizations also developed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. They include the Jōdo-shū, another sect of Pure Land Buddhism; Higashi Hongwanji, another major denomination of Jōdoshin-shū; Sōtō-shū, a Zen Buddhist school; Shingon-shū, known as Kōyasan Buddhism; and Nichiren-shū. The characteristics of Japanese American Buddhism changed significantly during World War II, when approximately 120,000 persons of Japanese descent living in the West Coast states were incarcerated because of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The postwar period witnessed a rapid transformation in the status and visibility of Japanese Buddhism in the United States. This transformation was driven by the promotion of ethnonational Buddhism by Nisei and by the growth of interest in Zen Buddhism among the general American public. The positive reception of Japanese Buddhism in the United States reflected and reinforced the transformed relationship between the United States and Japan from wartime enemies to Cold War partners. While they experienced greater receptivity and interest in Buddhism from nonethnics, they could no longer practice or espouse Jōdo Shinshū teachings or adapted practices without clarification. Debates concerning the authenticity of Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism and Japanese American Buddhist practices were interwoven within a longer history of American Orientalism. By the 1960s, Japanese American Buddhist communities were transformed by the addition of a small but vocal nonethnic membership and a new generation of Sansei Buddhists. Demands for English-speaking ministers resulted in the creation, in 1967, of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, the first graduate-level training program in the United States endorsed by Nishi Hongwanji. This article is an overview of Japanese American Buddhism with a focus on the development of the Nishi Hongwanji Shin Buddhist organizations in the United States. English scholarship on the development of other Japanese Buddhist organizations in the United States is still limited. Throughout the history of Japanese American Buddhism, Nikkei Buddhists negotiated with America’s political institutions and Christian churches, as well as with Euro-American Buddhists, over Buddhist and cultural practices to maintain and redefine their ethnoreligious tradition. Buddhist temples provided the space for them to gather and build a community of shared faith and cultural heritage, discuss their place and the role of Buddhism in American society, and express their concerns to America’s general public.

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Intersections of Arab American and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol W.N. Fadda
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Arab American Literature

The interconnections between Asian American and Arab American studies are deep and long-standing, with scholars and activists in both these intersecting fields affirming their common investments in anti-racist, anti-imperial, transnational, and coalitional feminist frameworks. Various scholars have even called for Arab Americans to be included under a broader definition of Asian American identities. An intersectional study of the forms of alliances and solidarities developing among these racialized communities becomes a cornerstone for combating the effects of racism, orientalism, imperialism, and xenophobia, as well as enactments of occupation, exclusions, internment, and incarceration carried out by the projects of colonialism and empire within the United States and abroad. Even while being shaped by the specificities of geographical, historical, and political contexts, Arab American literature showcases an array of thematic foci and engagements that link it to other ethnic literary traditions, including Asian American literature. Such thematic connections extend to engagements with cultural and transnational in-betweenness, collective and individual marginalization and racialization, wars and conflicts in original home countries and their effects on US diasporic identities, transnational connections and movement across borders, food and cultural memory, language, gender roles, heritage, and religious expression, to name but a few. The literary output of Arab American and Asian American writers from the 19th century up till the early 21st century closely reflects the factors that shape Arab and Asian experiences in the United States and the conditions that shape the affective, material, legal, and political lives of immigrant and diasporic communities. The viewpoints, experiences, and perspectives presented in the works of Arab American and Asian American writers, however, are far from uniform. They are widely varied, encompassing different immigration pathways, histories, struggles, military and geopolitical conflicts, literary lineages, and artistic investments.

Filipino American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Filipino Americans ◽  
Filipino American ◽  
American Group

The large body of Filipino American literature has helped to define and challenge the boundaries of the Asian American literary canon. Documenting various waves of Filipino migration to the United States as a result of US-Philippine colonial relations beginning at the turn of the 20th century, Filipino American literature includes genres such as autobiography, novels, short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction (letter writing and essays), and graphic literature. While Filipino American literature shares common themes with other forms of Asian American literature (exile, displacement, racist exclusion), it is distinguished by its inability to adhere to an immigrant-assimilationist paradigm. Filipino American literature provides insight into the experiences of Filipino colonial and neocolonial subjects who have migrated from the periphery to the center. The unique historical and geopolitical framework of US-Philippine relations recasts themes such as the search for identity and “home,” the seduction of assimilation, and postcolonial resistance to US orientalist discourse. At the heart of the Filipino American writer’s discovery that she is a part of, yet apart from, Asian America is the task of confronting her unique location as informed by the Filipino collective experience of racial/national subordination. For Filipino Americans, racism and US colonial/neocolonial control of the Philippines are inextricably intertwined. Filipino Americans, the second largest Asian American group in the United States and the largest Asian American group in the state of California, constitute a major segment of the Filipino diaspora which is over twelve million—a majority of whom labor as Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). More than 5000 Filipinos depart the Philippines daily as a strategy for economic survival. US-Philippine neocolonial relations, together with the traumatic global dispersal of Filipinos, function as the political unconscious of contemporary forms of Filipino American literature. These works grapple with heterogeneity, difference, displacement, and diverse strategies of decolonization—from exploring the complexity of Filipino American identity (intersection of race, gender, sexuality, class) to articulating the yearning to belong. For contemporary writers, Filipino American identity and the concept of decolonization are contested terrains—both still in the process of becoming.

The Beard, Masculinity, and Otherness in the Contemporary American Novel

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER FERRY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
John Updike ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Key Issues

This article identifies the humble beard as a device used in twenty-first-century American literature to examine the contemporary condition of American masculinity. Drawing on readings from key writers of post-9/11 fiction, such as John Updike, Moshin Hamid, and Don DeLillo, the article calls for the need to move on from the reductive rendering of the beard as an irrefutable representation of Otherness to see the beard as a device used to explore the construction of masculinities in relation to key issues such as racialization, sexuality and the queering of the Other, and nationhood in the globalized and globalizing arena of the United States. Reading Amy Waldman's nuanced engagement with the beard in The Submission (2011) alongside key works on hegemonic masculinity, whiteness, and globalized masculinities, the article underlines the power of the beard in the contradictions and complexities of a changing American masculinity now performed beyond the physical borders of “the nation” on the global stage.

Eugenics, Reproduction, and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asha Nadkarni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Population Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian American Women ◽  
Asian Populations ◽  
Asian Immigration

Asian American literature has capaciously explored the issues of gender, sexuality, and reproduction that have been so foundational to Asian American racial formation. It has likewise engaged, directly or indirectly, with “eugenics,” a pseudoscience by which nation states sought to improve their populations through managing reproduction. Eugenics, a term coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton in 1883, spans the late 19th to the early 21st centuries, where it continues in the form of population control and the “new” eugenics of genetic and reproductive technologies. In some national sites eugenics was aligned with feminist movements for birth control, whereas in others, such as the United States, they were largely opposed. Nonetheless, eugenic feminists argued that women’s right reproduction was the necessary mechanism by which women should gain rights within the state; as a formation, moreover, eugenic feminism specifically targeted Asian American women as standing in the way of US feminist advance. As such, one of the key ways eugenics was practiced in the United States in relationship to Asian populations was through immigration policy. The history of Asian exclusion in the United States therefore speaks to a larger eugenic project predicated on the notion that Asian immigrants embodied a public health threat in terms of diseases and deviant sexualities of various sorts. The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act opened up Asian immigration to the United States and also gave rise to a new set of stereotypes, gendered and otherwise, about Asian Americans as model minorities. Asian American literature has critically mined these issues, with some Asian American literature acceding to eugenics by stressing an assimilationist politics and with other works challenging it by critiquing eugenics’ reproductive logic of purity.

The Intersections of Latina/o and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Thananopavarn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Latin Americans

Latina/os and Asian Americans have lived in what is now the United States for hundreds of years, yet they are often considered foreign in the national imaginary. Legally, through acts excluding Latina/os and Asians from citizenship, and socially, through targeted anti-immigration rhetoric, both groups have been racialized in the United States as outsiders. This form of racial discrimination, also called “nativistic racism,” forms the basis of several intersections of Latina/o and Asian American literature. Latina/o and Asian American literary works counter nativistic racism by emphasizing multiracial histories within the United States, by drawing attention to racial injustices, and by employing tropes of loyalty and betrayal to highlight the selective ways that the United States has defined citizenship and belonging along racial lines. Latina/o and Asian American texts may also recognize the US military interventions that brought Asians and Latin Americans to the United States as (post)colonial subjects, Cold War allies, and refugees. Some of these texts counter national narratives such as American exceptionalism and Cold War bilateralism; others protest the erasure of military actions overseas from dominant histories of the United States. In addition to suggesting comparative intersections, Latina/o and Asian American literatures also depict literal interactions when Latina/o characters feature prominently in Asian American texts and vice versa. Literature set in California and other areas with high Asian American and Latina/o populations portrays both the significant contact and common political interests between Latina/os and Asian Americans. This long history of contact appears in early texts that center on Asian American and Latina/o farmworkers; it continues in more recent literature featuring Latina/o and Asian American friendships, partnerships, and rivalries. Some Filipino texts emphasize cultural commonalities with Mexican Americans, including Spanish-language surnames and Catholicism. A final intersection of Latina/o and Asian American literature occurs in texts by authors who are both Asian and Latina/o, including Peruvians, Cubans, Mexicans, and other Latin Americans of Asian descent. Written in both English and Spanish, this literature draws attention to the transpacific connections between Asia and the Americas. While it is crucial to acknowledge the historical particularities of Latina/o and Asian American literature, as well as the diversity within each of these groups, recognizing the ways in which these literatures intersect is important to understanding cross-racial alliances of the past and potential solidarities for the future.

Global India in 21st-Century Asian American Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Call Center ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
The World

Twenty-first-century Asian American literature is a developing archive of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and multimodal cultural texts. As a field, it is marked by its simultaneous investments in exploring the United States’ imperial geopolitical relations and the concurrent rise of Asia. Global India, a shorthand for the nation’s ascendance onto the world stage after the liberalizing market reforms of the early 1990s, is discernible in Asian American—and particularly South Asian American—depictions of a range of figures including call center agents, entrepreneurial farmers, art gallery owners, and globe-trotting filmmakers. It is an India to which many writers imagine returning, given its heightened standing in the world economy and the prospect of American decline. This change marks a shift in the literature from the Americas being the primary locus of attachment to Asia as a site of possible reinvestment, both psychic and material. Asian American writers frequently focus on parallels between the experience of international migration and that of in-country migration to India’s major cities. They also tacitly register the rise of India in narratives about the abortive promises of the American dream. In comparison to Asian American literatures of the 20th century, which were primarily read as part of the multiethnic canon of American literature, Asian American literatures written under the sign of Global India are equally legible as part of diasporic, postcolonial, world, and global Anglophone literary formations. Many writers considered postcolonial in the 20th century may be profitably read in the 21st century as Asian American as well, whether because of a move to the United States or a professed affiliation. This expansion of the field is a consequence of the evolving diasporic and global imaginaries of Asian American writers and scholars.

Reading South Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajini Srikanth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Global Vision

“South Asia” is the term used to refer to that part of Asia that comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. South Asian American literary studies emerged from the ethnic studies movements in the United States during the late 1960s. Asian American literary studies has analyzed poetry, fiction, memoir, and drama by writers of South Asian descent living in the United States, first by looking at the principal thematic impulses found in the writings and the literary techniques employed by authors from the early 1900s into the 21st century. Scholars have also argued that the worldviews and representations of South Asian American writers, sometimes considered within the category of “postcolonial” literature rather than multiethnic literature, gesture beyond the narrow confines of genre, nation, religion, ethnicity, and culture. South Asian American literary studies illuminates these texts’ unexpected connectivities, global vision, and entwined histories and highlights how those who read them have the opportunity to enlarge their consciousness.

Human Rights and Asian American Literature and Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Parikh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late 20Th Century

Asian American literature and art have had an illuminating effect on the significance of human rights in the United States and in national culture. Americans are often assumed to enjoy exceptional liberties and rights, which they seek in turn to deliver to other people, in other parts of the world. However, Asian American cultural critique provides an incisive perspective on the limits of citizenship and national belonging as the basis for the granting of fundamental human freedoms, rights, and protections to all persons. The legal exclusion of Asians from immigration and naturalization, as well as from other forms of social and economic security such as property ownership, has long been justified through the construction of Asian racial difference. Reforms in immigration law after World War II, which did eventually transform Asian American life in the United States, took place in the context of a “global Cold War,” and during the same period that saw the institution of an international human rights regime. “Integration” proved as essential a mandate in US domestic and foreign policy as did “containment” in this global conflict. As a result, not only has the Asian American population grown significantly and become more heterogeneous since the late 20th century, the nation has seen the flourishing of Asian American literary and cultural production. Asian American writers and artists have been especially keen to investigate the political, legal, and ideological tensions and contradictions that pervade the postsocialist world and the war on terror. Their works explore the political precarity faced by those caught between the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism, the logics and technologies of state security, and the legal tethering of human rights to citizenship.

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