Melodrama and Asian American Performance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunha Na
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Theater ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Wedding Banquet

American theater has long used melodramatic elements to shape the contour of racial dynamics and its representations for white mainstream audiences. Recurrent tropes of racial melodrama have appeared in such works as George Aiken’s stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1858) and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), asserting a strong influence on the public perception of the ethical flaws of slavery and the ambiguity of racial identities. With its sympathetic portrayals of racial minorities as virtuous, innocent victims of social injustice, racial melodrama engaged white viewers in stories of racialized characters that aroused basic human feelings of compassion and sympathy as well as a sense of moral righteousness that encouraged and mobilized political actions, such as abolitionist movements, well beyond the theater. Modern and contemporary Asian American dramatists have adopted formal and thematic elements of melodrama and its affective strategies as a way to gain public visibility and re-articulate prevailing ethnic stereotypes formulated within a binary framework peculiar to melodrama. Melodrama’s emotional intensity and stylistic excesses effectively help to convey the historical, social, and emotional experiences of Asian Americans, including migration, displacement, and injustices such as Japanese American World War II incarceration. At the same time, Asian American dramatists’ critical revision of the melodramatic mode complicates the gendered and racialized dynamic that has defined the cultural identity of Asian Americans against white, mainstream America. The clearly melodramatic characteristics in Gladys Ling-Ai Li’s The Submission of Rose Moy (1924) seemingly reaffirm the stark division between Asian and American identities, only to reveal their ambiguities and uncertainties. While Velina Hasu Houson’s Asa Ga Kimashita (1981) and Tea (1987) render the suffering of Japanese American female characters emotionally relatable to the viewer as a universal experience, Asian female victimhood also serves as a melodramatic sign of national abjection under the violence of American racism and imperialism. Melodrama meets stage realism in Wakako Yamauchi’s The Music Lessons (1980) and in Philip Kan Gotanda’s The Wash (1985), where melodramatic pathos is facilitated through the plays’ attention to socio-political and psychological realism. Contemporary Asian American culture’s continued use of melodrama is most notable in transnational films such as The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Saving Face (2004), works that explore the potentials and limitations of melodrama as a critical aesthetic strategy.

Comparison of Suicide Rates Among Asian Americans in 2000 and 2010

2016 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yusuke Kuroki
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Mortality Data ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Ethnic Variation ◽  
Filipino American ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
American Women ◽  
Suicide Rates ◽  
Suicide Behaviors

This brief report used the mortality data to separately examine suicide rates of the six largest Asian American groups: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. In 2000, Japanese American men (13.8 per 100,000) showed significantly higher suicide rate than Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese American men (7.3, 4.0, and 6.1 per 100,000), whereas Chinese, Korean, and Japanese women (3.7, 3.9, and 4.3 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than Indian women (1.2 per 100,000). In 2010, Korean and Japanese American men (19.9 and 15.7 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than men of other Asian groups. Korean and Japanese American women (8.1 and 5.0 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than Indian and Filipino American women (1.5 and 1.8 per 100,000). The findings challenge the notion that Asian Americans are at low risk for suicide and underscore the importance of examining ethnic variation in suicide behaviors among Asian Americans.

"Incontestable Proof Will Be Exacted": Historians, Asian Americans, and the Medal of Honor

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
James C. McNaughton ◽  
Kristen E. Edwards ◽  
Jay M. Price
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The U.S

For more than a century the Medal of Honor has served as a revered symbol of valor and service to the nation. In the 1990s Japanese American veterans requested a review of their service in World War II to determine whether the U.S. Army has overlooked any of their number for the award. In 1996 a team of historians began a review of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who fought in that war. Their work resulted in the award of twenty-two new Medals of Honor in June 2000. The review was also a revealing journey into the challenges of amending public memory.

Yellowface Performance: Historical and Contemporary Contexts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Lee
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Interracial Interactions ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
American Theater ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
East West

In European and North American theater and film, the centuries-old practice of “yellowface”—white actors playing Asian-identified characters—has dominated the ways that Asians and Asian Americans have been presented. Since the 19th century, yellowface representations in American theater portrayed these characters as villainous despots, exotic curiosities, or comic fools. These roles in turn greatly reduced the opportunities for the employment and recognition of Asian and Asian American actors. Yellowface performance does not only misrepresent Asians and Asian Americans by limiting the kinds of visibility and opportunities that they might have, but it also supports the imagined distinctions between those values presumably embodied by white Americans and those associated with oriental others. Late-19th and early-20th-century plays such as George Ade’s The Sultan of Sulu (1902), Joseph Jarrow’s The Queen of Chinatown (1899), and David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly (1900) not only used yellowface acting but also expressed anxieties about interracial interactions and the potential for racial contamination produced by U.S. imperialism and Chinese immigration. Both yellowface and “whitewashing” (the erasure of Asian and Asian American characterizations from film and theater in order to benefit white actors) continue to be used in U.S. theater and film. In addition to protesting, Asian American performing artists have responded by creating alternative venues for Asian American performers and writers to make their talents known, such as Los Angeles’s East West Players (established in 1965). Asian Americans have also fully engaged with these issues through writing a host of plays that feature characterizations of actors who suffer the effects of discriminatory casting practices. Two plays in particular, David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face (2007) and Lloyd Suh’s Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery (2015) not only critique the legacies of yellowface representation but also prompt broader reflection on how contemporary Asian American identities are shaped by both political radicalism and “model minority” conformity. These plays re-appropriate yellowface to comment on the changing and contested nature of racial categories such as “Asian American” as well as the continuing problems of racial typecasting.

Asian American Children’s Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Park Dahlen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Asian Diaspora

Asian American children’s literature includes books of many different genres that depict some aspect of the Asian diaspora. In total, the books should depict the breadth and depth of Asian diasporic experiences. Children’s books published in the early 20th century include mostly folktales, while books published after the 1965 Immigration Act tend to include contemporary fiction, poetry, and biographies. They address topics such as immigration and acculturation as well as capture landmark moments and experiences in Asian American history, such as the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the transnational, transracial adoption of Asian children to the United States. Books published at the turn of the 20th century have broached newer topics, such as mixed-race identities, and are written in a variety of genres including fantasy. As noted by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, the number of books by and/or about Asian Americans published is disproportionate to the total number of books published each year and to the population of Asians in the Americas. Also some Asian American writers continue to publish on topics unrelated to their identities. Academic researchers, practitioners, and writers have addressed various aspects of how this body of literature represents Asian Americans, mostly noting distortions and erasure and offering suggestions for improvement, emerging topics, and engagement with young people.

Japantown and the Fillmore District

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clement Lai
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
American Experience ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Two Phases

Many Asian American neighborhoods faced displacement after World War II because of urban renewal or redevelopment under the 1949 Housing Act. In the name of blight removal and slum clearance this Act allowed local elites to procure federal money to seize land designated as blighted, clear it of its structures, and sell this land to private developers—in the process displacing thousands of residents, small businesses, and community institutions. San Francisco’s Fillmore District, a multiracial neighborhood that housed the city’s largest Japanese American and African American communities, experienced this postwar redevelopment. Like many Asian American neighborhoods that shared space with other communities of color, the Fillmore formed at the intersection of class inequality and racism, and it was this intersection of structural factors that led to substandard urban conditions. Rather than recognize the root causes of urban decline, San Francisco urban and regional elites argued that the Fillmore was among the city’s most blighted neighborhoods and advocated for the neighborhood’s destruction in the name of the public good. They also targeted the Fillmore because their postwar plans for remaking the city’s political economy envisioned the Fillmore as (1) a space to house white- collar workers in the postwar economy and (2) as an Asian-themed space for tourism that connected the city symbolically and economically to Japan, an important U.S. postwar ally. For over four decades these elite-directed plans for the Fillmore displaced more than 20,000 residents in two phases, severely damaging the community. The Fillmore’s redevelopment, then, provides a window into other cases of redevelopment and aids further investigations of the connection between Asian Americans and urban crisis. It also sheds light on the deeper history of displacement in the Asian American experience and contextualizes contemporary gentrification in Asian American neighborhoods.

Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory Solidarities across Settler States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Candace Fujikane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Alternative Evaluation ◽  
Starting Point

Following the focus on Palestine in the previous chapter, Chapter 9 takes as a critical starting point the complicit relationship Asian American politicians such as Senator Daniel Inouye shared with Israel. Such complicit “yellowwashing,” which involves a strategic remembrance of World War II–era Japanese American incarceration, presages Fujikane’s alternative evaluation of “liberatory solidarities” between Pacific Islanders and Palestinians.

The New Gold Mountain

Trespassers? ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willow S. Lung-Amam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
World War ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Innovation Economy

This chapter explores why the valley became such an important hub of racial and ethnic diversity, especially among recently arrived Asian immigrants in the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. Beginning with a brief look back at the pathways forged by early Asian American pioneers, the chapter focuses on the sweeping changes that occurred in the region economically, spatially, and socially after World War II. The chapter shows how Asian Americans navigated their new terrain and put down roots in working- and middle-class neighborhoods, in particular underscoring how the Fremont suburb's rapid growth and development were prefaced on the valley's booming innovation economy and Asian Americans' own suburban dreams.

Nikkei Baseball

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel O. Regalado
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
Asian American Identity

Nikkei Baseball examines baseball's evolving importance to the Japanese American community and the construction of Japanese American identity. Originally introduced in Japan in the late 1800s, baseball was played in the United States by Japanese immigrants first in Hawaii, then San Francisco and northern California, then in amateur leagues up and down the Pacific Coast. For Japanese American players, baseball was seen as a sport that encouraged healthy competition by imposing rules and standards of ethical behavior for both players and fans. The value of baseball as exercise and amusement quickly expanded into something even more important, a means for strengthening social ties within Japanese American communities and for linking their aspirations to America's pastimes and America's promise. Drawing from archival research, prior scholarship, and personal interviews, this book explores key historical factors such as Meiji-era modernization policies in Japan, American anti-Asian sentiments, internment during World War II, the postwar transition, economic and educational opportunities in the 1960s, the developing concept of a distinct “Asian American” identity, and Japanese Americans' rise to the major leagues with star players including Lenn Sakata and Kurt Suzuki and even managers such as the Seattle Mariners' Don Wakamatsu.

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