Post-World War II Asian American Suburban Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Padoongpatt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Grocery Stores ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii

Substantial numbers of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants moved into suburbs across the United States after World War II, bringing distinctive everyday lifeways, identities, worldviews, family types, and community norms that remade much of American suburbia. Although Asian Americans were excluded from suburbs on racial grounds since the late 19th century, American Cold War objectives in Asia and the Pacific and domestic American civil rights struggles afforded Asian Americans increased access to suburban housing in the 1950s, especially Chinese and Japanese Americans. Following passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, new groups of Asian Americans, particularly Filipino, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and South Asian Indian, joined Chinese and Japanese Americans in settling in earnest into all kinds of suburban neighborhoods. At the turn of the 21st century, a majority of Asians resided in the suburbs, which also became the preferred gateway communities for new immigrants who often bypassed urban cores and moved straight to the suburbs when they arrived. Entrance into highly racialized postwar suburbs defined by white middle-class norms and segregated white privilege did not, however, mean that Asian Americans gained entry or assimilated into whiteness. While many certainly aspired to and reinforced long-standing white suburban ideals, others revamped, contested, and outright fractured dominant notions of the suburban good life. By the 1980s Asian Americans of various ethnic and national backgrounds had transformed the sights, sounds, and smells of suburban landscapes throughout the country. They made claims on suburban space and asserted a “right to the suburb” through a range of social and cultural practices, often in physical places, especially shopping plazas, grocery stores, restaurants, religious centers, and schools. Yet as Asian Americans tried to become full-fledged participants in suburban culture and life, their presence, ethnic expressions, and ways of life sparked tensions with other mostly white suburbanites that led to heated debates over immigration, race, multiculturalism, and assimilation in American society. The history of post-World War II Asian American suburban cultures highlights suburbia as a principal setting for Asian American experiences and the making of Asian American identity during the second half of the 20th century. More broadly, the Asian American experience reveals how control over the suburban ideal and the making of suburban space in the United States was and remains a contested, layered process. It also underscores the racial and ethnic diversification of metropolitan America and how pressing social, political, economic, and cultural issues in US society played out increasingly on the suburban stage. Moreover, Asian Americans built communities and social networks precisely the moment in which the authentic “American” community was supposedly in decline, providing a powerful counterpunch to those who lament nonwhite populations, particularly immigrants, for fracturing an otherwise unified American culture or sense of togetherness.

Asian Americans and the Cold War

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Strategic Alliances ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
The Cold War

The global political divides of the Cold War propelled the dismantling of Asian exclusion in ways that provided greater, if conditional, integration for Asian Americans, in a central aspect of the reworking of racial inequality in the United States after World War II. The forging of strategic alliances with Asian nations and peoples in that conflict mandated at least token gestures of greater acceptance and equity, in the form of changes to immigration and citizenship laws that had previously barred Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”1 During the Cold War, shared politics and economic considerations continued to trump racial difference as the United States sought leadership of the “free” capitalist world and competed with Soviet-led communism for the affiliation and cooperation of emerging, postcolonial Third World nations. U.S. courtship of once-scorned peoples required the end of Jim Crow systems of segregation through the repeal of discriminatory laws, although actual practices and institutions proved far more resistant to change. Politically and ideologically, culture and values came to dominate explanations for categories and inequalities once attributed to differences in biological race. Mainstream media and cultural productions celebrated America’s newfound embrace of its ethnic populations, even as the liberatory aspirations inflamed by World War II set in motion the civil rights movement and increasingly confrontational mobilizations for greater access and equality. These contestations transformed the character of America as a multiracial democracy, with Asian Americans advancing more than any other racial group to become widely perceived as a “model minority” by the 1980s with the popularization of a racial trope first articulated during the 1960s. Asian American gains were attained in part through the diminishing of barriers in immigration, employment, residence, education, and miscegenation, but also because their successes affirmed U.S. claims regarding its multiracial democracy and because reforms of immigration law admitted growing numbers of Asians who had been screened for family connections, refugee status, and especially their capacity to contribute economically. The 1965 Immigration Act cemented these preferences for educated and skilled Asian workers, with employers assuming great powers as routes to immigration and permanent status. The United States became the chief beneficiary of “brain drain” from Asian countries. Geometric rates of Asian American population growth since 1965, disproportionately screened through this economic preference system, have sharply reduced the ranks of Asian Americans linked to the exclusion era and set them apart from Latino, black, and Native Americans who remain much more entrenched in the systems of inequality rooted in the era of sanctioned racial segregation.

Law and Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Chang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
The 19Th Century

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.

Bonds and Barriers

2021 ◽  
pp. 260-294
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Enlisted Personnel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

Chapter 7 follows nonblack minorities through their training and service in the United States. America’s World War II military, from its top leaders to its enlisted personnel, simultaneously built and blurred a white-nonwhite divide alongside its black-white one. On the one hand, the blurring stemmed from a host of factors, including the day-to-day intermingling of troops, the activism of nonblack minorities, and, paradoxically, the unifying power of the black-white divide among nonblacks. On the other hand, this blurring had its limits. White-nonwhite lines cropped up in some of the same places black-white ones did and in some different ones, too, especially those related to national security and Japanese Americans. In the end, these lines remained in place throughout the war years, despite continuous blurring. They did so in part because of these racialized national security concerns and because of the power of civilian racist practices and investments.

3. Living in the margins

2016 ◽  
pp. 52-82
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
World War ◽  
Birthright Citizenship ◽  
Economic Discrimination

“Living in the margins” considers the lived realities of immigrants’ efforts to foster community, livelihood, and family under exclusion. Birthright citizenship was a key steppingstone to securing some rights in the United States, but still did not protect the American-born from racial discrimination. Asian Americans remained primarily associated with demarcated residential and employment niches that confined their perceived threat, but also facilitated the pooling and sharing of resources necessary for survival in an openly hostile society. Anti-Asian hostilities became institutionalized through laws, government bureaucracies, and social and economic discrimination. The nadir was World War II when Japanese, even American-born citizens, were removed into “relocation camps” as “enemy aliens.”

Business History at the Hagley Museum and Library

1986 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nash
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Business History ◽  
World War ◽  
Atlantic Region ◽  
Post World War Ii

From its beginnings in the private library of Pierre S. du Pont, the Hagley Museum and Library has grown into a leading resource for business historians, particularly for those interested in the development of the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. In this thorough description of the Hagley's collections, Dr. Nash demonstrates the breadth and depth of its holdings, from the papers of the eighteenth-century Physiocrats to those of New Deal and post-World War II companies and business leaders.

In Defense of Justice

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.

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.

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