Asian American Mobilization and Political Identities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Sadhwani ◽  
Jane Junn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Group ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Asian American Identity

Immigrants from Asia have been a defining feature of demographic change over the last quarter century in the United States. The 2000 US Census identified Asian Americans as the fastest growing immigrant group in the nation and the Pew Research Center estimates that Asian Americans will become the largest immigrant group in the country by 2055. With that growth has come the development of a vibrant scholarly literature examining Asian American political participation in the United States. This article is designed to provide an overview of the major foundational studies that explore Asian American political behavior, including mobilization and participation in American politics. The earliest research began in the fields of political science and sociology and consider the viability of a panethnic Asian American identity as a unit of analysis for group-based behavior and political interests. Numerous scholars have considered the circumstances under which panethnic Asian American identity can be activated toward group behavior, and how differences in national origin can lead to variations in behavioral outcomes. Participation in American politics, however, is rooted in many other factors such as socioeconomics, one’s experience as an immigrant, ties to the home country, and structural barriers to activism. Individual resources have long been considered an essential component to understanding political participation. Yet, Asian Americans present a puzzle in American politics, evincing higher education and income while participating in politics at a more modest rate. In response to this puzzle, scholars have theorized that structural conditions and the experience faced by Asian immigrants are powerful mechanisms in understanding the determinants of Asian American political participation. Once considered to have relatively weak partisan attachment and little interaction with the two major parties in the United States, studies that examine the development of partisan attachment among Asian Americans are explored which, more recently, find that a growing majority of Asian Americans have shown a preference for the Democratic Party. Finally, we detail studies examining the conditions under which Asian American candidates emerge and are successful, the co-ethnic electorate who supports them, and conclude by detailing the opportunities and constraints for cross-racial collaboration and conflict.

scholarly journals "Machine Town": Panethnic Asian American Identity in Philadelphia Politics

Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Ronald Raju Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Political Organizing ◽  
Asian American Identity

This paper investigated the topic of panethnic Asian American political coalition-building in Philadelphia politics, to determine if efforts to forge such a coalition succeeded. This paper traced the scholarship accumulated across multiple spheres of Asian American studies ranging from the emergence of panethnic Asian American identity, Asian American involvement in American politics before and after the civil rights movement, and the continuing ethnic divisions within the Asian American community. Further research on urban politics and its intersection with ethnic identity was also investigated, yielding insights into the nature of the potential of and obstacles to successful panethnic political organizing across ethnic lines in the urban areas of the United States. Upon investigating data on the voting patterns of Asian Americans, the socioeconomic statistics on various Asian American ethnic groups, the organizational landscape of organizations--panethnic or ethnic--serving the Asian American community, and the political clout of Asian American political activists and groups in Philadelphia politics, the conclusion was reached that efforts to forge a panethnic Asian American coalition in Philadelphia politics have not succeeded. While the topic of panethnic Asian American politics in the urban context remains a relatively understudied topic in political science, the existing evidence points that there remain significant obstacles to panethnic political organizing in Asian American communities.

Gay Asian Americans Are Seen as More American Than Asian Americans Who Are Presumed Straight

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika Semrow ◽  
Linda X. Zou ◽  
Shuyang Liu ◽  
Sapna Cheryan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Asian American Men ◽  
Orientation Information ◽  
The Relationship

Four studies investigate whether gay Asian Americans are stereotyped as more American than Asian Americans who are presumed straight. Gay Asian American men (Study 1) and women (Study 2) were rated as more American than their counterparts whose sexual orientation was unspecified. However, sexual orientation did not influence judgments of Whites’ American identity. The relationship between Asian Americans’ sexual orientation and perceptions of their American identity was mediated by a belief that American culture is relatively more accepting of gay people than Asian culture (Studies 3 and 4). Manipulating how accepting of gay people a target’s country of origin is relative to the United States altered ratings of American identity for gay but not straight targets (Study 4). Using an intersectional approach, these studies demonstrate that sexual orientation information comes together with race to influence who is likely to be perceived as American.

scholarly journals Asian American Older Adults and Social Isolation: A Systematic Literature Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 328-328
Author(s):  
Simona Kwon ◽  
Deborah Min ◽  
Stella Chong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Older Adults ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Social Isolation ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Systematic Literature Review ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eligibility Criteria

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 >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.

Strength in Numbers: Perceptions of Political Commonality with African Americans among Asians and Asian Americans in the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Harvey L. Nicholson ◽  
J. Scott Carter ◽  
Arjee Restar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Group Consciousness ◽  
Relational Dynamics ◽  
Linked Fate ◽  
Political Alliances

Asians are now the fastest growing racial minority group in the United States. Nearly 18 million Asians and Asian Americans currently reside in the country. Approximately 44 million African Americans also live in the United States. To improve their limited social, economic, and political clout, Asians and Asian Americans in the United States (AAAUS) could benefit from the formation of mutually beneficial political alliances with African Americans, another historically marginalized racial group. However, complicated relational dynamics between African Americans and AAAUS may drastically reduce the chances of political unity. Using the 2008 National Asian American Survey, the authors examine the effects of three factors—group consciousness, linked fate, and experiences of discrimination—on perceptions of political commonality with African Americans among AAAUS. The findings show that group consciousness and linked fate positively and strongly increase the odds of perceptions of political commonality with African Americans; however, experiences of discrimination do not. The results suggest that the cultivation of mutually beneficial political alliances between African Americans and AAAUS would first require AAAUS to develop a heightened sense of group consciousness and linked fate. The potential impact of these factors on future political alliances between both groups are discussed, as are the limitations of this study.

Accurately Counting Asian Americans Is a Civil Rights Issue

2018 ◽  
Vol 677 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lee ◽  
Karthick Ramakrishnan ◽  
Janelle Wong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Data Disaggregation ◽  
Rights Issue ◽  
The U.S

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing group in the United States, increasing from 0.7 percent in 1970 to nearly 6 percent in 2016. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2065, Asian Americans will constitute 14 percent of the U.S. population. Immigration is fueling this growth: China and India have passed Mexico as the top countries sending immigrants to the United States since 2013. Today, two of three Asian Americans are foreign born—a figure that increases to nearly four of five among Asian American adults. The rise in numbers is accompanied by a rise in diversity: Asian Americans are the most diverse U.S. racial group, comprising twenty-four detailed origins with vastly different migration histories and socioeconomic profiles. In this article, we explain how the unique characteristics of Asian Americans affect their patterns of ethnic and racial self-identification, which, in turn, present challenges for accurately counting this population. We conclude by discussing policy ramifications of our findings, and explain why data disaggregation is a civil rights issue.

Asian and Asian American Suburbs in the United States

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Zarsadiaz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Southern California ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Bay Area

Asians and Asian Americans are the most suburbanized people of color in the United States. While Asians and Asian Americans have been moving to the metropolitan fringe since the 1940s, their settlement accelerated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This was partly the result of relaxed US immigration policies following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Globalization and burgeoning transnational economies across the so-called Pacific Rim also encouraged outmigration. Whether it is Korean or Indian immigrants in northern New Jersey or Vietnamese refugees in suburban Houston, Asians and Asian Americans have shifted Americans’ understandings of “typical” suburbia. In the late 1980s, academic researchers and policymakers started paying closer attention to this phenomenon, especially in Southern California, where Asians and Asian Americans often clustered together in select suburbs. Sociologists, in particular, observed how greater Los Angeles’s economic, political, and built landscapes changed as immigrants and refugees—predominantly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Vietnam—established roots throughout the region, including Orange County. Since then, other studies of heavily populated Asian and Asian American ethnic suburbs—or “ethnoburbs”—have emerged, including research on New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. Nonetheless, scholarship remains focused on Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other hubs of the metropolitan West Coast. Research and scholarship on Asians and Asian Americans living in the suburbs has grown over the last decade. This is partly a response to demographic shifts occurring beyond the coasts. Moreover, geographers, historians, and urban planners have joined the discussion, producing critical studies on race, class, architecture, and political economy. Despite the breadth and depth of recent research, literature on Asian and Asian American suburbanization remains limited. There is thus much room for additional research on this subject, given a majority of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States live outside city limits.

Parody, Pastiche, and Intertextuality in Asian American Novels

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Tang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Cultural Integrity ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Asian American Identity

The repetition and reframing of styles, forms, and texts variously known as pastiche, parody, intertextuality, appropriation, or sampling is a pervasive practice in Asian American literature. Since the emergence of Asian American literary studies in the 1970s, such strategies have formed a key site for negotiating the terms of Asian American identity, politics, and culture. While pastiche has been recognized as a signature style of postmodern culture at large, it has held particular significance for Asian American literary and cultural studies because of its resonance with Asian American identity. Because Asian Americans have long been stereotyped as mimics of Western culture, and because the category Asian American refers to a coalition of multiple and diverse ethnic groups, Asian American identity itself seems constituted by the formal operations of imitation and recombination central to parody and pastiche. The close alignment between Asian American identity and these formal practices has made shifting critical attitudes toward parody, pastiche, and intertextuality into a telling register of evolving conceptions of Asian American identity. In the cultural nationalist era of the 1970s, pastiche was seen as the formal expression of Asian Americans’ tendency to repeat and reproduce dominant ideologies, a sign of complicity with white racism, and a lack of cultural integrity. By contrast, a second wave of Asian American criticism in the 1990s embraced strategies of textual repetition as subversive parody rather than complicit pastiche, reinterpreting them as articulations of a politically oppositional, hybrid and heterogeneous Asian American subject. Since the turn of the millennium, the use of parody, pastiche, and intertextuality in Viet Nguyen’s prize-winning 2015 novel The Sympathizer intimates yet another iteration of Asian American identity centered on the war refugee, a model of Asian American subjectivity which shifts attention from traditional topics of immigration and assimilation to urgent questions of imperialism and militarism. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how the formal strategies of parody, pastiche, and intertextuality have served as crucial sites for the invention and reinvention of Asian American identity, politics, and aesthetics.

Asian American Graphic Narrative

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Chiu ◽  
Jeanette Roan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Before And After

Asian American graphic narratives typically produce meaning through arrangements of images, words, and sequences, though some forgo words completely and others offer an imagined “before” and “after” within the confines of a single panel. Created by or featuring Asian Americans or Asians in a US or Canadian context, they have appeared in a broad spectrum of formats, including the familiar mainstream genre comics, such as superhero serials from DC or Marvel Comics; comic strips; self-published minicomics; and critically acclaimed, award-winning graphic novels. Some of these works have explicitly explored Asian American issues, such as anti-Asian racism, representations of history, questions of identity, and transnationalism; others may feature Asian or Asian American characters or settings without necessarily addressing established or familiar Asian American issues. Indeed, many works made by Asian American creators have little or no obvious or explicit Asian American content at all, and some non-Asian American creators have produced works with Asian American representations, including racist stereotypes and caricatures. The earliest representations of Asians in comics form in the United States were racist representations in the popular press, generally in single-panel caricatures that participated in anti-immigration discourses. However, some Asian immigrants in the early to mid-20th century also used graphic narratives to show and critique the treatment of Asians in the United States. In the realm of mainstream genre comics, Asian Americans have participated in the industry in a variety of different ways. As employees for hire, they created many well-known series and characters, generally not drawing, writing, or editing content that is recognizably Asian American. Since the 2010s, though, Asian American creators have reimagined Asian or Asian American versions of legacy characters like Superman and the Hulk and created new heroes like Ms. Marvel. In the wake of an explosion of general and scholarly interest in graphic novels in the 1990s, many independent Asian American cartoonists have become significant presences in the contemporary graphic narrative world.

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.

Southeast Asian Americans

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chia Youyee Vang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Southeast Asian Americans ◽  
Socialist Republic ◽  
Brunei Darussalam

In geopolitical terms, the Asian sub-region Southeast Asia consists of ten countries that are organized under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Current member nations include Brunei Darussalam, Kingdom of Cambodia, Republic of Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos), Malaysia, Republic of the Union of Myanmar (formerly Burma), Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, Kingdom of Thailand, and Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The term Southeast Asian Americans has been shaped largely by the flow of refugees from the American War in Vietnam’ however, Americans with origins in Southeast Asia have much more diverse migration and settlement experiences that are intricately tied to the complex histories of colonialism, imperialism, and war from the late 19th through the end of the 20th century. A commonality across Southeast Asian American groups today is that their immigration history resulted primarily from the political and military involvement of the United States in the region, aimed at building the United States as a global power. From Filipinos during the Spanish-American War in 1898 to Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong refugees from the American War in Vietnam, military interventions generated migration flows that, once begun, became difficult to stop. Complicating this history is its role in supporting the international humanitarian apparatus by creating the possibility for displaced people to seek refuge in the United States. Additionally, the relationships between the United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore are different from those of other SEA countries involved in the Vietnam War. Consequently, today’s Southeast Asian Americans are heterogeneous with varying levels of acculturation to U.S. society.

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