Taiko Scenarios

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela K. Ahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Performance Analysis ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Meaningful Connections

The Minneapolis-based taiko group Mu Daiko challenges notions of Minnesota as uniformly white and ideas about Asian America as a coastal phenomenon. The chapter uses ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and performance analysis to argue that taiko outreach (low-tech engagements, often with an educational aim) creates familiar scenarios that reveal pervasive racial attitudes toward Asian Americans. Building on Diana Taylor’s “scenarios of discovery,” the chapter demonstrates the ways taiko outreach sometimes reinforces the idea that Asians are perpetual foreigners, while at other times they create opportunities for meaningful connections between performers and audiences. A focus on the group’s Korean American adoptee members prompts a challenges easy definitions of Asian America and the Midwest and highlights Minnesota as a key site for Asian American cultural production.

Convergence between performance and amateur management of a social organisation

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (8) ◽  
pp. 1493-1509
Author(s):  
Victor Meyer Jr ◽  
Diórgenes Falcão Mamédio ◽  
Alechssandra Ressetti Oliveira ◽  
Natália Brasil Dib
Keyword(s):  
Performance Management ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Environmental Care ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
And Performance

Purpose Understanding social organisations requires considerable effort because of their complex reality. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the performance and amateur form of management of an organisation of scavengers, with significant results for society. Design/methodology/approach This study is a qualitative in-depth case study. Data were collected through ethnographic interviews, non-participant observation and document analysis. The association of scavengers in question was identified as being strongly representative of the 23 similar associations in Curitiba. The city is the first Brazilian capital to create conditions for direct disposal of selective waste collected by waste pickers, as recommended by the National Solid Waste Policy. Findings Three main aspects of evidence are highlighted in the proposed model: unique features, performance management and multiplicity of practices. The findings showed a strong presence of utilitarian behaviour due to the need of the members of the organisation to generate income for survival, forcing social and environmental concerns into the background. The combination of community values, informal practices, collective learning and amateur management has had a positive effect on the social organisation’s performance. Social implications The outcomes were identified for individuals, the community and society by contributing to social inclusion, economic growth and environmental care. Originality/value The differentiated approach lies in the convergence between performance and amateur management in social organisations, with relevant environmental, economic and social results. A model is proposed to demonstrate the complex relationship between unique features, multiplicity of practices and performance with regard to the amateur management analysed in this study.

Violence, Hmong American Visibility, and the Precariousness of Asian Race

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1752-1756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Schein ◽  
Ya-Megn Thoj
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Virginia Tech ◽  
Korean American ◽  
American Student ◽  
Asian Race ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Model Minorities ◽  
Asian American Men ◽  
Hmong American

When the murders at Virginia Tech in spring of 2007 began to be processed, by mainstream media and Asian American commentators alike, in tenuously racial terms as the un/intelligible acts of a Korean American student, Seung-hui Cho, some observers of media racialization recalled the spectacularizations of Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong hunter who killed six white hunters in the woods of Wisconsin in 2004. Were these events likely to be discursively linked, and if so what effect would they produce? Would they destabilize tropes of Asian American men as studious, reserved, effeminate model minorities? Would we see the rise, or the return, of a racial menace in the form of gun-toting, ruthless, killer Asian males, and what would be the fallout? What difference would it make to discursive homogenization that one of the killers was Hmong, a member of a group that has articulated awkwardly if at all with prevailing images of Asian Americans?

Theresa, I Miss You (Arsenale Veneto)

October ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 146-147
Author(s):  
Mia Kang
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ◽  
Research Writing ◽  
Long Day ◽  
American Artist ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Venice Biennale

This poem was written after a long day at the 2019 Venice Biennale. It is from a body of work—spanning research, writing, and performance—dedicated to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha's seminal autoethnography Dictée has been readily mobilized by the disciplinary demands of both Asian American and literary studies, becoming the beloved exception reifying the rule of the false (and racialized, and gendered) binary between expressivity and innovation. Meanwhile, Cha's visual, video, and performance work has remained relatively obscure. My project for Theresa wants to un-discipline her archive while interrogating my own marking as a “Korean” “American” artist. In order to write this introduction, I had to go into the rain in all white, to move through silence with a hand to my mouth. In addressing these texts and rituals to Theresa, I seek to acknowledge the exchange we make in communing with the lost.

scholarly journals Zakotwiczanie się. Migrantki z Polski w norweskim przedszkolu

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Izabela Czerniejewska
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Employment Trajectories ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
Adaptation Processes

Based on participant observation and ethnographic interviews with Polish women working in kin-dergartens in Norway, this article studies the migrant women’s employment trajectories, including adaptation processes in the workplace and integration into the wider Norwegian society. In this paper, I aim at answering the following questions: How do Polish migrant women go about seek-ing employment in Norwegian kindergartens? How do they adapt to the new work environment? How do they deal with cross-cultural differences in childcare? How did they learn new norms and values within the institutional context of kindergartens? The research indicates that employment in kindergartens was not merely a way to provide for one’s livelihood, but was also a mechanism to establish and develop a closer relationship with members of the Norwegian society, a tool facilitating meaningful connections with the new country.

Object Theory and Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Shomura
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Object Theory

Do considerations of Asian America as, to use Kandice Chuh’s words, a “subjectless discourse” entail a turn toward objects? “Object theory” refers to a broad range of intellectual currents that take up objecthood, things, and matter as starting points for reconceptualizing identity, experience, politics, and critique. A few prominent threads of object theory include new materialism, thing theory, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. Versions of object theory have also been developed in disability studies, critical ethnic studies, posthumanism, and multispecies studies. What spans these varied, sometimes contentious fields is an effort to displace anthropocentrism as the measure of being and knowledge. By troubling the (human) subject, the poststructural and deconstructive turns in Asian American studies have especially primed the field to more closely engage the place of objects in Asian America. While Asian American writers and critics have tirelessly explored subjectivity and its mixed fortunes—from providing access to legal rights, political representation, and social resources to facilitating the reinforcement of racial and ethnic hierarchies—they have also sought to tweak the historical relationship of Asian Americans to objects. Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects. Asian American literary studies develops object theories to grasp these dynamics through investigations of racial form, modes of objecthood, material things, ecology, and speculative fiction. Ultimately, object theory leads Asian American literary studies to reconsider the place of human subjectivity in politics, attend to the formation of Asian America through nonhuman matter, and develop positive visions for Asian American futures from speculative imaginations of being and reality. This article discusses the place of object theory in Asian American literature and surveys key topics, including phenomenologies of race, transvaluations of objecthood, speculative realisms, and ontologies of Asian America.

Drumming Asian America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela K. Ahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Model Minorities ◽  
A Site

With its dynamic choreographies and booming drumbeats, taiko has gained worldwide popularity since its emergence in 1950s Japan. Harnessed by Japanese Americans in the late 1960s, taiko’s sonic largesse and buoyant energy challenged stereotypical images of Asians in America as either model minorities or sinister foreigners. While the majority of North American taiko players are Asian American, more than four hundred groups now exist across the United States and Canada, and these groups are comprised of people from a variety of racial and ethnic identities. Using ethnographic and historical approaches combined with performance description and analysis, this book explores the connections between taiko and Asian American cultural politics at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Based on original and archival interviews, as well as the author’s extensive experience as a taiko player, this book highlights not only the West Coast but also the Midwest as a site for Asian American cultural production and makes embodied experience central to inquiries about identity. The book builds on insights from the fields of dance studies, ethnomusicology, performance studies, and Asian American studies to argue that taiko players from a variety of identity positions “perform Asian America” on stage, as well as in rehearsals, festivals, and schools and through interactions with audiences. While many taiko drummers play simply for the love of the form’s dynamism and physicality, this book demonstrates that politics is built into even the most mundane aspects of rehearsing and performing.

The Making of an Asian American Short-Story Cycle: Don Lee's Yellow: Stories

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
KUN JONG LEE
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
White American ◽  
Specific Order ◽  
The Common ◽  
Story Cycle

Don Lee reworked his eight magazine stories to varying degrees, arranged the sequence of the stories in a specific order, and published a short-story cycle in 2001. Significantly, the writer changed the ethnic identity of some characters from white American to Asian American. He also added and highlighted Asian American themes and issues. In short, Lee made an “Asian American” short-story cycle par excellence by coloring his stories yellow. This essay examines Lee's rewriting and arrangement of his magazine stories for an Asian American short-story cycle. It first compares the differences between the magazine and cycle versions of the stories. It goes on to examine totalizing devices such as the common setting, recurrent places, connective characters, and unifying themes. Lastly, it elucidates the arrangement of the eight stories and significance of the title story in the cycle. It ultimately argues that Don Lee retrofitted his magazine stories extensively and meticulously for a short-story cycle in order to portray the diverse aspects of post-immigrant Asian America at the turn of the century from his positionality as a third-generation Korean American.

Excavating Asian America in the Sacramento Delta

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly N. Fong
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Business Owners ◽  
Peat Bog ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Migrant Farm ◽  
Historic Significance ◽  
Agricultural Areas ◽  
Sacramento Delta

The Sacramento Delta is an agricultural region in northern California with deep historic significance for Asian Americans. Asian American laborers were instrumental to the development of Sacramento Delta, transforming the swampy peat bog into one of the richest agricultural areas in California. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Chinese laborers constructed levees, dikes, and ditches along the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers before breaking the fertile soil to grow fruit and vegetables including pears and asparagus. Asian Americans continued a permanent and transient presence in the Sacramento Delta on farms as migrant farm laborers, permanent farmworkers, and overseers, and in the small delta towns such as Isleton that emerged as merchants, restaurant operators, boardinghouse operators, and other business owners catering to the local community.

Performance of an Abbreviated Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6) in Three Ethnic Groups of Older Asian Americans

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Jang ◽  
Daniel A Powers ◽  
Nan Sook Park ◽  
David A Chiriboga ◽  
Iris Chi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Internal Consistency ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Health Indicators ◽  
Confirmatory Factor Analyses ◽  
Network Scale ◽  
Central Texas ◽  
And Performance

Abstract Background and Objectives The present study examined the measurement quality and performance of an abbreviated Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6) in three ethnic groups (Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese) of older Asian Americans, addressing both within- and cross-group validations. Research Design and Methods We selected 605 participants aged 50 or older (242 Chinese, 150 Koreans, and 213 Vietnamese) from the 2015 Asian American Quality of Life survey, conducted with self-identified Asian Americans aged 18 or above living in central Texas. We analyzed LSNS-6 data on measurement qualities (internal consistency and corrected item-total correlation), dimensionality (exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses), and correlations with other indicators. Results LSNS-6 showed very good internal consistency in each ethnic group, and the two-factor structure of family and friends were invariant across the groups. The items on friends demonstrated greater homogeneity than those on family and emerged as a first factor. Both subscale and total scores of LSNS-6 were associated in expected directions with the social and health indicators considered. Discussion and Implications The findings confirm the measurement qualities of LSNS-6 within each group and provide support for measurement invariance across the groups. While the observed difference in family and friend networks warrants further investigation, LSNS-6 serves as a viable option for the assessment of social networks. When using LSNS-6 with older Asian Americans, it is highly recommended to use the family/friend subscales in consideration of cultural and immigration contexts.

North Korea in Asian American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Hong
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
The Korean War

To the extent North Korea features within Asian American literature and culture, it primarily does so in a body of Korean American cultural production—memoirs, biographies, documentary films, oral histories, fiction, and multi-media political advocacy—that is distinctively post-9/11 but not-yet post-Korean War. The irresolution of the Korean War, a war that has yet to be ended by a peace treaty, serves as defining extraliterary context for representations of North Korea. Not reducible to historical setting, much less an event safely concluded in the past, the Korean War, as a contemporaneous structure of enmity between the United States and North Korea, conditions the significance of this cultural archive—its urgency, politics, and reception. Often markedly instrumental in nature, indeed defined by the antithetical political ends it wishes to foster, Asian (mainly Korean) American cultural production on North Korea falls into two broad camps: on the one hand, “axis of evil” accounts that advocate, at times explicitly, for US intervention against North Korea, and on the other, more emergent cultural expressions that seek to expose the human costs of unending US war with North Korea.

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