“I Was Raised a Buddhist”: Tiger Woods, Race, and Asian-ness

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Stanley Thangaraj
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Tiger Woods

Scholarly articles on Tiger Woods have attended to his mixed-race body through blackness and the refusal of his Asian heritage and identity. His Asian-ness was not part of the early marketing of his iconicity. In this paper, I looks at how Tiger Woods responded to the news of his marital affairs through a deployment of Buddhism. In particular, I theorize Asian/Asian American masculinity that engages with religion, Asia, Asian-ness, and Asian America to complicate theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Through the invocation of Buddhism, Tiger Woods offers a different racial heteronormativity that is legible in the nation and larger marketplace. In the process, he aligns with Asian and Asian American respectability as a way to temper blackness; it is an Asian and Asian American identity grounded in the rise of Asian capital and reconfigurations of both Asian and Asian American masculinity. Therefore, through Asian-ness, Woods offers an assemblage of religion, race, gender, and sexuality that silences and erases blackness.

Mixed Race Asian American Identity on Display

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Lily Anne Welty Tamai ◽  
Cindy Nakashima ◽  
Duncan Ryuken Williams
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian American Identity

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela K. Ahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
The 1960S

The introduction places North American taiko in the context of Asian American identity, the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of taiko in Japan. The chapter further defines the scope and aims of the study, explaining how the book seeks to highlight gender, race, and sexuality as key lenses through which taiko can be understood. The chapter defines and complicates what “Asian America” means and how it intersects productively with embodied performance, ultimately arguing that taiko players from a range of backgrounds perform Asian America through their involvement in the art form. The chapter provides a brief history of taiko in the United States and offers an overview of the remaining chapters of the book.

From Merging Histories to Emerging Identities: An “Asian” Museum as a Site of Pan-ethnic Identity Promotion

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Chong-suk Han ◽  
Edward Echtle
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Pacific Islander ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian Pacific Islander ◽  
Common Problems ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Asian Pacific ◽  
A Site

In this paper, we explore the significance of the Wing Luke Asian Museum (WLAM) in Seattle, Washington as a site where pan-ethnic Asian American identity can be promoted by analyzing the strategies employed by the staff and artists of the WLAM to promote, foster and disseminate a larger Asian Pacific Islander American pan-ethnic identity. We argue that museums are a significant site that can “provide a setting for persons of diverse Asian backgrounds to establish social ties and to discuss their common problems and experiences.”

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.

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