Unquiet Tropes: Form, Race, and Asian American LiteratureRacial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of EmotionThe Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday

2016 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 859-862
Author(s):  
Kita Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Asian America

Inter-Imperial Relations, the Pacific, and Asian American History

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Augusto Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Asian America ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Over Time

Despite the turn toward diasporic, transnational, global, and comparative perspectives, this article argues that historians of Asian America have largely neglected and need to reflect upon inter-imperial relations—the relations of cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, including subaltern attempts at creating spaces for maneuver and agency between them. With a focus on the development of the United States as an empire, this article identifies the key inter-imperial relations over time that have shaped the Asian American experience. An awareness of inter-imperial relations helps scholars to account for the political dynamics, the multiple sources of power, and the challenges to existing hegemonies that have structured Asian American lives. An approach sensitive to inter-imperial relations opens up the possibility of recognizing, and comparing, the simultaneous subaltern struggles that cut across nations and immigrant groups.

scholarly journals Performing a Geography of Asian America: The Chop Suey Circuit

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
SanSan Kwan
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
The Us

The Chop Suey Circuit describes Asian American cabaret performers who toured the US from the 1930s through the '50s. Performing the era's popular songs and dances, these “Orientals” were novel yet familiar, exotic yet accessible. At a time of war, internment, and segregation they simultaneously solidified and challenged racial cartographies that would emplace race.

Surviving the Bomb in America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoko Wake
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian America ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Costs ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
And Gender

This article explores the little-known history of Japanese American survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By focusing on this particular group of survivors with a careful attention to their layered citizenship, national belonging, and gender identity, the article makes important connections between the history of the bomb and the history of immigration across the Pacific. U.S. survivors were both American citizens and immigrants with deep ties to Japan. Their stories expand our understanding of the bomb by taking it out of the context of the clash between nations and placing it in the lives of people who were not within a victors-or-victims dichotomy. Using oral histories with U.S. survivors, their families, and their supporters, the article reveals experiences, memories, and activism that have connected U.S. survivors to both Japan and the United States in person-centered, relatable ways. Moreover, the article brings to light under-explored aspects of Asian America, namely, significant intersections of former internees’ and bomb survivors’ experiences and the role of older women’s agency in the making of Asian American identity. In so doing, the article destabilizes the rigidly nation-bound understanding of the bomb and its human costs that has prevailed in the Pacific region.

“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.

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.

Biopolitics and Asian America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Kong
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Theoretical Terms ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
Governmental Power ◽  
A Site

Biopolitics, unlike other conceptual rubrics such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, or the subaltern, does not contain a singular theoretical origin. While Michel Foucault is often cited as the progenitor of contemporary biopolitical thought, a number of other theorists and philosophers have also been credited with significantly shaping its critical lineage, from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Achille Mbembe. By extension, the relation between biopolitics and Asian America is an open-ended one, insofar as no one set of theoretical terms or axioms grounds this relation. Moreover, insofar as biopolitics in its widest sense encompasses the intersection of politics and life, including the inverse of life, its domain is potentially infinite. The conjunctions between biopolitics and Asian America, then, can be defined tactically through the following questions: what are some prominent motifs and concerns within Asian American history, culture, and scholarship that may be illuminatingly narrated within a biopolitical framework? Conversely, how have Asian American writers and scholars themselves analyzed these nexuses, and in what directions have they developed their inquiries? Finally, what does an Asian Americanist criticism bring to the study of biopolitics? These questions can be usefully pursued via three thematics that have formed core concerns for Asian American studies: orientalist exoticism and exhibitions of the Asian body, associations of the Asian body with pollution and disease, and structures of US governmental power over Asian bodies and populations. Asian Americanist criticism has often centered on analyses of the body as a site for the production of racial difference, whether or not they explicitly adopt a biopolitical theoretical lexicon. What Asian Americanist engagements with biopolitics bring to biopolitical thought is a spotlighting of intersectional politics—the insight that the politics of life never simply operates in relation to abstract bodies but always occurs within power economies of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and other forms of social difference and stratification. Conversely, biopolitical theories allow Asian Americanist criticism to develop in multiple new directions, from medical humanities and disability studies to science and technology studies, from animal studies to post-human feminisms, from diaspora studies to surveillance studies. Ultimately, an ethical impetus and an orientation toward justice continue to animate Asian Americanist critical practices, which hold out the promise of a positive biopolitics within prevailing paradigms of negative biopower.

An Asian American Epistemology of Reading: Aiiieeeee! and Ekphrasis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elda E. Tsou
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The contested category of Asian American literature presents a rich opportunity to explore questions of epistemology. At the start of the 21st century, a formal turn in literary study further illuminates shifts in structures of knowledge and ways of knowing. Asian American literature emerged in the 1970s as a critical response to a history of exclusion and misrepresentation. As the field established itself, literary knowledge was defined quite narrowly: it is produced by Asian Americans and the subject of knowledge is Asian America itself. The reading practices that arise from this central paradigm have been called “instrumental” or “sociological,” insofar as they conceive of literary language, with varying degrees of formal interest, as an instrument or expression of Asian America. From the 2000s onward, scholarship on Asian American form and poetics has grown steadily, and what distinguishes this particular movement is its privileging of form as its primary object of investigation. Correspondingly the subject of knowledge also shifts from Asian America as the default referent to Asian American literature and the literary tradition. Critics note that one consequence of making form the prime objective is a potential tendency to drift away from the ambit of Asian America altogether. Those literary texts featuring conspicuous formal experimentation have garnered a lot of attention; less has been paid to the early texts, like the anthology Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), where formal concerns are not as explicit. Yet upon closer examination of Aiiieeeee! one discovers another type of figurative activity that can help redefine Asian American literary knowledge, offering us new ways of reading and looking at race.

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.

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