National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage; Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

2004 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-191
Author(s):  
M. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Resistance Literature

Scholar-Public Intellectual

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (2) ◽  
pp. 406-412
Author(s):  
Min Hyoung Song
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Job Offers

Viet thanh nguyen's recent successes might appear to have come out of nowhere. before the sympathizer won the pulitzer prize and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was long-listed for the National Book Award, and before he was named a MacArthur Fellow, Nguyen was another hardworking academic, laboring away in a field that no one outside it knew much about. For those who labored alongside him in the same field, the story looks different. When many of us were finishing graduate school and looking for our first teaching jobs, there was a joke going around that all the applicants on the market that year were waiting to find out what Nguyen would do. He had gotten all the job offers in the field, and the other top contenders were hanging out on the waiting list. His irst book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), a study of how the idea of resistance circulates in critical discussions of Asian American literature, landed with a splash, becoming one of those works other scholars had to be familiar with. What made it stand out was his insistence that we not idealize resistance. If the standard story that scholars liked to tell was that Asian American literature adopted a radical posture when it came to race, seeking to critique racism and to conjure alternative social possibilities, Nguyen pointed out that the story was incomplete. Asian Americans, including creative writers, are as heterogeneous ideology-wise as they are heterogeneous in every other way.

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.

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