Mel-han-cholia as Political Practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 410-434
Author(s):  
Jennifer Cho
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Japanese Colonialism ◽  
Korean History ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Discursive Power

Abstract Turning to extant theories of melancholy, this article uses Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée to reevaluate the linear trajectory of Asian American identity formation in the United States. In particular, the author develops the term mel-han-choly—a hybrid form of melancholy and Korean han (a culturally specific grief)—to show how Cha uses it as a subversive political tool to defer historical closure and to refuse her quiet assimilation. Cha’s remembrance of the histories of Japanese colonialism in the Korean peninsula and the Korean War defies the expectation that minority populations somehow transcend their grievous pasts in becoming model American citizens. The author claims that Cha’s mel-han-cholic gestures disrupt the United States’ discursive power in narrating Korean history, especially as one contingent on accepting America’s “liberating” charge. This article also proposes that mel-han-choly serves a healing function within the diasporic Korean community, offering transnational connectivity through the shared experience of grief.

The Intimacies of Complicity

2020 ◽  
pp. 241-262
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Japanese Colonialism ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Korean Christianity ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of

This chapter elaborates a transnational literary critical methodology for approaching South Korean depictions of the Korean War that now circulate in the United States in translated form through an analysis of Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Guest. This magical realist work recounts a massacre that occurred in late 1950 in which roughly thirty-five thousand residents of Sinch’on, located in what is now North Korea, were slaughtered by their friends and neighbors. This chapter situates The Guest in its domestic context, elaborating its critique of both North and South Korean nationalist narratives that tend to avoid holding Koreans themselves accountable for such atrocities, and its complex engagement with the history of Korean Christianity. Even as it does so, however, the novel also implicates Japanese colonialism and Western Christianity in the violence that erupted in Sinch’on. However, this chapter also argues that this novel in its translated form must also be read within the context of its circulation in the United States, which highlights certain aspects of it: the affinities it suggests between working-class Koreans drawn to Marxism and enslaved Africans and its critique of the bystander role adopted by the US military in relation to atrocities committed by its Korean allies.

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.

Representations of Foreign versus (Asian) American Identity in a Mass-Shooting Case

2012 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angie Chuang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Asian American ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Immigrant Services ◽  
Mass Shooting ◽  
Asian American Identity

Scholarship on media representations of Asian minority identity has established that historic constructions of the Other perpetuate a conflation of ethnic with foreign. Previous studies of Seung-Hui Cho and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings concluded that though Cho was a South Korean national, news media overemphasized his foreign identity, despite his living in the United States most of his life. This study examines newspaper coverage of the 2009 mass shooting at an immigrant-services center in Binghamton, New York, and of perpetrator Jiverly Wong, who immigrated from Vietnam, had lived in the United States for two decades, and was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

The Challenges of Displaying “Asian American”: Curatorial Perspectives and Critical Approaches

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
ShiPu Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Racial Demographics

This essay delineates the issues concerning AAPI art exhibitions from a curator’s perspective, particularly in response to the changing racial demographics and economics of the past decades. A discussion of practical, curatorial problems offers the reader an overview of the obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of AAPI works in the United States. It is the author’s hope that by understanding the challenges particular to AAPI exhibitions, community leaders, and patrons will direct future financial support to appropriate museum operations, which in turn will encourage more exhibitions and research of the important artistic contribution of AAPI artists to American art.

Japanese Reinvention of Self through Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yujin Yaguchi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Modern Japanese History ◽  
American Society

This article investigates the relationship between Asian American and modern Japanese history by analyzing the image of Japanese Americans in postwar Japan. Based on a book of photographs featuring Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i published in 1956, it analyzes how their image was appropriated and redefined in Japan to promote as well as reinforce the nation’s political and cultural alliance with the United States. The photographs showed the successful acculturation of Japanese in Hawai‘i to the larger American society and urged the Japanese audience to see that their nation’s postwar reconstruction would come through the power and protection of the United States. Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i served as a lens through which the Japanese in Japan could imagine their position under American hegemony in the age of Cold War.

Delegitimizing al-Qaida: Defeating an “Army Whose Men Love Death”

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Mark Long ◽  
Alex S. Wilner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recruitment Tool ◽  
The Arab Spring ◽  
New Social Order

Deterring terrorism is no longer a provocative idea, but missing from the contemporary theoretical investigation is a discussion of how delegitimization might be used to manipulate and shape militant behavior. Delegitimization suggests that states and substate actors can use the religious or ideological rationale that informs terrorist behavior to influence it. In the case of al-Qaida, the organization has carefully elaborated a robust metanarrative that has proved to be remarkably successful as a recruitment tool, in identity formation for adherents, as public apologia and hermeneutic, and as a weapon of war—the so-called media jihad. In the wake of the upheaval of the Arab Spring, al-Qaida and its adherents have redeployed the narrative, promising a new social order to replace the region's anciens régimes. Delegitimization would have the United States and its friends and allies use al-Qaida's own narrative against it by targeting and degrading the ideological motivation that guides support for and participation in terrorism.

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.

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