scholarly journals Alexandra Nickerson, Reimagining Suburbia

AmeriQuests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra A Nickerson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
Community Planning ◽  
World War ◽  
Suburban Communities ◽  
Asian American Immigrants

Since their origins in the post-World War II decades, American suburban communities have been battlegrounds for racial and socioeconomic conflict. Serving as enclaves for White privilege, many were purposefully designed to keep working class and minority residents out. Willow Lung-Amam's Trespassers? Asian-Americans and the Battle for Suburbia examines the bitter social and cultural tension that has plagued the affluent Silicon Valley suburbs since an influx of Asian-American immigrants in the 1970s. Her narrative illustrates how, by their very nature, suburban communities regress toward homogenity, enforcing ideas of who is welcome through their physical landscapes.  However, it also inadvertently suggests that if we can use community planning, town ordinances, and other tools and practices to deliberately exclude, we too can use them to include. As our country continues to diversify, but also stratify, it is important that we create suburban landscapes that foster diversity, welcome newcomers, give everyone a shot at achieving their version of the American dream. 

The New Gold Mountain

Trespassers? ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willow S. Lung-Amam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
World War ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Innovation Economy

This chapter explores why the valley became such an important hub of racial and ethnic diversity, especially among recently arrived Asian immigrants in the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. Beginning with a brief look back at the pathways forged by early Asian American pioneers, the chapter focuses on the sweeping changes that occurred in the region economically, spatially, and socially after World War II. The chapter shows how Asian Americans navigated their new terrain and put down roots in working- and middle-class neighborhoods, in particular underscoring how the Fremont suburb's rapid growth and development were prefaced on the valley's booming innovation economy and Asian Americans' own suburban dreams.

Post-World War II Asian American Suburban Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Padoongpatt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Grocery Stores ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii

Substantial numbers of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants moved into suburbs across the United States after World War II, bringing distinctive everyday lifeways, identities, worldviews, family types, and community norms that remade much of American suburbia. Although Asian Americans were excluded from suburbs on racial grounds since the late 19th century, American Cold War objectives in Asia and the Pacific and domestic American civil rights struggles afforded Asian Americans increased access to suburban housing in the 1950s, especially Chinese and Japanese Americans. Following passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, new groups of Asian Americans, particularly Filipino, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and South Asian Indian, joined Chinese and Japanese Americans in settling in earnest into all kinds of suburban neighborhoods. At the turn of the 21st century, a majority of Asians resided in the suburbs, which also became the preferred gateway communities for new immigrants who often bypassed urban cores and moved straight to the suburbs when they arrived. Entrance into highly racialized postwar suburbs defined by white middle-class norms and segregated white privilege did not, however, mean that Asian Americans gained entry or assimilated into whiteness. While many certainly aspired to and reinforced long-standing white suburban ideals, others revamped, contested, and outright fractured dominant notions of the suburban good life. By the 1980s Asian Americans of various ethnic and national backgrounds had transformed the sights, sounds, and smells of suburban landscapes throughout the country. They made claims on suburban space and asserted a “right to the suburb” through a range of social and cultural practices, often in physical places, especially shopping plazas, grocery stores, restaurants, religious centers, and schools. Yet as Asian Americans tried to become full-fledged participants in suburban culture and life, their presence, ethnic expressions, and ways of life sparked tensions with other mostly white suburbanites that led to heated debates over immigration, race, multiculturalism, and assimilation in American society. The history of post-World War II Asian American suburban cultures highlights suburbia as a principal setting for Asian American experiences and the making of Asian American identity during the second half of the 20th century. More broadly, the Asian American experience reveals how control over the suburban ideal and the making of suburban space in the United States was and remains a contested, layered process. It also underscores the racial and ethnic diversification of metropolitan America and how pressing social, political, economic, and cultural issues in US society played out increasingly on the suburban stage. Moreover, Asian Americans built communities and social networks precisely the moment in which the authentic “American” community was supposedly in decline, providing a powerful counterpunch to those who lament nonwhite populations, particularly immigrants, for fracturing an otherwise unified American culture or sense of togetherness.

Asian Americans and the Cold War

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Strategic Alliances ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
The Cold War

The global political divides of the Cold War propelled the dismantling of Asian exclusion in ways that provided greater, if conditional, integration for Asian Americans, in a central aspect of the reworking of racial inequality in the United States after World War II. The forging of strategic alliances with Asian nations and peoples in that conflict mandated at least token gestures of greater acceptance and equity, in the form of changes to immigration and citizenship laws that had previously barred Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”1 During the Cold War, shared politics and economic considerations continued to trump racial difference as the United States sought leadership of the “free” capitalist world and competed with Soviet-led communism for the affiliation and cooperation of emerging, postcolonial Third World nations. U.S. courtship of once-scorned peoples required the end of Jim Crow systems of segregation through the repeal of discriminatory laws, although actual practices and institutions proved far more resistant to change. Politically and ideologically, culture and values came to dominate explanations for categories and inequalities once attributed to differences in biological race. Mainstream media and cultural productions celebrated America’s newfound embrace of its ethnic populations, even as the liberatory aspirations inflamed by World War II set in motion the civil rights movement and increasingly confrontational mobilizations for greater access and equality. These contestations transformed the character of America as a multiracial democracy, with Asian Americans advancing more than any other racial group to become widely perceived as a “model minority” by the 1980s with the popularization of a racial trope first articulated during the 1960s. Asian American gains were attained in part through the diminishing of barriers in immigration, employment, residence, education, and miscegenation, but also because their successes affirmed U.S. claims regarding its multiracial democracy and because reforms of immigration law admitted growing numbers of Asians who had been screened for family connections, refugee status, and especially their capacity to contribute economically. The 1965 Immigration Act cemented these preferences for educated and skilled Asian workers, with employers assuming great powers as routes to immigration and permanent status. The United States became the chief beneficiary of “brain drain” from Asian countries. Geometric rates of Asian American population growth since 1965, disproportionately screened through this economic preference system, have sharply reduced the ranks of Asian Americans linked to the exclusion era and set them apart from Latino, black, and Native Americans who remain much more entrenched in the systems of inequality rooted in the era of sanctioned racial segregation.

Law and Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Chang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
The 19Th Century

The place of Asian Americans in the American national narrative has always been mediated through the laws, particularly relating to citizenship and immigration. In the 19th century, Asian Americans were marginalized and omitted from the national narrative through discriminatory laws that excluded them from naturalized citizenship, civic participation, and eventually immigration. During this era, Asians were stereotyped in literature and popular culture as threatening menaces that required restriction and surveillance, which was later exacerbated by the hostilities between the United States and Japan during World War II. Asian American writers during this era sought to challenge the stereotypical representations of Asians and provided voice to the silences produced by the discriminatory laws. Following World War II, as the United States redefined itself as the leader of the free world during the Cold War, the discriminatory laws were reformed, and Asian Americans were reconstructed into a model minority that now served the dominant narrative of America as a nation of equality and opportunity. Asian American authors in this era resisted such co-opting of Asian American experiences by writing counter-histories that challenge the grand narrative of American exceptionalism produced by seemingly progressive laws that these authors critique as reifying and perpetuating racist and xenophobic biases that continue to be applied to not only Asian Americans but also other minority groups.

Voices of Angels

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Country Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Representations Of Women

Chapter 6 traces the musical and lyrical developments of honky-tonk in the late 1930s and 1940s with Al Dexter, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams and remained a predominant mode of country music after World War II, right when Kitty Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard contributed to the musical discourse. These female artists, taking over male-defined and often parodic representations of women, developed narratives that articulated class-specific voices couched in the metaphors of sexual and material desire, heartache, and loss juxtaposed with 1950s ideals of domesticity. Examining the particulars of musical style and vocal expression, this chapter argues that female artists in their various enactments of the honky-tonk angel, the angry, jilted housewife, the single mother, and the forsaken lover disclosed the paradoxes of class and gender and helped to lift the cloak of invisibility shrouding working-class women.

Legaspi, Cesar Torrente (1917–1994)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Legaspi Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Farm Workers ◽  
World War ◽  
Art Educator ◽  
Internal Migrants ◽  
Early Image ◽  
Seasonal Farm Workers

Cesar Legaspi was a Filipino painter known as one of the 13 Moderns, a group of emergent artists whose work, according to artist-art educator Victorio Edades, was an alternative to the classicism and nostalgia-laced realism popular during the pre-World War II juncture of American colonialism in the Philippines. Along with peers Hernando Ocampo and Vicente Manansala, Legaspi was part of a generation of artists whose early image making engaged with questions of distortion, and the liberties artists could take in construing reality. In the early 1950s, these painters were regarded as the neo-realist triumvirate. While they produced works dealing with the same everyday subject matter as conservative artists of the period, they unselfconsciously took from other stylistic traditions that they encountered through research and peer exchanges. In doing so, they worked towards more individuated ways of rendering subjects, finding affinities with Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. In the post-World War II period, the Neo-Realists manifested a cynicism toward the urbane, which they resolved visually in different ways. A well-known work of Legaspi’s from this period, Gadgets II (1949), depicts the mutant fusing of man and machine in an age where the industrial was both feared and mythologized. This work, alongside pieces imaging the working class (including stevedores, grave diggers, beggars, seasonal farm workers, and internal migrants) is associated with his early proletarian or proto-social realist phase.

3. Living in the margins

2016 ◽  
pp. 52-82
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
World War ◽  
Birthright Citizenship ◽  
Economic Discrimination

“Living in the margins” considers the lived realities of immigrants’ efforts to foster community, livelihood, and family under exclusion. Birthright citizenship was a key steppingstone to securing some rights in the United States, but still did not protect the American-born from racial discrimination. Asian Americans remained primarily associated with demarcated residential and employment niches that confined their perceived threat, but also facilitated the pooling and sharing of resources necessary for survival in an openly hostile society. Anti-Asian hostilities became institutionalized through laws, government bureaucracies, and social and economic discrimination. The nadir was World War II when Japanese, even American-born citizens, were removed into “relocation camps” as “enemy aliens.”

Melodrama and Asian American Performance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunha Na
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Theater ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Wedding Banquet

American theater has long used melodramatic elements to shape the contour of racial dynamics and its representations for white mainstream audiences. Recurrent tropes of racial melodrama have appeared in such works as George Aiken’s stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1858) and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), asserting a strong influence on the public perception of the ethical flaws of slavery and the ambiguity of racial identities. With its sympathetic portrayals of racial minorities as virtuous, innocent victims of social injustice, racial melodrama engaged white viewers in stories of racialized characters that aroused basic human feelings of compassion and sympathy as well as a sense of moral righteousness that encouraged and mobilized political actions, such as abolitionist movements, well beyond the theater. Modern and contemporary Asian American dramatists have adopted formal and thematic elements of melodrama and its affective strategies as a way to gain public visibility and re-articulate prevailing ethnic stereotypes formulated within a binary framework peculiar to melodrama. Melodrama’s emotional intensity and stylistic excesses effectively help to convey the historical, social, and emotional experiences of Asian Americans, including migration, displacement, and injustices such as Japanese American World War II incarceration. At the same time, Asian American dramatists’ critical revision of the melodramatic mode complicates the gendered and racialized dynamic that has defined the cultural identity of Asian Americans against white, mainstream America. The clearly melodramatic characteristics in Gladys Ling-Ai Li’s The Submission of Rose Moy (1924) seemingly reaffirm the stark division between Asian and American identities, only to reveal their ambiguities and uncertainties. While Velina Hasu Houson’s Asa Ga Kimashita (1981) and Tea (1987) render the suffering of Japanese American female characters emotionally relatable to the viewer as a universal experience, Asian female victimhood also serves as a melodramatic sign of national abjection under the violence of American racism and imperialism. Melodrama meets stage realism in Wakako Yamauchi’s The Music Lessons (1980) and in Philip Kan Gotanda’s The Wash (1985), where melodramatic pathos is facilitated through the plays’ attention to socio-political and psychological realism. Contemporary Asian American culture’s continued use of melodrama is most notable in transnational films such as The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Saving Face (2004), works that explore the potentials and limitations of melodrama as a critical aesthetic strategy.

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