“At the Western Palace”: The Dehumanization of Whiteness, Americanness, and Chinese-Americanness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

2021 ◽  
pp. 105-116
Author(s):  
Klara Szmańko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
White People ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Chinese American Immigrants

The dehumanization of whiteness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inheres in the overarching ghosthood metaphor. While first generation Chinese American immigrants in The Woman Warrior attribute the power of transforming people into ghosts to the United States of America as a country, the questioning of a person’s humanity by calling them a “ghost” is not reserved for white people alone. Chinese American immigrants also run the risk of losing their humanity and becoming ghosts if they renounce their relatives and their heritage. The husband of the first-person narrator’s Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid, is an example of a Chinese American man, who turns into a ghost on account of swapping his Chinese wife for a much younger American one. The clinic in which Moon Orchid’s husband works, a chrome and glass Los Angeles skyscraper, becomes a vehicle for the metaphoric representation of the United States as the Western Palace – also the title of the fourth of the five chapters of The Woman Warrior, exemplifying narrative techniques employed by Kingston in order to render the above mentioned dehumanization.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s Transpacific Imagination

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-187
Author(s):  
Yuan Shu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Critical Process ◽  
Narrative Role ◽  
Native Informant

In juxtaposing The Fifth Book of Peace with The Woman Warrior, this essay argues that Kingston has moved away from the narrative role as a native informant and presents a new multicultural United States by inventing a Chinese American epistemology and intervening in US imperialism around the globe. Such a move substantiates Mignolo’s theory of “global decolonial thinking,” a critical process that reclaims non-Western notions of humanity and epistemology.

Subversive Spirits

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Roberts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Female Immigrant ◽  
La Llorona ◽  
The Woman Warrior

The supernatural remains extraordinarily popular in literature, television, and film. But one figure has remained in the shadow, the female ghost. Inherently liminal, often literally invisible, the female ghost has nevertheless appeared in all genres. Subversive Spirits presents a history of the figure in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the female ghost in heritage sites, theatre, Hollywood film, literature, and television in the United States and the United Kingdom. What holds these disparate female ghosts together is their uncanny ability to disrupt, illuminate, and challenge gendered assumptions and roles. As with other supernatural figures, the female ghost changes over time, especially responding to changes in gender roles. Comedic female ghosts in literature and film disrupt gender norms through humor (Topper and Blithe Spirit ). Terrifying and vengeful female ghosts in England and America draw on horror and death to present a challenge to restrictions on mothers (The Woman in Black and La Llorona). The female immigrant experience and the horrors of slavery provide the focus for ghosts who expose history’s silences (The Woman Warrior and Beloved ). Heritage sites use the female ghost as a friendly and inviting but structurally subordinated narrator (The Untold Story and The Ghost of the Castle ). In the twenty-first century, the female ghost expands her influence to become a mother and savior to all humanity (Being Human , U.K. and U.S.) Subversive Spirits brings this figure into the light, exploring her cultural significance in popular culture.

A Night in Old Chinatown

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-472
Author(s):  
William Gow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Drum Corps ◽  
And Gender

In 1938, the Chinese American community in Los Angeles hosted the Moon Festival in Old Chinatown as a fundraiser for Chinese victims of the Sino-Japanese War. Held against the backdrop of Bowl of Rice fundraisers across the United States, and the demolition of most of Old Chinatown by the construction of Union Station, the 1938 Moon Festival attracted tens of thousands of visitors to Old Chinatown while providing a stage for local Chinese Americans to perform self-representations of Chinatown to visitors. Focusing on Chinese American performances such as those of the Los Angeles Mei Wah Girls’ Drum Corps, this article examines the extent to which Chinese Americans utilized the festival’s performances of race and gender to challenge Orientalist ideas about the their community.

“We are not the people they think we are”: First-generation undocumented immigrant belonging and legal consciousness in the wake of deferred action for parents of Americans

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110418
Author(s):  
Lizette G Solórzano
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Undocumented Immigrant ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Deferred Action

On 20 November 2014, President Barack Obama introduced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) as a temporary relief for undocumented immigrant parents raising citizen children in the United States. DAPA’s implementation stalled indefinitely following a court-issued injunction in 2015, subsequent legal contestation, and a Supreme Court decision in 2016 upholding the original injunction. I purport that both DAPA and its failure to implement constitute sites from within which to critically examine the legal consciousness and sense of belonging of undocumented participants. By bridging scholarship on legal consciousness and belonging, this article examines how Latino first-generation undocumented immigrants from Los Angeles, who considered DAPA, understand their unlawful presence and assert belonging in the United States (US). This article draws on participant observation in Los Angeles, California, including four DAPA legal information forums and 24 in-depth interviews following DAPA’s court injunction with undocumented parents who intended to apply to DAPA. Data reveal a legal consciousness imbued with normative and value-based notions of substantive citizenship including parenthood, law-abidingness, and contribution. In light of DAPA’s failure, participants draw on these narratives to counter-assert their belonging and deservingness of DAPA. Ultimately, this case draws attention to how undocumented, first-generation immigrant legal consciousness is more complex than previously ascertained, and how DAPA shapes immigrants’ claims to a lawful presence.

scholarly journals Song of Chinese American Females- A Traumatic Reading of The Woman Warrior

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 171
Author(s):  
Zhao Qing
Keyword(s):  
Maxine Hong Kingston ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Chinese American Immigrants

Maxine Hong Kingston is a famous Chinese American writer, who is adept at interpreting the living conditions of Chinese American immigrants by making vivid and profound description. She writes several influential novels and the publication of her masterpiece The Woman Warrior makes her immediately renowned in the American literary circle. This paper is going to apply trauma theory to describe the Chinese females’ miserable fates, to further explore the causes of their trauma, and to focus on how they treat trauma, overcome trauma and become “woman warriors”.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Forging Aztecness: Twentieth-Century Mexican Musical Nationalism in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
KRISTINA F. NIELSEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Siglo Xx

Abstract (Spanish/English)Forjando el Aztecanismo: Nacionalismo Musical Mexicano del Siglo XX en el siglo XXI en Los ÁngelesHoy en día, un creciente número de músicos mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos tocan instrumentos indígenas mesoamericanos y réplicas arqueológicas, lo que se conoce como “Música Azteca.” En este artículo, doy a conocer cómo los músicos contemporáneos de Los Ángeles, California, recurren a los legados de la investigación musical nacionalista mexicana e integran modelos antropológicos y arqueológicos aplicados. Al combinar el trabajo de campo etnográfico con el análisis histórico, sugiero que los marcos musicales y culturales que alguna vez sirvieron para unir al México pos-revolucionario han adquirido una nuevo significado para contrarrestar la desaparición del legado indígena mexicano en los Estados Unidos.Today a growing number of Mexican-American musicians in the United States perform on Indigenous Mesoamerican instruments and archaeological replicas in what is widely referred to as “Aztec music.” In this article, I explore how contemporary musicians in Los Angeles, California, draw on legacies of Mexican nationalist music research and integrate applied anthropological and archeological models. Pairing ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I suggest that musical and cultural frameworks that once served to unite post-revolutionary Mexico have gained new significance in countering Mexican Indigenous erasure in the United States.

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