Showing papers in "Journal of Asian American Studies in 2019"

Asian American Studies, Comparative Racialization, and Settler Colonial Critique

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article explores how Asian American studies as a disciplinary formation and as a political and intellectual project is engaging with the Indigenous and settler colonial turns reverberating across multiple disciplines. It interrogates the question of what it would mean for Asian American studies to engage with issues and concerns raised by Native theorizing in terms of the cohering assumptions and anchoring terms of the field. It looks to particular strands of writing within Asian American studies as an archive that sheds light on the field’s multivalent yet uneven engagements with Indigenous studies. The article concludes with a consideration of more recent works in Asian American studies that aim to further extend the field’s critical reach and open up critical dialogue between Asian American studies and Indigenous studies. It looks to these works as an index charting possible future directions for Asian American studies and its various projects.

Precarious Memories and Affective Relationships in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do

Abstract: ABSTRACT:The Best We Could Do is a multilayered feminist interrogation into the power of affective connections and knowledge for second-generation Vietnamese in the United States. I argue that Thi Bui’s illustrated memoir uses techniques of cotemporality, the intertwining of event and insidious trauma, and the performativity of memory through the visual technologies of maps and photographs to destabilize the rhetorics and realities of U.S. exceptionalism and assimilation. Her memoir questions the promise of freedom and refuses to adhere to a cultural politics of forgetting for those in the diaspora. The Best We Could Do recontextualizes intergenerational trauma, gender, and cultural identity, producing an alternative configuration of subjectivity, history, and futurity for Vietnamese diasporic subjects. In this way the text demands that readers interrogate the seemingly static images and discourses that inform our ideas of freedom, agency, and history in the post–Việt Nam War era and their impact on Vietnamese American futurity.

Narrating Chinese Massacre in the South American War of the Pacific

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This essay explores competing and overlapping narratives about massacres of Chinese men by African-descended Peruvians during the War of the Pacific (1879–84), a conflict during which Chile invaded and occupied Peru. Reports of brutal killings of Chinese merchants in Lima circulated alongside stories about the massacre of over a thousand Chinese contract workers on plantations in the province of Cañete. Descriptions of brutal acts by black people, especially black women, were central to both narratives. Asking what political purpose these stories served, this essay explores how Chileans, Peruvians, and Chinese recounted episodes of anti-Chinese violence to make larger claims about gender, race, and nation. It argues that both urban and rural violence against Chinese men during the war stemmed from struggles over Chinese contract labor and a plantation system that had long exploited African and indigenous people. Narratives of Chinese massacre occluded the centrality of plantations to political struggles among Peruvians as well as the importance of Chinese labor to Chilean military occupation. Moreover, accounts of black women savaging Chinese men functioned as cover stories for other violence, such as Chilean massacres of Peruvians, new forms of exploiting Chinese labor, Peruvian elites’ collaboration with Chile, and their disqualification of black people as Peruvian patriots.

Race, Performance, and Colonial Governance: The Philippine Constabulary Band Plays the St. Louis World's Fair

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article explores intersections of race, performance, and colonial governance by historically analyzing the experiences of African American conductor Walter Loving and the Philippine Constabulary (PC) Band at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Amid an enormous Philippine exhibit and minimal African American representation at the fair, Loving and the Filipino musicians not only helped justify U.S. colonization of the Philippines through patriotic and “civilized” music, but also used their music as leverage to expose the inadequacies of American colonial governance. Their music expressed Filipino nationalism, contested colonial scripts toward Philippine self-governance, and challenged whites’ exclusive claims to colonial leadership.

Professional Amateurs: Asian American Content Creators in YouTube's Digital Economy

Abstract: ABSTRACT:YouTube has been valued as a space for marginalized peoples who have been historically excluded from mainstream media to authorize their self-representation, redress stereotypes, and galvanize political activism. However, critical studies have overlooked the platform’s most seminal institutional formation—the Partner Program, a user-based partnership model that has allowed amateur content creators to monetize their video content since 2007. This article argues that the Partner Program, largely regulated by mainstream advertising and entertainment firms, transformed the landscape of cultural production on YouTube by blurring amateurism and industry professionalism. The Partner Program turned content creators into professional amateurs—an independent ad hoc workforce interpellated into YouTube’s neoliberal corporate growth models. Professional amateurs identify an emergent kind of new media professional whose amateurism, cultural production, and professional opportunities remain regulated by traditional industry gatekeepers. To make this argument, I analyze YouTube’s evolving partnership guidelines alongside content creation from 2006 to 2018 to demonstrate how user-based partnerships directly impacted Asian American video performances, thereby shaping cultural constructions of Asian Americanness and affecting Asian Americans’ capacities to access professional possibilities in the broader media industry. As a critical heuristic for revealing the institutional formations that legislate cultural production in YouTube’s digital economy, professional amateurism scrutinizes the corporate logics that incentivize performativity, enabling new critical possibilities for conceiving race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, authenticity, performance, and labor in the twenty-first century.

Breakfast at Kuniyoshi's: Photography, Forgetting, and Racial Form

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article examines a number of visual and verbal texts that gather around Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, including the paintings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the painter on whom Capote’s I. Y. Yunioshi and Mickey Rooney’s infamous yellowface caricature were based. The article focuses particularly on the way in which photography—both aesthetically and historically—can be read in racial terms, particularly in light of the underappreciated fact that it would have been impossible for a Japanese American to work as a photographer during World War II, when the novella is set. In this context photographs register not only as a highly mediated image of the novella’s heroine, but also as a figuration of racial form. Particularly in Edward’s adaptation, race is transformed into a series of signs that become transferable from one body to another, and as such becomes unmoored from historical grounding. This abstraction in turn authorizes a further redeployment of racial logics in service of the larger midcentury project of justifying an affiliation with a recent enemy as the postwar economic reconstruction of Japan became crucial to U.S. hegemonic ambitions in the Asia-Pacific.

Postmodern Ecology: Technologically Modified and Commodified Nature in Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation

Abstract: ABSTRACT:Whereas environmental pollution and overexploitation of natural resources have been noticeable problems, recent concerns of ecocriticism include an increasing lack of biodiversity and technological interventions in nature through biotechnology. Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation (2003) depicts this new concern—whether we call it postmodern ecocriticism or postnatural ecocriticism—in its highlighting of the manner in which biotechnology has created simulated nature; the very distinction between nature as a living entity and simulated nature, created by genetically modified organisms, tends to be erased in the market society dominated by GMO products. Through her novel Ozeki articulates her sense of global ecological crisis in the loss of regenerative capabilities of natural resources, and she connects economic rationalism to the root causes of ecological crisis and extends struggles for ecological justice to transnational contexts. Moreover, Ozeki’s calls for ecological awareness and oppositional strategies toward biotechnological violence against nature through the interventions of biological and cultural diversities exemplify the critical voices of multiracial environmental literature and a growing environmental justice movement in Asian American literature.

The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race by Anthony Christian Ocampo (review)

Abstract: Chinese culture to draw publicity, and there is an open question about whether or not she was romantically involved with Scott. At best, Li Ling-Ai is accused of being an opportunist and, at worst, a prostitute. Although it’s clear Lung is deeply devoted to Li Ling-Ai and that her quest for the truth serves as a love letter to this complicated woman, Lung also begins to question if Li Ling-Ai is really the heroine she’s been looking for. In doing so, the film deftly highlights core feminist principles about how difficult it is to distance ourselves from the harms of patriarchal ideologies, and how our political ideals and expectations may not align with messy human realities. The film’s resistance to tidy conclusions is what ultimately makes the narrative provocative, compelling, and richly rewarding—like the translated title of Kukan itself, both women filmmakers have “bitterly persevered against all odds,” and we are lucky to now have a chance to learn their stories. Lori Kido Lopez University of Wisconsin, Madison

"But You Have to Do Something": The Racialized Holding Environment of Julia Cho's Office Hour

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This article performs a psychoanalytic reading of Julia Cho’s Office Hour, a play inspired by the Virginia Tech massacre, in order to forward a method for mitigating Asian American isolation and attrition. Attending to the relationship between the play’s primary characters—a Korean American adjunct instructor and her student, a stand-in for the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho—the author positions spaces of academic and theatrical encounter as potential “racialized holding environments,” environments often cultivated by coerced, feminine labor that nevertheless hold the potential to nourish minoritized subjects through a performance and provision of good-enough, racially attuned care.

Family Business: The Work of Asian American Child's Play

Abstract: ABSTRACT:Departing from the “Tiger Motheresque” tendency in Asian American literary criticism to dismiss adolescent play as an extravagance rather than a necessity, this article resituates Asian American child’s play as a racialized phenomenon. Readings of historical, ethnographic, and literary texts, including Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, build on Sau-ling Wong’s influential argument of the “Asian American Homo Ludens” (1993) to reinterpret scenes of play in Asian American literature as sites of racial formation. The article tracks the ways that Asian American adolescents’ participation in family businesses and their oftentimes liminal position in recreational spaces produce a unique perspective on the artificiality of the work/play binary we frequently take for granted. The essay demonstrates how racialization has “worked” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America not only through designated sites of labor but through the fraught and contested intersection between work and play.

Slavery in Sui Sin Far's Early Fictions

Abstract: ABSTRACT:This essay examines Sui Sin Far’s early fictions that feature Chinese female “slaves” and Black female characters in order to see what her rhetorical use of slavery can teach us about the afterlife of slavery in the United States. I read the metaphor of marriage as slavery in Sui Sin Far’s “Ku Yum” (1896) alongside the rhetoric of early U.S. white suffragists who argued that their condition of rightlessness was chattel slavery. The marriage-as-slavery analogy depends on and perpetuates the process of what Hortense Spillers calls the ungendering and misnaming of the Black female captive, a core element of the antiblack technology of the transatlantic racial slavery. As a means of reading Sui Sin Far’s early stories not for what she can teach us about Chinese slavery or women but for how representational practices in U.S. chattel slavery such as blackface minstrelsy continued to influence literary and cultural imaginations in the construction of the figure of the Black woman, I read “Ku Yum” together with “Away Down in Jamaica” (1898). The latter provides a heuristic for how we might read the enduring legacy of antiblackness and slavery in literature and culture through the figure of the misnamed Black woman.