Asian American Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch... more

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Objective: Discrimination against nonnative speakers is widespread and largely socially acceptable. Nonnative speakers are evaluated negatively because accent is a sign that they belong to an outgroup and because understanding their... more

Objective: Discrimination against nonnative speakers is widespread and largely socially acceptable. Nonnative speakers are evaluated negatively because accent is a sign that they belong to an outgroup and because understanding their speech requires unusual effort from listeners. The present research investigated intergroup bias, based on stronger support for hierarchical relations between groups (social dominance orientation [SDO]), as a predictor of hiring recommendations of nonnative speakers. Method: In an online experiment using an adaptation of the thin-slices methodology, 65 U.S. adults (54% women; 80% White; M age 35.91, range 18 – 67) heard a recording of a job applicant speaking with an Asian (Mandarin Chinese) or a Latino (Spanish) accent. Participants indicated how likely they would be to recommend hiring the speaker, answered questions about the text, and indicated how difficult it was to understand the applicant. Results: Independent of objective comprehension, participants high in SDO reported that it was more difficult to understand a Latino speaker than an Asian speaker. SDO predicted hiring recommendations of the speakers, but this relationship was mediated by the perception that nonnative speakers were difficult to understand. This effect was stronger for speakers from lower status groups (Latinos relative to Asians) and was not related to objective comprehension. Conclusions: These findings suggest a cycle of prejudice toward nonnative speakers: Not only do perceptions of difficulty in understanding cause prejudice toward them, but also prejudice toward low-status groups can lead to perceived difficulty in understanding members of these groups.

Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their... more

Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, they use a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems that surround them. This essay explores the unconventional ways through which Otto and B.D.G.’s intimacies are depicted, and analyzes the performance styles they use to express critical perspectives on racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. I argue that Otto and B.D.G.’s performances offer alternative ways to think through contemporary conversations around cultural appropriation and interracial desire in ways that decenter whiteness or a white desiring subject. However, I also observe how their critical deployments of hypermasculinity potentially skew public conversations about racialized violence.

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among... more

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among others. In so doing, it advances a model of the nineteenth-century US state-in-formation that demonstrates how the legal status of the transatlantic Famine Irish took on greater significance than any cultural differences with White Anglo Saxon Protestant America. Key concepts are explored, such as citizenship, nationality, race, ethnicity, the fractional state, the racial state, and the Black and Green Atlantic. Introduced, moreover, is one of the most important yet most overlooked American patriots of the nineteenth century, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes of New York, whose efforts helped to mold the corporate Catholic Church into a major ideological apparatus of the US state.

This short essay, for the volume _Keywords for Asian American Studies_ edited by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Linda Vo and K. Scott Wong, examines the history and significance of the term "orientalism" for Asian American Studies, from its initial... more

This short essay, for the volume _Keywords for Asian American Studies_ edited by Cathy Schlund-Vials, Linda Vo and K. Scott Wong, examines the history and significance of the term "orientalism" for Asian American Studies, from its initial deployment by Edward Said in postcolonial studies as a critique of knowledge formation, to a more capacious understanding of orientalism as encompassing racial formations and coalitions beyond Asian Americans, with radical potential for Third World, Afro-Asian, and internationalist politics.

This chapter explores how intersections of power, privilege, and oppression related to race, gender, and nativity influence in-group relations among women of color. Specifically, we explore the experiences of Black and Asian immigrant and... more

This chapter explores how intersections of power, privilege, and oppression related to race, gender, and nativity influence in-group relations among women of color. Specifically, we explore the experiences of Black and Asian immigrant and U.S. born women as they negotiate the dominance of race as a social status in the United States, examine the influence of imposed meanings of gendered racialization and their relation to nativity, and consider ways these imposed meanings affect relations between immigrant and U.S. born Black and Asian women within the same racialized group. Given the dearth of prior literature examining these intersections, we integrate theoretical and empirical literature with our own experiences and observations as immigrant Black and U.S. born Asian women in this exploration. We pay particular attention to the ways in which the dominant White European American male context creates barriers to the development of alliances to resist oppression as women of color. We conclude with a discussion of strategies and processes to reach across the divide and their application to therapy, education, research, and organizational leadership.

an essay on cosmopolitanism as a keyword in Asian American Studies

Co-curated event, "A Pilgrimage to WWII Japanese-American Internment Camps." An exhibit at the Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester, Nov. 17 - Dec.11, 2017, with photographs by Margaret Miyake, commentary by Notch Miyake, and... more

Co-curated event, "A Pilgrimage to WWII Japanese-American Internment Camps." An exhibit at the Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester, Nov. 17 - Dec.11, 2017, with photographs by Margaret Miyake, commentary by Notch Miyake, and historical ephemera from the Re-Envisioning Japan Collection (J. Bernardi). Sponsored by the University of Rochester Humanities Project, the Dept. of Modern Languages and Cultures, The Hartnett Gallery, The RIver Campus Libraries Digital Humanities Center, the American Studies Program, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of English, and the Film and Media Studies Program. A University of Rochester Humanities Project event.

This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing collective racial politics across differences. As digital media objects, the Asian American Feminist Collective’s zine Asian American... more

This article examines the tensions, communal processes, and narrative frameworks behind producing collective racial politics across differences. As digital media objects, the Asian American Feminist Collective’s zine Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus and corresponding #FeministAntibodies Tweetchat responds directly to and anticipates a social media and information environment that has racialized COVID-19 in the language of Asian-ness. Writing from an autoethnographical perspective and using collaborative methods of qualitative discourse analysis as feminist scholars, media-makers, and interlocuters, this article looks toward the technological infrastructures, social economies, and material forms of Asian American digital media-making in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

In this article, I consider the emergence of the term Asian American as a political and racial identifier in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and survey the meanings that are associated with the term today. Through the analysis of... more

In this article, I consider the emergence of the term Asian American as a political and racial identifier in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and survey the meanings that are associated with the term today. Through the analysis of in-depth interviews, I examine how Asian American prospective teachers, who were enrolled in a master’s and credential program that had an explicit focus on social justice and on teaching in urban communities of color, appropriated and challenged these multiple meanings. The interview data highlight the relationship between these teachers’ understandings of their racial identity and the responsibil- ities and challenges they anticipated for themselves as Asian American teachers of other students of color. I conclude the article by exploring the implications of these findings for teacher education programs, particularly programs that enroll high proportions of Asian Americans.

The formation of queer psychology has been a critical intervention in breaking apart the psychological tendency of reifying categories of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, latent Orientalism and white-centered epistemologies in... more

The formation of queer psychology has been a critical intervention in breaking apart the psychological tendency of reifying categories of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, latent Orientalism and white-centered epistemologies in psychology have continued to produce culturally essentialist depictions of a repressive "Chinese sexuality" and "backward Asian culture." In this article, I present three main problems in psychological representations of Sinophone queers: (a) "cultural colorblindness" resulting from the conflation of race and culture, (b) the problematic analytical category of "Chineseness," and (c) race and culture being theorized as a burden for Sinophone and Asian queers. In order for psychology and queer studies scholars to destabilize these epistemologically violent interpretations, this article argues that we must engage with Sinophone critique and shift away from a framework of culture to one of "concerns" in order to capture the heterogeneity of queer Sinophone subjectivities.

It is an audience reception study of Asian Americans' viewing practices of dominant media. The chapter asserts that Asian Americans adopt "biased optimism" to believe they are only beneficially shaped by representation.

A review of Ruth Asawa exhibition at David zwirner