Browsing by Subject "Asian American studies"

Disorientations: Experimental Form in Asian American Literature explores the relationship between unconventional, experimental, avant-garde, or broadly nonrealist aesthetic form in the major works of three seminal writers of Asian American literature — Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and “The Story of a Letter” (1946), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982) — and the role that these works played in the foundation and development of an Asian American literary canon and Asian American studies in general. Focusing on how the aesthetic maneuvers and formal conventions of these works are not only shaped and informed by, but directly shape and inform, their political and social commitments, this dissertation traces how these works in turn shaped and informed the trajectory of the Asian American literary and critical traditions which established themselves by mobilizing them. This dissertation argues that these works seek to create languages for diasporic Asian experiences that were previously unavailable and were interdicted by the political and social conditions and historical violences of European and American imperialism and white supremacist racism which informed and made possible those same diasporic experiences by warping recognizable literary conventions and genres, often realist and⁠/⁠or autobiographical; and in doing so both created a new register which not only registered those histories of violence, but would also provide crucial material through whose deployment Asian American studies and literature would consolidate themselves and their core political commitments and critical vocabulary.

Graphic Intimations: Postwar to Contemporary Asian Diasporic Art and Writing follows the oblique tensions in Asian diasporic creative compositions between art and writing, performance and inscription. Identifying the graphic—written and/or drawn—as a preeminent form for Asian diasporic artists and writers in North America, this project connects scholarship in Asian American literary studies on questions of form and social formation with the material histories of Asian diasporic visual culture. From postwar graphic internment memoirs to New York City subway writing, this dissertation traces the Asian diasporic graphic’s investments in embodied creative practices that intimate the sensible and sensual in queer, interracial, and cross-cultural liaisons.

Charting the history of the graphic as a twinned positivist technology of measurement and a visceral aesthetic response, this dissertation proposes that the Asian diasporic graphic intimates social possibilities formed in, but not necessarily of, the purview of nation and the state regulation of Asian North Americans as populations. Accordingly, this work examines how these artists’ staging of the graphic encounter might enact disruptive performances of unforeseen social intimacies and political affiliations during these decades that trouble the fidelity of visual documentation.

This project explores the intersection between diasporic identity negotiation, gender, sexuality, and multi-cultural experiences portrayed in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004). It features two main chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. Chapter One focuses on the intimacy aspect in The Wedding Banquet, examining how it intersects with gender and sexuality in promoting cross-cultural identity formation. Through analyzing intimacy as the site of contestation between alienation, ambivalence, and sacrificial narratives, both of which contribute to the formation of a nuanced, multi-layered Asian American identity. I argue that Lee’s portrayal of familial intimacy challenges stereotypical depictions of Asian American family units and proffers a nuanced yet intricate understanding of cross-cultural identity formation, uncovering the dilemma and hypocrisy inherent in the Gao family narrative that is manifested as social critique under the disguise of a romantic comedy. Chapter Two analyzes Saving Face focusing on the intersection between the discourses of indebtedness, guilt, and female liberation. I argue that by paralleling the dilemma and different forms of oppression and alienation faced by Hwei-Lan and Wil, Wu provides insight into the elastic relationship between the liberation discourse and indebtedness, guilt, and filial responsibilities of ‘Chinese daughters’. Through the constant negotiations of these elements, self-narrativity is achieved through the construction of flexible identities that strive to attend to both filial responsibilities and the search for individual narratives and autonomy.

This thesis surveys the aesthetics mobilized by Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End as well as Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay to accommodate and navigate the negative, non-cathartic, and untelegenic feelings that arise in Asian American and diasporic realities. This thesis adopts the theoretical framework of minor literature, minor feelings, and minor aesthetics, which prefigures a formal-affective-aesthetic approach. Pertaining to the specificities of Asian American and Asian diasporic affectivity, this thesis focuses on unfeeling as an example of minor feeling and examines the aesthetics of flatness and inscrutability. Li’s two works and Wang’s work are chosen for they exhibit different ways of representing and negotiating affective flatness and inscrutability. With two main body chapters respectively devoted to Li’s writing and Wang’s writing, this thesis theorizes the critical productivity, aesthetic sensibility, and political potential of unfeeling and inscrutability. With regard to the general field of Asian American literary studies, this thesis contributes to the pertinent questions of how to read superficiality and inscrutability as well as how to theorize negativity and ambivalence.

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975 many Southern Vietnamese were displaced and forced to relocate. Many of those refugees settled into an area located in Orange County, California and for the past fifty years have worked together to establish the community and space that is now recognized as Little Saigon. This thesis is a study of Little Saigon in particular, how Vietnamese immigrants have deterritorialized, or rejected the dominant notion of having to assimilate and adopt American culture to fulfill the American dream. Instead, community members have made purposeful interconnections to reterritorialize to construct a space meaningful to them where they, through their own minor strategies can productively and successfully live their own version of the Vietnamese American dream, thus allowing them to climb the ladder of upward mobility and attaining opportunities to physical mobility. I first trace the ways in which the first and generation physically alter the space in Orange County to a space that is accessible and makes sense to them by analyzing historical and present maps. Next, I examine the ways Vietnamese culture is produced and maintained in the United States for this community by examining the content and distribution of entertainment shows such as Paris By Night. Lastly I trace the impact of Vietnamese contribution to the nail salon industry and how the expansion of manicuring services has allowed for Vietnamese women to successfully become independent entrepreneurs and breadwinners in their family.

This project charts the emergence of a postrace aesthetic in American fiction. It examines how American novels respond to the pressures of what has been called the paradox of the postrace era: that our images and rhetoric portray a nation moving toward racial equality while our statistics actually reveal the opposite. I argue that through the use of features such as futuristic orientation, racially unmarked characters, and the reconfiguration of racial groupings, postrace novels attempt to unsettle our notions of race – a paradoxical endeavor, for attempts to unsettle a category ultimately invoke it again. Capable of interrogating emergent cultural phenomena, postrace novels provide a crucial vantage point from which we can interpret the shifting operations of race in the 21st century.

This purpose of this thesis is to investigate the most significant issues and concerns confronting the Chinese immigrant community in the U.S. through a quantitative analysis of the current states of Chinese America and a qualitative inquiry with Chinese immigrants themselves. Data for this thesis were mainly collected from U.S. Census Bureau and the Immigration Naturalization Services, which served as part of a broad overview of the current states of Chinese society in the U.S. To answer questions that the data alone cannot elaborate on, I inquired into the everyday experience and struggles of immigrant Chinese by conducting oral history interviews.

Based on a careful examination of government records and oral histories, this thesis has recognized that Chinese immigrants’ affluence, high education and cultural identity have positioned Chinese as a “model minority.” However complimentary that term may sound, it represents a stereotype that homogenizes the Chinese community as a successful community and further obscure issues facing the community such as glass ceiling and assimilation. This thesis further examines the complex relationship between Chinese immigrant perceptions regarding model minority as a myth and their expectation to live up to it in the next generation.

This thesis examines the representation of migrant workers in smaller-screen visual practices within the Chinese mediascape, using DV-made documentaries and short videos as case studies. By conducting a content analysis on the documentary Jianghu: Life on the Road and a series of rented room short videos on Douyin, I argue that the agency of migrant workers as subalterns in these visual practices is ambiguous and that digital technology can create complex power dynamics that do not necessarily lead to the empowerment of the subaltern. Furthermore, the thesis analyzes the content of the short videos to explore their homogeneity, the sense of hope conveyed through positive energy and the affective spectatorship they generate. Through these analyses, the thesis aims to contribute to discussions on the representation and agency of migrant workers in the Chinese mediascape and to offer insights into the complex power dynamics at play in smaller-screen visual practices.

This dissertation seeks to understand the conditions of hegemonic transfer, in the case of world-historical cycles of accumulation, through investigating the cultural production of the period. I examine turn of the century British and American science fiction to more fully comprehend the historical situation of imperial decline, and find that a concern with the possibility of resource depletion and imminent future “overpopulation” of racialized people, specifically Chinese people, lie at the heart of cultural understandings of the turmoil which the British-led world economic, social, and political system had entered. I thus study its science fictional imaginations of the future, mainly constellated around the threat of social collapse occasioned by future war, invasion, or resource scarcity, then emergent in order to elucidate how cultural production narrates the historical tendencies of intensifying industrialization, the formation of the military-industrial complex, economic stagnation, and increasing imperial instability. Given that the US-led world-system has itself has seemingly entered protracted decline, and as “overpopulation” once more emerges as a prominent social problem, especially as imbricated within global climate collapse, this dissertation contributes to a more thorough understanding of the present through comparison with a historically analogous cultural instance.

The literati stereotype of Modern Chinese Art began as a conservative adaption of Chinese nationalist reform during the early twentieth century. Modern stereotypes provided an intuitive, common-sense way of acting and negotiating the complexities of difference. The Fantastic Theater of Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century chronicles an alternate history of Chinese émigrés’ embrace of the stereotypical image of literati culture. That stereotype was a modern form of visibility and recognition of Chinese identity. From China to diverse Western locales—Geneva, London, France, New York, and California—the literati stereotype reconciled the dual undesirable conditions of Westerners’ absent understanding and negative misunderstanding of China. The stereotype was a positive compromise of optics, expectations, and self-presentation.The visual archive of the literati stereotype examines literati scholars and their associations with learning, philosophy, and ink painting. Sculpture, books, design, advertising, ceramics, photography, architecture, and personal ephemera allow me to assemble a new approach to the artists Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), Zhang Shuqi (1900-1957), Yu Jingzhi (1900-1980), and Wang Jiyuan (1893-1975), to write a different history of the Bollingen Foundation, the lives of the Chew Family and their China Art Center in Carmel, and Mai-mai Sze, the little-known translator of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting.

This dissertation examines space as a privileged yet repressed site of cultural production in a global America, in response to ongoing attempts to reconfigure American literary and cultural studies through the lens of globalization, postnationality, worlding, and planetarity, and to build conversations between literature, the arts, and space. Drawing its inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of social space and Fredric Jameson's theory of postmodern global culture, this project studies globalization with a particular emphasis on its unique spatial apparatus, which through geographical expansion and contraction and worldwide connection and disconnection produces hitherto unprecedented social spaces, including most notably the global city, virtual space, transnational diasporas, postmodern architecture, and the "non-places" of shopping malls, airports, and highways. I discuss how these global social spaces radically alter our experience of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and transform our representational practices, by analyzing innovative contemporary cultural forms such as literary theory (Jameson, Derrida, Adorno, and Deleuze), deconstructive architecture (Peter Eisenman), video art (Nam June Paik), diasporic writing (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), postmodern detective fiction (Paul Auster), the cyberpunk novel (William Gibson).

While I thus mediate global spatial production and cultural production, I argue that the predominant focus on deterritorialization, disjuncture, and postspatiality in much of contemporary discourse on globalization oftentimes diverts our attention from the complex mechanism whereby the spatial world system of globalization brings the entire globe into its all-encompassing and totalizing force field. I formulate the concept of a spatial unconscious in order to address the salient, though repressed, presence of the totalizing spatial logic of global capitalism that underlies contemporary cultural production. In so doing, I demonstrate that diverse contemporary literary and cultural forms have their conditions of possibility the newly emergent global spatial network of cultural flows and exchanges; and that those literary and cultural forms function as symbolic acts or registering apparatuses that reflect, remap, and reimagine the multifaceted and even contradictory spatial configurations of the world today. By bringing a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective to American literary studies, this study seeks to shift our critical attention from a putatively unitary and homogeneous national literature towards manifold cultural loci crisscrossed by dynamic interplays and fluid interchanges amongst multiple axes and nodal points on the globe.

My dissertation comprises three studies on topics in selective migration and economic assimilation of new immigrants. The first study examines the influence of selective migration on Asian Americans’ academic success. Conventional explanations attribute their academic advantage to a distinctive academic culture and their socioeconomic status (SES), but ignore the importance of the relative attainment of parents formed in the pre-immigration context (i.e., the high relative educational attainment of parents compared to their non-immigrant counterparts in sending countries) in explaining Asian Americans’ academic success. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study and the Barro-Lee dataset, this chapter shows that Asian parents’ relative attainment predicts their children’s advantage in college enrollment over whites. Part of the advantage from parents’ relative attainment is through youths’ academic culture (e.g., parental educational expectations and youths’ effort, school behaviors, and attitudes). The findings in this chapter suggest the cultural explanation for Asian Americans’ academic advantage could be overstated.

The second study investigates the emigration intentions of Chinese adolescents from a supply-side perspective. Most existing studies employing data in destination countries provide an incomplete image of the selected features of immigrants. Values and norms often attributed to immigrants, such as high educational expectations, may be shaped by experiences during pre-emigration, rather than originating from distinct cultural values or the immigration experience itself. With data from Chinese Education Panel Study, this study finds parents whose children intend to emigrate employ different parenting strategies (via family norms and parental involvement) than children with no intention to emigrate. Adolescents with emigration intentions are also positively selected based on familial income, parental education, and mother’s occupational status, but negatively selected on father’s occupational status. These findings help establish a more comprehensive image of selective migration among Chinese adolescents who potentially emigrate and suggest that distinctive norms and values of emigrants could be shaped by parenting strategies during the early planning stages of emigration.

The third study examines how new immigrants utilize potential resources from religious organizations to help their entrepreneurial businesses in the United States (U.S.). Although a number of qualitative studies have previously identified the resource attainment through ethnic churches among immigrant entrepreneurs, such evidence is limited in quantitative analysis and the role of co-ethnicity is unclear. With the data from the New Immigrant Survey, this study shows that regardless of ethnic backgrounds and religious congregations, immigrant entrepreneurs with limited familial resources have a higher level of church involvement, and higher co-ethnicity in churches also increases church involvement of immigrant entrepreneurs. These findings suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs may actively seek resources in ethnic churches. From a policy perspective, religious organizations that target immigrants in ethnic communities can potentially benefit immigrant entrepreneurs by providing co-ethnic resources and help them overcome initial barriers during economic assimilation.

As a whole, my dissertation concerns about socioeconomic mobility of new immigrants. It contributes to the research on Asian Americans’ academic advantage by integrating the pre-immigration contexts and provides a supply-side explanation on how distinctive cultural elements of potential Chinese emigrations could be selected in the pre-immigration childrearing process. Moreover, it also contributes to the research on immigrant entrepreneurship by providing quantitative evidence that religious organizations could supply resources to start-up businesses of new immigrants and help their economic assimilation in the U.S. context.

Children of post-1965 Asian immigrants experience a different mode of social incorporation than other people of color. They achieve marked socioeconomic advancement but racism and discrimination continue to haunt them. Sociologists suggest that the group falls between whites and African Americans in the American racial stratification system. However, scholars know little about how this intermediate position shapes the group's modes of social incorporation and identities. I seek to answer this question by examining the lived experiences of grown children of Korean immigrants. For this research, I draw upon 69 in-depth interviews with upwardly mobile, 1.5- and 2nd-generation Korean Americans. I focus my analysis on four distinctive but related aspects of their lives: parental socialization, neighborhood contexts, occupational standing, and racial identity. Utilizing the grounded theory and the critical discourse analyses, I found that the group experiences neither full inclusion into nor exclusion from the white mainstream, but undergoes divergent adaptational experiences due to multiple factors. First, in their upbringing, Asian ethnic advantages and racial marginality did not shape parental expectations for children's success in a uniform way; their influences differ by the parents' class backgrounds. Second, the community contexts where my informants grew up diversify their perception of race relations, leading them to have divergent ideas of social incorporation. The ethnic communities function to refract the influence of the larger society's racial categorization on the informants, rather than insulating them. Third, the Korean informants' upward mobility in the mainstream labor market does not guarantee full assimilation; their occupations partially determine the extent of incorporation. Korean informants in Asian-clustered occupations are more likely than those in Asian-underrepresented occupations to experience social inclusion while accepting the racialized image of Asians. Finally, my Korean informants do not have homogeneous racial identities; they are diversified by gender and occupational standings. Male respondents and those in Asian-clustered occupations tend to have white-like identities. Also, the majority of my informants have an ambivalent racial identity that denies that they are an "oppressed" minority while endorsing the idea that they are non-white, which reflects their intermediate racial position. By identifying multiple factors in the construction of Asian Americans as racialized subjects, the findings illustrate the distinctive racialization pattern of Asian Americans, a pattern that is qualitatively different from other racial and ethnic groups. Additionally the research confirms the ongoing significance of race in the life chances of Korean Americans.