American Oriental Research Articles

Conceptualising the influence of the cultural orientation of Latin Americans on consumers’ choice of US brands

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to identify the main cultural factors that influence Latin American consumers’ intentions to purchase US brands. Although culture and cultural orientation have been well researched in international business and marketing literature, there is a lack of research on the relationship between consumers’ cultural orientation and their bias towards foreign and domestic products.Design/methodology/approach– The paper reviews the extant literature with a particular emphasis on the key constructs of consumer ethnocentrism, consumer xenocentrism, conspicuous consumption and consumers’ national characteristics. Based on this review, the authors propose a conceptual model showing the influence of cultural orientation on the selection of US brands in Latin America.Findings– The review of the literature shows that previous studies support the proposition of cultural orientation and preferences for foreign versus domestic products among Latin American consumers. Accordingly, in their conceptual framework, the authors posit that consumer ethnocentrism negatively influences the selection of US brands, while xenocentrism does the opposite. Conspicuous consumption is posited as moderating the influence of consumer xenocentrism on purchase intentions of the US brands. On the other hand, national characteristics of consumers in Latin America are posited as moderating the influence of both consumer ethnocentrism and consumer xenocentrism on the selection of US brands.Practical implications– The authors also present important theoretical and practical implications that contribute to the growing body of research on consumer acculturation and country of origin effects, providing a better interpretation of consumer behaviour in the context of international and domestic markets.Originality/value– This study fills a significant gap in the understanding of the impact of cultural orientation and conspicuous consumption on selection of US brands in Latin America. Its conceptual framework can provide the basis for future empirical studies and also improve understanding of emerging markets.

American Orientalism in Korea

People express and exercise power as much through words as through actions. Yet scholars never have examined systematically how officials and others in the United States actually talked and wrote about Korea, both north and south, during the momentous interwar period. This article unearths crude depictions of the Korean people common in American writings from the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that this rhetoric created and reinforced an unequal power relationship between the United States and Korea. These negative discourses about Koreans, as expressions of American Orientalism, had important implications for u.s.policy in Korea and for the post-war trajectory of developments on the entire Korean peninsula. They also have left a perceptible imprint on English-language scholarship engaging in assessments of Korea ever since.

Social sciences and the politics of knowledge: Inculturation and anthropology of knowledge: American orientalism 1945-1970

Social sciences have now contributed to a better understanding of society and different cultural spaces that make up the world basing themselves on disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and history. These disciplines are involved in the development of a cognitive environment which allows us to define and delimit Orientalism perceived here as an approach. The purpose of this writing is to compare the organization and ways of Orientalism in two distinct cultural environments (Anglo-Saxon and Arabic) through the analysis of interactions and different structures which preceded its identification. If from the 40s to the 60s showed the emergence of Orientalism as a tool for policy analysis, institutionalization of the scientific community with the establishment of departments of research, growth of foundations roles in funding and policy definition of Area Studies equally sored. This leads us to question the real contribution of Areas Studies in the understanding of the Orient.

Labelling the Ottoman Empire as ‘Turkey’ in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893

Through an examination of government, media, and commercial sources published during the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, this article demonstrates the co-existence of three dominant ideological movements that helped create a unified social identity for the Ottoman Empire against threats of nationalism and imperialism from the Great Western Powers, in specific, the United States, during the late nineteenth century. The three ideologies that found a representation at the World’s Fair were: Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism. Firsthand accounts of the Ottoman Empire through these three ideologies reveal American and Western nations’ political and cultural power and influence over the Ottoman Empire, which was made possible through the external labelling of the Ottoman Empire as ‘Turkey’, and its people as ‘Turkish’, as well as through the representation of the Ottoman Empire as a ‘Muslim state’. This article will also examine how American Orientalism was perpetuated at the fair, through juxtaposing the United States’ modern and democratic institutions visually and textually with the Ottoman Empire’s conservative and authoritarian ones.

American Orientalism

One group of South Asians had become objects of fear and derision and targets of immigration enforcement and extra-legal violence. Another group of South Asians was being heralded for their social, economic, and cultural contributions to the United States. The aftermath of 9/11 had brought into relief a deep set of divisions within the South Asian American community. In some ways, these years called into question the very utility of “South Asian” as an identity marking the common experiences of Americans with roots in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.These were nations that shared colonial histories as different parts of British India and Ceylon, but they were now divided by military, religious, and ethnic conflicts on the subcontinent, and their diasporic communities had significantly different levels of power, income, and influence in the United States

Lesbians, tea, and the vernacular of fluids

In Go Fish, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner's seminal lesbian film from 1994, one of the protagonists complains that the woman who her friends want to set her up with has cupboards of herbal tea and no sex appeal. In the course of the film, the women end up together, but the joke/not-joke about lesbians and their fondness for herbal tea remains. What can we make of this conjunction? What does the linkage of tea and lesbianism connote and how does tea function within representational economies of lesbianism? On the one hand, tea functions as prelude to eroticism and codes for the opacity of lesbian sex. On the other hand, it also works to consolidate stereotypes about lesbianism. In this essay, the author explores the factors that make this almost joke possible – the gendering of tea as feminine, stereotypes about lesbian feminism – and examine ways in which it has been deployed as a form of lesbian shorthand. In working to understand why tea has evoked this stereotype, a sense of American counter-cultures, Orientalism, and historical memory come together to paint second-wave lesbian feminism as out of touch, politically inactive, and intimidated by sex. But what alternatives might tea open towards? Focusing on tea, then, gives us access to economies of desire and pleasure that both build on perceptions of radical feminism and expands upon it by establishing a vernacular of fluids, taste, and tactility.

“The Case of the Mysterious Koreans”: The Meaning of Life, American Orientalism and the Korean War in the Age of the World Target

This article examines the coverage of the Korean War in the popular American magazine Life, focusing on its depiction of Koreans. In these depictions, Koreans figure as an epistemological enigma: as ambiguously friendly/hostile, loyal/disloyal, and as worthy/unworthy of life. But in journalism’s attempted management of that inscrutability we glimpse a crucial element of the shift in epistemes that defined the emergence of what cultural theorist Rey Chow has described as the Age of the World Target: an epoch in which the “countries of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East took on the significance of ‘target fields’ — as fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary to the United States’ continual political and ideological hegemony.” To understand this emergent episteme, however, it is also necessary to engage with the work of cultural critic Christina Klein, who has described the post-1945 period as one in which middlebrow cultural works like Life reveal a U.S. Cold War ideology oriented as much by a desire to integrate subjects of the decolonizing world into the American sphere of influence as by an impulse to contain the Soviet menace.

Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s <em>China Mountain Zhang</em>

Author(s): Fan, Christopher T. | Abstract: Christopher T. Fan argues that McHugh’s award-winning 1992 science fiction novel perceives the twilight of the American Century by offering a “critical realism,” to use Georg Lukacs’s phrase, of postsocialist US–China interdependency. In other words, it offers a form in which we perceive ourselves as subjects and objects of the twenty-first century world-system’s most important bilateral relationship. Moreover, as a novel about US–China interdependency, it implicitly critiques the binary Orientalism that structures the rapidly growing body of work on “techno-Orientalist” formations. Fan's analysis thus extends arguments about American Orientalism’s non-Manichean formations (Christina Klein, Melani McAlister, Colleen Lye) into the postsocialist era.The novel’s near-future, China-centric world analogizes McHugh’s personal crises of professional desire as a precarious laborer in New York City, with the massive reorientation of desires from Maoist politics to market-directed individuality that she witnessed among her students when she taught in China from 1987–1988. Chinese racial form plays a crucial mediating role in the novel because it reflects the revival of Confucian humanist discourse in reform-era China as a way to focus a national project of rapidly generating capitalist desire. Finally, by describing US–China interdependency, this article also generates a theory of US–China neoliberalism that corrects for universalist, Euro-American accounts of neoliberal subject formation (Lauren Berlant), as well as insufficiently subject-sensitive accounts (Aihwa Ong).

The Qur’ānic Story of Joseph as a ‘History’ of the Human Soul

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 40, 3, 2015 © The Maghreb Review 2015 This publication is printed on longlife paper THE QUR’ĀNIC STORY OF JOSEPH AS A ‘HISTORY’ OF THE HUMAN SOUL MOHAMMED RUSTOM∗ INTRODUCTION The point of departure in this article will be the classical principle which says that some parts of the Qurʾān explain other parts of the Qur’ān (al-Qur’ān yufassiru bafiḍuhu bafiḍan). 1 My basic assumption is that, as a self-contained text, the Qur’ān not only suggests that we see its verses in light of other verses and passages, but it demands that we do so. And, if this applies to the use of words and phrases, then the same holds true for clusters of key Qur’ānic ideas, concepts and themes. I will here be concerned with relating this abovementioned intertextual principle to two sections of the Qur’ān, namely the story of Joseph (12:3–101) and parts of Sūrat al-Tīn, ‘The Fig’ (95:4–6). More specifically, an attempt will be made to demonstrate that the Qur’ānic story of Joseph serves as a perfect ‘commentary’ upon the relevant verses of Sūrat al-Tīn, with respect to both structure and meaning. But to see the story of Joseph in this light, one must assume a symbolic perspective as opposed to the more literary and dramatic approaches that are commonly applied to the story, and often with considerable insight and interest. 2 My approach to the story of Joseph is thus informed by and somewhat akin to the more ‘esoteric’ interpretations it has traditionally received in texts of Sufism and Islamic philosophy. 3 ∗ Carleton University, Canada This article has benefited from the critical comments of a number of colleagues. Particular thanks go to Waleed Ahmed, Yousef Casewit, William Chittick, Aasim Hasany, Hany Ibrahim and Todd Lawson. 1 For a general treatment of this principle, see Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Understanding the Qur’an (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), ch. 12. 2 See, in particular, Anthony Johns, ‘Joseph in the Qur’ān: Dramatic Dialogue, Human Emotion and Prophetic Wisdom’, Islamochristiana , Vol. 7, 1981, pp. 29–55; Todd Lawson, ‘Typological Figuration and the Meaning of “Spiritual”: The Qur’anic Story of Joseph’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 132, No. 2, 2012, pp. 221–244; Mustansir Mir, ‘Irony in the Qur√ān: A Study of the Story of Joseph’, in Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur√ān, edited by Issa Boullata (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000), pp.173– 187; Mir, ‘The Qur’anic Story of Joseph: Plot, Themes, and Characters’, The Muslim World, Vol. 76, No. 1, 1986, pp. 1–15; James Morris, ‘Dramatizing the Sura of Joseph: An Introduction to the Islamic Humanities’, Journal of Turkish Studies, Vol. 18, 1994, pp. 201– 224. 3 Some representative materials and pertinent secondary scholarship can be found in Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. ‘Joseph i.: In Persian Literature’ (by Asghar Dadbeh) and Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. ‘Joseph ii.: In Qur√ānic Exegesis’ (by Annabel Keeler). One may also consult Paul Nwyia, ‘Un cas d’exégèse soufie: l’Histoire de Joseph’, in Mélanges offerts à Henry Corbin, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Tehran: McGill University, Institute of Islamic Studies, Tehran Branch, 1977), pp. 407–423 and my commentary upon Sūra 12 in The Study Quran (for which, see the following note). THE QUR’ĀNIC STORY OF JOSEPH AS A ‘HISTORY’ OF THE HUMAN SOUL 281 SOME PREPARATORY REMARKS Qur’ān 95:4–6 reads as follows: ‘Truly We created man in the most beautiful stature [95:4], then We cast him to the lowest of the low [95:5], save those who believe and perform righteous deeds; for theirs shall be a reward unceasing’ (95:6).4 A common explanation of 95:4 is that human beings were created in the image of God, in accordance with the Prophetic saying, ‘God created Adam in His form’.5 And 95:5 can be interpreted as the general state of disbelief from which only those mentioned in 95:6 are excluded.6 According to the great philosopher-mystic Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 1274...

Sociocultural Influences on Gambling and Alcohol Use Among Native Americans in the United States.

Gambling opportunities on and near Native American lands have increased in recent decades; yet there is a lack of research examining the patterns of problem gambling and alcohol abuse among Native Americans in the US. Traditional Native American cultural identity may be a protective factor for problem gambling and alcohol abuse among Native Americans. Telephone interviews were conducted with 415 Native American adults aged 18 years and older across the US. The past-year prevalence of gambling among Native Americans is similar to the rate for non-Native Americans in the US (80 vs. 77%). However, Native Americans have over twice the rate of problem gambling as the US sample (18 vs. 8%). Although Native Americans have a lower rate of past-year alcohol use than the US population (47 vs. 68%), they have a somewhat higher rate of alcohol abuse than their US counterparts (5.5 vs. 4.3%). Logistic regression analysis, with problem gambling as the dependent variable, revealed that lower socioeconomic status is significantly associated with an increased odds of problem gambling for Native Americans. Counter to the hypothesis, the higher the score on the Native American orientation, the higher the odds of being a problem gambler. Further, living by the "White way of life" was associated with a decreased odds of being a problem gambler; and perceived gambling convenience was associated with an increased odds of being a problem gambler. None of the Native American factors was significant in predicting alcohol abuse. These findings highlight the need for further investigation into the influence of cultural factors on Native American gambling.

The Historical Edge of Irony: Marco Millions and Its Chinese Adaptations

ABSTRACT: This article historicizes the playtext(s) of Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions (1927) as a satire on America and contextualizes its adaptations in semi-colonial and “postcolonial” China, to examine how irony functions across time and across cultures. In the first part, I investigate the play’s poetic resistance to American Orientalism and its ironic failure to transcend the Eurocentric discourse it criticizes. In the second part, I examine the play’s trajectory on the Chinese stage from 1929 to 2009, arguing that these adaptations, as transideological, “postcolonial” irony, embodied the polyphony of Chinese Occidentalism and wrote back to the divided self of modern China. The ironic Marco Millions and its Chinese adaptations provoke the audience to rethink history and rewrite reality, also providing a site for critics to reconceive the complementary relationship between Orientalism and Occidentalism. Thus, this minor O’Neill play of the 1920s has acquired historical significance and contemporary relevance.

Relocating to Hawai‘i: Dwelling with Islamic art at Doris Duke’s Shangri La

Abstract This article explores Doris Duke’s (1912–93) practices as the ‘creative persona’ in building Shangri La, both her home in Hawai‘i and the fifth largest collection of Islamic art in America. Discussion begins with historical contextualization. A brief review of elite collecting in the 1930s extends the timeline of American orientalism to Duke’s project at Shangri La. Enabled by the emergence of interior design as a field for women’s creativity, her practices as the first major western female collector of Islamic art are considered against American orientalism’s gendered slant. Thereafter, the discussion turns to theoretical concerns. First, Duke’s deliberately hybrid spaces, mixing Islamic art from various regions and also combining historical objects with replicas, is studied as the creation of an Islamicate dwelling place, which, contrary to the colonial bases of orientalism, recognized the contemporaneity of the Islamic world. Duke’s practices of replication and recollection suggest relocation as the conceptual mode in which mobile objects create a sense of the transitory that supplants static architecture. Finally, the concept of relocation enables an examination of Duke’s major innovation. She moves Islamic tentage indoors to express her understanding of transitional space in Islamic architecture relocated to its setting in Hawai‘i.

Ethnic Identity and Orientation to White American Culture Are Linked to Well-Being Among American Indians – But in Different Ways

This study examined the relationship between ethnic identity, orientation toward the White mainstream culture, and psychological well-being among American Indians. In the light of the unique history of American Indians, we investigated the relationship between identification with the American Indian ingroup, orientation toward the dominant White American culture (in terms of showing behavior typical for White mainstream culture as well as positive attitudes and feelings of belonging to White American culture), and self-efficacy and learned helplessness as indicators of psychological well-being. Structural equation analyses with an adolescent and an adult sample revealed a positive relationship between ethnic identity and self-efficacy but no link with learned helplessness. The tendency to show behavior typical for White mainstream culture was associated with higher self-efficacy in both samples and with lower helplessness in the adult subsample. White American orientation in the form of positive attitudes and sense of belonging were associated with higher helplessness in both samples and with lower self-efficacy among adults. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of both ethnic identity and the orientation toward the mainstream culture for well-being among American Indians, focusing on the distinct relations of White American behavior versus White American affiliation with well-being in American Indians.

Parent–child cultural orientations and child adjustment in Chinese American immigrant families.

Direct and indirect/mediated relations of (a) children's and parents' cultural orientations and (b) parent-child gaps in cultural orientations to children's psychological adjustment were examined in a socioeconomically diverse sample of 258 Chinese American children (age = 6-9 years) from immigrant families. Parents reported on children's and their own Chinese and American orientations in language proficiency, media use, and social relationships. Parents and teachers rated children's externalizing and internalizing problems and social competence. Using structural equation modeling, we found evidence for both the effects of children's and parents' cultural orientations and the effects of parent-child gaps. Specifically, children's American orientations across domains were associated with their better adjustment (especially social competence). These associations were partly mediated by authoritative parenting. Parents' English and Chinese media use were both associated with higher authoritative parenting, which in turn was associated with children's better adjustment. Furthermore, greater gaps in parent-child Chinese proficiency were associated with children's poorer adjustment, and these relations were partly mediated by authoritative parenting. Together, the findings underscore the complex relations between immigrant families' dual orientations to the host and heritage cultures and children's psychological adjustment.

Chinese American parents’ acculturation and enculturation, bicultural management difficulty, depressive symptoms, and parenting.

This study examined whether Chinese American parents' acculturation and enculturation were related to parenting practices (punitive parenting, democratic child participation, and inductive reasoning) indirectly through the mediation of parents' bicultural management difficulty and parental depressed mood. Data came from a two-wave study of Chinese American families in Northern California. Mothers and fathers were assessed when their children were in early adolescence and then again in middle adolescence (407 mothers and 381 fathers at Wave 1; 308 mothers and 281 fathers at Wave 2). For both waves, we examined cross-sectional models encompassing both direct and indirect links from parental cultural orientations to parenting practices. We also used individual fixed-effects techniques to account for selection bias in testing model relationships at Wave 2. At Wave 1, via bicultural management difficulty and depressive symptoms, American orientation was related to less punitive parenting and more inductive reasoning for both parents, and Chinese orientation was related to more punitive parenting and less inductive reasoning for fathers. The findings indicate that bicultural management difficulty and parental depressed mood are important mechanisms to be considered when studying the relation between Chinese American parents' acculturation/enculturation and parenting.

Cultural dynamics and marital relationship quality in Mexican-origin families.

Prior research suggests that acculturation may influence relationship outcomes among Mexican-origin married couples, including marital adjustment and distress. Despite much theory and research on parent-child cultural differences and disruptions in the parent-child relationship, no previous research has investigated possible associations between husband-wife cultural differences and marital relationship quality. With a sample of Mexican-origin married couples (N = 398), the current study investigated the relations between husband-wife differences in acculturation (American orientation) and enculturation (Mexican orientation) with husband and wife reports of positive marital qualities (warmth and relationship satisfaction). To clarify and extend previous research, the current study also investigated within-person models of cultural orientation domains as related to positive marital quality. Results provide partial evidence showing that dyadic cultural differences are associated with lower positive marital quality while cultural similarity is associated with higher positive marital quality; however, the relations are complex and suggest that the associations between wife cultural orientation and positive marital quality may depend on husband cultural orientation (and vice versa). Findings also implicate the importance of assessing spouse bidimensional cultural orientation by showing that the relation between spouse acculturation level and relationship quality may depend on his or her enculturation level. Additional nuances in the findings illustrate the importance of assessing multiple domains of cultural orientation, including language use and cultural values. We highlight several future directions for research investigating nuances in spouse cultural dynamics and relationship processes.

American Orientalism in Popular Culture Post 9/11: A Gramscian (Re)Reading

This academic paper focuses on Bush’s administration ability to capture the common sense of the American populace and diffuse a common ideology namely; neo-conservatism to mobilize public support for its war against Iraq. It is the examination of Oriental discourse as a source of knowledge for imperialist means and the role of the mass media in promotion of the neo-cons agenda of the Bush administration that the military intervention of Iraq was justified vis-a-vis the construction of the aberrant ‘other’ or ‘enemy’. The Gramscian concepts of common sense and the organic intellectual offer an elaborate perspective on how the latter point was effectively institutionalized in the American society and discourse. While at the same time, allowed the Bush administration to dominate the discourse over national security and the safety of its citizenry. The paper is divided into three sections. Firstly, it provides a general overview of Oriental discourse and its usage as a form of knowledge for imperialist and/or colonial purposes. Secondly, it examines Gramscian notions of common sense and the organic intellectual from his work within the ‘Selections from the Prison Notebook.’ Thirdly, utilizes Gramscian concepts in relation to the important of mass media discourse post 9/11 and its effects on public consumption leading to U.S Invasion on Iraq. In doing so, this paper aims to show how we can understand the instrumentalization of Oriental discourse and the mass media functions within civil society to diffuse the dominate ideology of the organic intellectuals associated with the Bush administration in a Gramscian sense.

Multidimensional Silence, Spirituality, and the Japanese American Art of Gardening

Multidimensional Silence, Spirituality, and the Japanese American Art of Gardening Brett Esaki (bio) Japanese American Artworks, such as origami, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music, are riddled with complex silences. Many Japanese American artists create silences to express experiences of being silenced by various forms of marginalization. In order to exercise agency within contexts of racism, some immerse themselves in an internal silence that allows them to focus on crafting the art. They also create art that communicates cultural and religious ways of being silent. As I discovered in interviews and site visits, these layers of silence are essential to Japanese American gardeners and the gardens they design. This article examines three generations of Japanese American gardeners in the Central Coast of California. Political, discursive, and religious silences have been infused into this lineage’s silent practices of art as they negotiated economic marginalization and American Orientalism. A primary strategy to negotiate racism—called outward assimilation—was to transform religious resources within gardening to appear nonreligious; in recent decades, Asian Americans often accomplish this by identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” Together, multidimensional silence and spirituality are strategies of resistance that have sustained Japanese American gardeners through cycles of racism. [End Page 235] Introduction to Multidimensional Silence and a Lineage of Gardeners Political, discursive, religious, and artistic silences fused within gardening to create multidimensional silences in response to a history of anti-Japanese racism. In order to understand multidimensional silence, it is helpful to compare it to common conceptions of silence. Silence according to a Western definition is the absence of sound, and in this sense is negative, deep, and dark. Asian American studies has typically utilized this definition because it matches the experience of having one’s political and subjective voice muffled and distorted; this applies to all Asian Americans and involves more layers for women and those of nonnormative sexualities. The preference for this definition can be traced to the historical roots of the Asian American movement in “breaking the silence” and “speaking truth to power” and the theoretical roots of Asian American studies in Marxist class analysis. Similarly, Asian American studies has addressed cultural tendencies to avoid discussing issues of sexuality and not to seek counseling and other mental health services.1 Other Asian American silences have been traced to the legacy of colonialism—two exemplars of this critique are Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and Edward Said’s Orientalism.2 Generally, in this line of analysis, Asians are colonial subjects, and their voices are transformed through epistemic violence into colonial discourse, information to be ignored, or affirmations of the colonialist assumption that Asians have nothing to contribute to Western civilization. As Said expresses, “[I]n discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence.”3 In these ways, the definition of silence as the absence of speech has been useful to illustrate the lack of full civic inclusion and the muffled presence of Asian American voices, and to contest the stereotype of Asians as passive, inactive, diminutive, and (feebly) feminine—or in other words without power. While this definition provides strong analyses of discourse and society, it tends to overlook other forms of silence that Asian Americans engage, and this has the potential to skew the image of Asian Americans toward the perfectly silent victim or the perpetually shouting protester. Literary scholar King-Kok Cheung articulated this dilemma in Articulate Silences, where she argued that “monocultural criteria of competence and even feminist antipathy toward silence may run roughshod over the sensibilities [End Page 236] of some ethnic groups. While the importance of voice is indisputable, pronouncing silence as the converse of speech or as its subordinate can also be oppressively univocal.”4 To be clear, this is not to assert that Asian Americans are not silenced and that Asian Americans should not speak out regarding their oppression, but that focusing on either side of the binary of speaking or voicelessness overlooks many silences that Asian Americans utilize. For example, Asian Americans have cultural silences for deference and respect, and religious silences of meditation and of awe in the presence of the divine; these silences may be used to oppress, but not always. In order...

Broadcasting Jazz into the Eastern Bloc—Cold War Weapon or Cultural Exchange? The Example of Willis Conover

For jazz lovers worldwide, and particularly for listeners in Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, Willis Conover's Voice of America show, Music USA (“The Jazz Hour” segment) provided the main source of knowledge for this music, and it was largely through the filter of his broadcast that each of the tens of millions of listeners crafted his or her understanding of “America.” Conover's popularity in Cold War-era Eastern Europe would be hard to overstate.Mainstream assessments of jazz posited—and continue to posit—equivalence between “jazz” and the “American way of life;” during the Warsaw Pact era, jazz functioned as a kind of “window to the West.” From such a viewpoint, Conover's wild popularity seems to anoint him as a victorious Cold War warrior for the West, but such equivalences and their conclusions are misleading, even mythical. Rather, the reception of Conover's radio program can be seen as part of a general mobilization of a whole generation. “The Jazz Hour” both reflected and added impetus to a modernization process in the Eastern Bloc—a process which began with the advent of the Cold War and continued over several decades. However, this modernization was both responsive to, and at the same time independent of, jazz's associations with the United States.With the beginning of Conover's jazz broadcast, both US-dominated NATO and Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact factions used jazz for their own purposes. The US administration and Conover himself regarded his penetration into Soviet Bloc radio as an important victory in the Cold War over their ideological enemy. But, as jazz gained a foothold in Soviet countries, both Conover's Music USA and the state-affiliated radio stations began to broadcast local or regional versions of jazz (labelled “own” jazz). The State socialist governments could thus claim victories of their own, now that listeners of their countries could turn to state radio stations for jazz, as opposed to American ones. The US administration intended to use jazz's popularity to weaken the loyalty of Eastern Bloc inhabitants to their governments, while the Soviet regime sought to establish a local, “own” jazz sensibility as a way of undermining the United States' strategy.Both strategies failed. Eastern Bloc inhabitants did not rise against their regimes, but implemented jazz within their own cultures. Eastern Bloc rulers managed a degree of control over the dissemination of jazz, but they failed also, because they could not stop the spread of an American orientation in jazz, despite of the strategy to promote their “own” jazz.Conover was an instrument for both sides. For the US government, he advertised US music and US values; for Eastern Bloc regimes, his broadcasts' inclusion of Eastern Bloc jazzmen promoted local and regional pride in the emerging “own” jazz styles played within the Eastern Bloc, and now transmitted internationally. If Conover really helped to destabilize anything, then he destabilized both systems, creating a worldwide listening community which proceeded to act beyond bloc boundaries.

David R. Vishanoff, The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics: How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 2011). Pp. 344. $46.00 cloth.

David R. Vishanoff, The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics: How Sunni Legal Theorists Imagined a Revealed Law (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 2011). Pp. 344. $46.00 cloth.