Asian American Subject Research Articles

Association of Prepregnancy Cardiometabolic Factors With Gestational Diabetes Among Asian Populations in the United States

BackgroundAsian individuals are among the highest immigrant group to the United States and at particularly high risk of gestational diabetes, which is associated with long-term maternal cardiovascular disease. Limited data are available on the association of prepregnancy cardiometabolic risk factors with gestational diabetes among Asian American subjects. ObjectivesThis study sought to determine the association of prepregnancy hypertension and body mass index (BMI) among Asian ancestry subgroups and by maternal nativity. MethodsUsing data from the National Vital Statistics System from 2016 to 2019, the prevalence of gestational diabetes, stratified according to prepregnancy hypertension and obesity, was examined according to maternal race. Predicted probability of gestational diabetes with continuous BMI was calculated across Asian ancestry subgroups and by maternal nativity. ResultsAmong 13.3 million pregnancies, gestational diabetes occurred in 6.5%. Asian subjects had the highest prevalence (12.3%). Among those with prepregnancy hypertension, Asian subjects had the highest prevalence (29.3%). Across the range of BMI (18-42 kg/m2), Asian subjects had the highest predicted probability. There was substantial heterogeneity across Asian ancestry subgroups between the association of BMI with gestational diabetes, with highest probability among Japanese and Korean American subjects at BMI >23 kg/m2. Predicted probability of gestational diabetes was higher for mothers born outside the United States among all Asian subgroups, except for Japanese American subjects. ConclusionsAsian American individuals have the highest prevalence of gestational diabetes at any BMI and with hypertension. Substantial variation in risk is present across Asian subgroups. Findings suggest a need for more tailored screening and intervention for gestational diabetes among Asian American subjects, with a specific focus on risk for individuals born outside the United States.

The Asian American Contract: On Useful Labor and Social Reproduction in Severance and Minari

This article examines the central role that the work contract plays in the production and reproduction of Asian diasporic worlds. In light of the history of Asian indentured contract labor in the Americas, the article proposes that the “Asian American contract” emerges as an affirmation of the exchange of useful labor for a sense of belonging and world for the Asian American subject—even when this exchange comes at the expense of life. Through readings of Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) and director Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari (2020), the article demonstrates how the contract ultimately transforms Asian Americans’ reproductive labor—their childbearing and child-rearing—into their social reproduction as a racialized class of useful, compliant workers.

Undoing the Dissociation of the Unthought Subject

ABSTRACT A discussion of David Eng’s and Shinhee Han’s reflections on the racial melancholia of the Asian American subject of history, especially in relation to affects of rage and guilt.

Circles of Sorrow: Discussion of David Eng’s and Shinhee Han’s “Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America”

ABSTRACT Using David Eng’s and Shinhee Han’s article in this issue as a point of departure, I respond to their discussion of Asian American subjectivity as it is represented in the Netflix series Beef. Focusing on the challenges faced by “hybrid” groups and individuals who find themselves blocked from both the expression of rage and the experience of self-representation, I reflect on the emotional and ontological vicissitudes of a range of “in-betweeners” within violently hierarchical systems, from those of mixed ethnic heritage to the invisibilized children of narcissistically abusive families.

Takeo Rivera. Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity

Takeo Rivera’s Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity examines the ways in which Asian American subject formation since the 1980s bears a masochistic relationship with the model minority myth, highlighting this dynamic in a wide range of Asian American texts and performances.

Empowering Subjectivity with Cultural Diversification by Subverting Ethnic Stereotypes in Eddie Huang’s Asian American Reminiscence— Fresh off the Boat: A Memoir

The Asian American literary work written by Eddie Huang, Fresh off the Boat expounds how the immigrant family pursuits the ideal American Dream in Orlando. Asian American characters can hardly survive in the racist fissure due to ethnic discrimination and denigration in Western immigrant society. Being absurdly imposed with stereotyped images arising from culture collisions, how the protagonist of the reminiscence strives for being a warrior to subvert prejudiced stereotypes in traumatic life experiences is the dominant issue to be analyzed in this paper in accordance with the following steps: First, expound the crisis of uncertain Asian American identity resulting from culture collision; Second, decipher model minority myth imposed with racial bias; Third, probe into traumatic experiences caused by stereotype in various space; Fourth, discuss the formation of Asian American subjectivity through the perspective of cultural diversification, and finally, explore the finding of how ethnic stereotype is subverted for subjectivation.

The limits of imperial incorporation: Alternative sociological frameworks to study Asian American subjects

AbstractThis paper argues existing scholarship on Asian American communities is limited by an assumption that incorporation into the US can productively address racial and economic precarity. As an alternative, we offer “Extinguishing Asian (American) Insurgency”, a theoretical framework that incorporates histories of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonial politics of incorporation into contemporary sociological analyses of Asian subject formation. Applying Du Boisian sociology alongside Frantz Fanon and Joy James, the framework adopts a global, relational analysis of Asian Americans and the US state. We demonstrate the framework's utility through two case studies: anti‐colonial Sikh diasporic politics through the Gadar Party and US state efforts to tie diasporic South Vietnamese identity to an anti‐communist politic. As such, we encourage the study of alternative possibilities of Asian subject formation that are extinguished by state incorporation, particularly through imperialism and military serivce. Specifically, we address sociologists who extinguish the insurgent Asian American subject in their scholarship by assuming incorporation and pro‐state politics as a natural end goal of migration, or those who simply do not name the US as the institutional force extinguishing possibilities of Asian Americans' insurgency.

Asian American Experience: The Illusion of Inclusion and the Model Minority Stereotype

ABSTRACT The stereotype of Model Minority is often applied to Asian Americans, whose educational and economic achievements are held up as a sign of successful inclusion into American society. Yet the deadly anti-Asian attacks following the Coronavirus pandemic have shattered this illusion of inclusion. Using trauma theories, I explore Asian Americans’ belief in the American Dream, alignment with whiteness, and the illusion of inclusion afforded by the Model Minority stereotype. In particular, I examine how the illusion of inclusion has obscured recognition of an Asian fetish, the sexualized objectification of Asian women and feminization of Asian men. Clinical examples illustrate the workings of racialized stereotypes and mutual dissociation of racial traumas in Asian therapist and Asian patient dyads. Finally, I add a plea for Asian American psychoanalysts and therapists to write and speak about their experiences from their own frame of reference for fuller recognition of Asian American subjectivity.

A Study of Paradigms and Theoretical Key Words of Asian American Literary Criticism

A Study of Paradigms and Theoretical Key Words of Asian American Literary Criticism

Contradictions and Continuity: Constructing Asian American Political and Aesthetic Subjectivities in the Work of Ruth Asawa

Considering contradiction and continuity as a framework to examine the aesthetic and political subjectivities in Ruth Asawa’s work, this essay explores how the visual grammar of contradiction and continuity became a generative force for the artist to negotiate the politics of Asian American citizenship, and navigate various roles and responsibilities as an Asian American woman artist. Through a critical engagement with works by contemporary Asian American and feminist theorists such as Lisa Lowe and Anne Anlin Cheng, it raises issues of the ornamental, domesticity, citizenship, and otherness as a backdrop of Asawa’s Asian American subjectivity, and argues that Asawa’s work needs to be understood simultaneously within and against the rhetoric of binaries of inside and outside, that both articulates and establishes the boundaries of citizenship.

Historicizing the Transpacific Settler Colonial Condition: Asian–Indigenous Relations in Shawn Wong’sHomebaseand Viet Thanh Nguyen’sThe Sympathizer

AbstractThis article introduces the concept of a transpacific settler colonial condition, a term which captures the interconnected nature of Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism across the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, given shared histories of American empire and military violence. In order to historicize the transpacific settler colonial condition's coarticulation with Asian American political subjectivity, ever since the Asian American Movement of the Long Sixties, this article turns to two works of Asian American historical fiction: Shawn Wong's Homebase (1979), one of the first self-identified works of Asian American literature, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015), a contemporary best-selling novel. Both texts call attention to the interconnected nature of Indigenous sovereignty struggles across the continental United States, Guam, and Vietnam and grapple with the vexed positionality of Asian American subjects who at times uphold transpacific settler colonialism and at other times resist it. The article ends with a call for transpacific decolonization via a feminist refugee epistemology.

Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park; Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism by Amy Tang

Review Article| March 01 2020 Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park; Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism by Amy Tang Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature, by Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 320 pages.Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism, by Tang, Amy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 240 pages. Elda Tsou Elda Tsou Elda Tsou is associate professor in the Department of English at St. John’s University. Her first book, Unquiet Tropes: Form, Race, and Asian American Literature, reconceived Asian American literature as a set of classical rhetorical tropes figuring specific historical problematics. Her next book argues that the special affinity defining the relationship of the Asian American subject to whiteness articulates an alternate model of racialization that she calls a “politics of proximity.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2020) 66 (1): 147–156. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-8196751 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Elda Tsou; Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature by Josephine Nock-Hee Park; Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature after Multiculturalism by Amy Tang. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2020; 66 (1): 147–156. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-8196751 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The new formalism may no longer be so new, but its call to reinvigorate the study of form continues to be heard, as two recent books on Asian American literature can attest. While it is true that Asian American studies has traditionally favored historical or sociopolitical approaches to literature, the formal turn of the last decade or so has produced a growing body of scholarship to which we can now add Josephine Park’s Cold War Friendships and Amy Tang’s Repetition and Race.1 The new formalism has unevenly pursued questions of race and racial formation as compared, for instance, to its scrutiny of gender, sexuality, or class. Park and Tang make significant contributions to that scholarship by dint of their subject matter alone, but more than this, they sketch out something like a distinct Asian American epistemology—an inquiry into how Asian American literature might... © 2019 Hofstra University2019 You do not currently have access to this content.

Model Minority Terrorist: Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these seemingly positive changes, how can we engage the continued production of novels that fixate upon damaged Asian American subjects? How does racism get configured in today's age of unparalleled legislative inclusion? If the model minority stereotype merely represents the flip side to the yellow peril (Okihiro 142), then Asian American racial formation continues to revolve around a subtle dialectic in which oppression and prejudice emerge in more insidious ways. We can thus read the work of contemporary Asian American fictions through their illumination of the malleable contours of racial formation, as it has changed during the post-1965 period. Since 1966, the predominant racial formation attached to Asian Americans has been that of the model minority. Presumed to be astute, hardworking, and obedient, Asian Americans have been promoted as the minority ideal. However, South Asian Anglophone and South Asian American fiction writers have been incisive in their attention to racial formation, as it was re-scripted in the post-9/11 moment and as civil liberties [End Page 232] began to erode in light of the war on terror. In a range of novels, the South Asian American body transforms into a site of racial anxiety that manifests in acts of prejudice and violence. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes a prominent place within this grouping, which includes Marina Budhos's Ask Me No Questions, Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been, H. M. Naqvi's Home Boy, Nafisa Haji's The Writing on My Forehead, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams. But Hamid's status as a transnational author has moved critical considerations of his work largely into the purview of postcolonial and global studies. Though published in 2007, the novel has already received widespread critical attention in dozens of articles, book chapters, reviews, and conference papers. Some scholars read the novel as exemplary of a global or world novel (Medovoi; Morey, "'The Rules of the Game Have Changed'") or as a postcolonial narrative boasting a trenchant critique of American imperialism and globalization (Singh; Haider; Keeble). Others focus on its unique combination of formal elements and social contexts (Adami; Mandala White). My article builds upon the work of Anna Hartnell, who argues that the novel reveals the complicated dynamics of religion and racial formation. As Hartnell notes, "The fact that America hosts a far more assimilated and upwardly mobile population of Muslims and Arabs than any European country suggests" (340) a form of privilege that some minority groups could not claim, at least prior to 9/11. Hartnell's larger point is that the novel critiques the melting pot formulation precisely because America's racial and religious minorities rarely inhabit the same positions in social hierarchies and are often positioned against one another. I extend Hartnell's argument by emphasizing the shift in American ethnoracial and religious alignments that repositions South Asians alongside Arabs and Muslims in the period following 9/11. The novel's depiction of a Pakistani transnational necessarily places this text within the purview of Asian American Studies, its attendant critical methodologies, and its central thematics (such as racial formation). At the same time, this novel encourages further interdisciplinary dialogues. With respect to US ethnic studies after 9/11, Ibrahim G. Aoudé provocatively considers how "Ethnic Studies, especially Asian American Studies, is compelled to deal with Arab American issues if it wants to remain a relevant field and revitalize its traditional commitments" (144). [End Page 233] Nadine C. Naber notes the affiliations between Asian American and "Arab/South Asian/Muslim American(s)" in that same period through the germination of activist coalitions (217–27). In light of the heightened paranoia, Shireen Roshanravan investigates how the targeting of Filipino airport screeners after the terrorist attacks demonstrated a large-scale attack on civil liberties in the name of...

Reimagining Asian American literary studies in China

ABSTRACTThe study of Asian American literature has developed for almost two decades since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Inspired by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s “Asia as method,” which situates Asia at the center and uses Asian societies as each other’s points of reference, we use China as a site to reconsider how to read, teach and study Asian American literature in its new phase by exploring the following interactions: (1) between Asian American literature and American literature; (2) between Asian American literature and overseas Chinese literature; (3) between Asian American literature and Chinese literature. We encourage writers, readers and scholars to adopt Chen’s inter-Asia approach to rethink and reconsider the writing of Asian American subject, the study of Asian American literature, the inquiries made about it, and the methods of teaching it. We further expand it to include both a global perspective and a comparative approach that also uses national/regional literatures as reference points.

Untimely Developments: Genre Drag and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

Abstract Through a reinterpretation of Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land (1996), this essay makes the case for the queer possibilities immanent to the most conservative “family values” Asian American genre—the bildungsroman organized around intergenerational conflict. In a decade obsessed with the question of what shifting racial and ethnic demographics meant for the national future, Mona’s content tempted 1990s readers to interpret its vision of the 1960s as a timely meditation on the present. Read in such a way, the novel resolves anxieties about demographic change by reproducing the “timeless” values of family and nation. However, Mona’s form tells a different story. Rather than using the historical past as a mere backdrop to tell a timely story about national progress, Mona is reflexive in its preoccupation with its relationship to the past. Jen’s novel shows us what a coming-of-age story looks like when it does not assimilate its subject into national time. Instead, Mona draws “untimely comparisons” between past US imperial formations that are the present’s condition of possibility. I examine how the novel disrupts the bildungroman’s formal and ideological relationship to national futurity by evoking the past as a drag on progress and the novel as enacting a formal corollary to queer drag performance. I read Mona as a novel of untimely development that reinvents the coming-of-age narrative so that the Asian American subject becomes not a figure that exemplifies a certain future subject or nation but instead one that generatively obstructs national fantasies of progress.

Asian Americans, Affirmative Action, and the Political Economy of Racism: A Multidimensional Model of Raceclass Frames

Utilizing a critical raceclass theory of education, OiYan A. Poon and colleagues analyze interviews with Asian Americans who have publicly advocated for or against affirmative action and acknowledged how their understandings of racial capitalism informed their perspectives and actions. Limited research has considered Asian American subjectivity in examining what shapes their diverse perspectives on affirmative action. This study adds to research on the racial politics of the debate, which has increasingly centered Asian Americans and their interests, and introduces a multidimensional model of raceclass frames representing different political perspectives and choices around affirmative action: abstract liberalism, ethnocentric nationalism, conscious compromise, and systemic transformation. The model offers insights on Asian American frames and ideologies of racism, capitalism, and education to account for their divergent political perspectives and choices in the affirmative action debate.

Abstract 19: Cardiovascular Health Amongst Asian-Americans: National Health and Nutrition Examination Study

Background: Variable propensity towards cardiovascular disease amongst the different ethnicities in the United States (U.S.) has been reported. We aimed to characterize the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors, as defined by the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 metrics amongst Asian-Americans. We also hypothesized that the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors is changing among Asian-Americans and that that the prevalence varies between American-born and foreign-born Asian-Americans. Methods: The National Health and Examination Nutrition Study (NHANES) 2011-2016 cross-sectional surveys were used to evaluate the prevalence trends for cardiovascular risk factors adjusted for age, sex, educational attainment, family income to poverty ratio, and insurance status amongst self-identified Asian-Americans. We further divided foreign-born Asian-Americans into strata based on residence in the U.S. for < 10 years, 10-19 years, and > 20 years to assess the difference in the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors between American-born and foreign-born Asian-Americans. The difference in the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors between American-born and foreign-born Asian-Americans were adjusted for the same covariates as above and presented as odds ratios. Results: Amongst cardiovascular health metrics, the prevalence of Asian-Americans reporting no physical activity increased from 21.5% in 2011-2012 to 32.4% in 2015-2016 (p for linear trend = 0.001). The prevalence of Asian-American subjects reporting a healthy diet decreased from 44.1% in 2011-2012 to 36.8% in 2015-2016 (p for quadratic trend = 0.02). There was a concomitant decline in the prevalence of subjects with healthy weight (BMI<25 kg/m 2 ) from 60.5% in 2011-2012 to 55.3% (p for linear trend = 0.04). We did not observe any significant trend in smoking, total cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes. Compared with American-born Asian-Americans, foreign-born Asian-Americans had lower odds of having a healthy diet [odds ratio (OR): 0.51; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.35-0.74 in < 10 years; OR: 0.48; 95% CI: 0.34-0.64 in 10-19 years, and OR: 0.56; 95% CI: 0.41-0.76 in > 20 years]. Similarly, foreign-born Asian-Americans had lower odds of having hypertension (OR: 0.55; 95% CI: 0.36-0.82 in < 10 years; OR: 0.56; 95% CI: 0.41-0.76 in 10-19 years, and OR: 0.71; 95% CI: 0.51-0.99 in > 20 years) compared to the American-born Asian-Americans. Conclusions: In the NHANES 2011-2016 surveys, Asian-Americans exhibited a declining prevalence of healthy weight, ideal diet, and ideal physical activity levels. Compared with American-born Asian-Americans, foreign-born Asian-Americans had better diet and blood pressure. Further research should be undertaken to delineate trends amongst Asian-American sub-groups and optimal cardiovascular preventive and treatment strategies amongst Asian-Americans.

Neo-Orientalist Stereotyping in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses

ABSTRACTAn American novelist of Chinese origin, Amy Tan attempts to reconstitute the American experience for both the first and second generation Chinese immigrants in her fictional discourses. Curiously, she defiantly promotes the idea of a re-created identity through assimilation, even while she is aware of the inability of Asian Americans to discard their ethnicity and disappear into the American culture. Significantly, Tan’s fictional Asian American characters not only justify their ethnic affiliation but also assert the importance of variance within the American culture by challenging the status-quo of American identity. However, this assertion of the Asian American subjectivity within the multicultural context of America further reinforces the insurmountable cultural differences between the scientific Western ‘self’ and the exotic Eastern ‘other,’ leading to the production of hybrid or alchemised characters, rather than monolithic Americans. Focusing on her use of exotic and supernatural tropes in The Hundred Secret Senses, this paper probes how Tan astutely perpetuates occidental and oriental stereotyping in her fictions and thereby indulges in New Age Ethnicity or neo-Orientalism, as a part of her aspiration to belong to the white American intellectual circle.

Dental caries experience associate with mental issues and hypertension in asian americans

Objective: To determine if oral health indicators (dental caries experience and periodontitis) associate with mental and cardiovascular health issues in Asian Americans. Methods: Medical history data, dental caries experience (DMFT and DMFS; Decayed, Missing due to caries, Filled Teeth/Surface), and periodontitisstatus of Asian Americans were obtained from the Dental Registry and DNA Repository at University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine. A total of 6,117 individuals were evaluated and among which dental status of 309 Asian American subjects (292 adults and 17 children under the age of twelve) were analyzed. The frequency of mental health issues and hypertension depending on dental caries experience (Decayed, Missing due to caries, Filled Teeth or Surfaces, DMFT/DMFS) and periodontitis were evaluated and chi-square or Fisher’s exact test were used with an alpha of 0.05 to determine statistical differences. Results: For the 292Asian American adult subjects, the mean DMFT was 10.1 and mean DMFS was 27.5, which is similar to the expected values in adult DMFT (9.0-11.3) for the United States. For the 17 Asian American children subjects under age of twelve, the mean DMFT was 1.8 and mean DMFS was 3.8, which also fell into the expected values for children DMFT for the United States (1.2-2.6). More severe dental caries experience was associated with having an underlying mental health issue (p=0.02) and hypertension (p=0.02). No associations between having periodontitis and mental or cardiovascular issues were found in the cohort. Conclusion: More severe dental caries experience of Asian Americans associate with mental and cardiovascular issues.

Configuring an Asian American Subject through Comic

In his preface to Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (2009), Jeff Yang addresses that “a quarter of the kids are Asians” in national comic book conventions like Comic-Con and that many comic book artists are Asian Americans (11). While Asian Americans take a substantial part of comics industry, however, writers in Secret Identities argue that there are not many Asian (American) superhero characters. Comics writers thus employ (auto)biographical voices not only to debunk Asian Americans’ marginalized place in comics narratives but also to push the literary convention to the critical contours. In particular, some artists revisit hero genres in an attempt to appropriate the American mythology in which an Asian American protagonist reinvents his or her subjectivity. In this article, I discuss the ways in which Asian American artists interweave comics, short stories, and autobiographies together to configure their racialized experiences, and I focus on “Preface: In the Beginning” and “Driving Steel” to examine the critical location of current Asian American writers.