Asian American Subject Research Articles

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Poetic Language as a Sounding Mo'um (Body): Reading Cathy Park Hong's Poems as Deleuze's “Minor Literature”

Poetic Language as a Sounding Mo'um (Body):Reading Cathy Park Hong's Poems as Deleuze's “Minor Literature” Tae Yun Lim (bio) introduction Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong has a unique relationship with the Korean language and culture through her innovative and stylish English verses in Translating Mo'um (2002; hereinafter TM) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007; hereinafter DDR). These books elaborate Hong's “cultural zigzagging,” the re-importation of the English language back to Western culture, and “misplaced cultural bartering” in the imagined city called “the Desert” (Kryah, “Interview”).1 Reading Hong's work in relation to a matrix of French post-structuralist thinkers and phenomenologists reveals that her language can be interpreted as a “minor literature” as described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and that her work enacts new forms of culturally or ethnically “in-between” or “becoming” ethnic subjectivity. Hong's “minoritized” ways of using language no longer denote the Korean or Asian American subject as a racially and culturally homogeneous subject. Her “minor” language functions as a new cultural lens through which these “in-between” subjects, if only temporarily, reinterpret themselves and the world around them; therefore, Hong's experimental language is an important political tool for these culturally in-between figures. Like many other contemporary Asian American writers, Hong's attitude towards the term “Asian American” is ambivalent. As Song Min Hyoung has noted, Asian American writers and poets in the last three decades, including Hong, are “engaged in actively redefining what it means to be an Asian American … [and] work within a space of tense creativity that reflects a national unease [End Page 83] about the question of race” (14). Eunsong Kim and Don Mee Choi also state that in the contemporary era, Asian Americanness is no longer a manageable or controllable category, as it is comprised of rich and complex genealogies of diverse cultural and racial groups in their manifesto “Refusal=Intervention.” In this regard, the importance of reading contemporary Korean American women poets no longer lies in “their exploration of the complexities of 'Korean' or 'Korean-American' or 'Korean-American woman' as subject positions or as opportunities for constructing even minority/oppositional voices …, [but in] their poem's hostility to these questions” (McNeill 2). Hong's art aesthetic revolving around the pure language—that does not have any fixed semantic referent—and new “becoming” subject is evident in Dance Dance Revolution. The title is derived from the name of a series of music video games produced by a Japanese company. To play this game, the players first choose a pop song and stand on a platform to hit the colored arrows on the screen with their feet to musical cues. Hong titles her work DDR because this process of cultural zigzagging—in which Western pop music and dance moves are imported, made into game formats in Asian countries, gain popularity and are reimported into Western countries, losing their cultural originality—is similar to the ways in which the English language in the contemporary era is losing its original meaning and becoming distorted or transformed under the influence of globalization. The contemporary world is one in which different cultures daily flow across their borders, and so cultural/ethnic identities are continually being disconnected and dislocated by elements from other cultures and languages. No one culture or language now can be truly insulated from another. “The Desert” in Hong's DDR is a microcosm showing how our fast-changing multicultural and multilingual society creates a culturally and racially different (Asian American) subject that has lost its cultural or national originality. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. In DDR, she incorporates elements of the Korean language and culture into her English verses, attempting to construct her “becoming” or “in-between” writing subject. Hong's hybridized language has the creative and transformative force to construct identities beyond conventional notions of nation and culture. Hong uses a hybrid of English and foreign elements, particularly from Korean language and culture, to differentiate her subject from a homogeneous national/cultural identity—but not [End Page 84] entirely. Under the conditions of this transnational or cultural mobility the main character, the Guide, and her use...

“A Strange Form of Love”: The Global Asian American Subject in Richard E. Kim's <em>The Martyred</em>

“A Strange Form of Love”: The Global Asian American Subject in Richard E. Kim's <em>The Martyred</em>

Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies Eng-Beng Lim, chair, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, and Lori Lopez Grace Hong's Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) crosses disciplinary (de)limitations to model an Asian American studies project in intersectional, coalitional, and comparative terms. Our pick was guided by a sense of where Hong's book takes us in the field, and we think the suggested direction, at once bold and broad-based, is an important one for our time; Asian America has always been, and must continue to be understood as a collective field in conjunction with black and brown bodies. By rethinking how we know what we think we know about the field using sources that do not "look Asian American," the book stands out for its departure from any singular optic or subject organized by monolithic racial categories; in doing so, it renders Asian America in light of U.S. histories of racialization that are insistently comparative, and attuned to difference in illuminating ways. It presents a number of provocations that are steeped in questions of performativity (i.e., what would this text do to and within Asian American studies?) rather than questions of ontology (i.e., is this an Asian American studies text). To ask what it would be to receive Death Beyond Disavowal as an Asian American studies text only begins to scratch the meditative lessons of the book, organized around foundational examples drawn from black and Chicano studies, and fully charged in their critical import for Asian American lifeworlds. Hong's text resonates with Aihwa Ong's work (especially Neoliberalism as Exception, Buddhas in Hiding, and Flexible Citizenship), or Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwise, and we are excited to see how Hong's multi-and transdisciplinary model of scholarship can further encourage Asian American studies to perform a sustained and thorough engagement [End Page 462] with black studies, Chicano studies, indigenous studies, and queer/trans theory. As Hong's book teaches us again and again, such analytics and solidarities are vital for the survival of all of our various, embattled communities in a renewed era of white supremacy. Even if Hong's lesson is not directly organized around the example of Asian American subjects or their histories, it's one that could do vital work within and for Asian American studies. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

Racialization, Schooling, and Becoming American: Asian American Experiences

Racial categories, inequalities, and hierarchies have shaped life in the United States since the formation of the country. For children and youth in the immigrant and second generations, schools are central sites of racialization. In this article, we focus on what the educational research suggests about the role of schooling in the racialization of ethnically diverse Asian immigrant and refugee groups in the United States. Specifically, we examine how schools have been implicated in the racialization of Asian Americans from immigrant families in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as how Asian immigrant youth have used schooling to respond to the forces of racialization. Through policies of exclusion and segregation in schools, the state often positions Asian Americans as outside the realm of Americanness. Today, in addition to an ongoing image of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, we see racialization processes expressed in the religification of South Asian immigrant students and in the ideological Blackening of some Southeast Asian youth. At the same time, schools have often positioned Asian Americans as model minorities whose academic success is used to argue that US schools are meritocratic and to blame other students of color for their own academic challenges. Our review demonstrates that Asian immigrant students experience racialization in diverse and contradictory ways that intersect with other identities like class, religion, and ethnicity, making the notion of a single Asian American subject problematic. Although it may seem as though Asian Americans are not subjected to racism, due to the model minority stereotype and their relative racial privilege, our review of the literature clearly challenges this assumption. Rather than proof of the absence of racism, the model minority narrative arguably demotes Asian Americans to 2nd-class citizenship, which hinges on the approval of Whites.

Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. By C. Winter Han. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+237. $89.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).

Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. By C. Winter Han. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+237. $89.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).

Acculturation levels and personalizing orthognathic surgery for the Asian American patient

This study was performed to investigate whether the level of acculturation among Asians living in the USA plays a significant role in their opinion of facial profiles. One hundred and ninety-eight Asian American subjects were asked to complete a pre-validated survey to measure their level of acculturation and to evaluate four sets of pictures that displayed a class II male, class II female, class III male, and class III female. Each set consisted of three lateral profile pictures: an initial unaltered photo, a picture simulating a flatter profile (orthodontic camouflage in class II; mandibular setback in class III), and a picture simulating a fuller profile (mandibular advancement in class II; maxillary advancement in class III). For the class II male, subjects who were more acculturated indicated that a flatter profile (orthodontic camouflage) was less attractive. For the class II female, higher acculturated subjects chose expansive treatment (mandibular advancement) as more aesthetic compared to the less acculturated subjects. Each of these scenarios had statistically significant odds ratios. In general, highly acculturated subjects preferred a fuller facial profile, while low acculturated subjects preferred a flatter facial profile appearance, except for the class III female profile, which did not follow this trend.

In Asian americans, is having a family member diagnosed with cancer associated with fatalistic beliefs?

Objective:Cancer can evoke long-held cultural beliefs which either facilitate or impede efforts to expand the health literacy of families. Among these beliefs is fatalism which holds that controlling ones’ outcome is not possible, and that ones’ outcome is predestined. Some fatalistic beliefs are broadly held within the Asian American (AA) community and may be challenged or reinforced by the experience of having a family member diagnosed with cancer. This study evaluated the relationship between having a family member diagnosed with cancer and selected demographics in AAs on fatalistic beliefs.Methods:Data from 519 AA subjects from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Health Information Trends Survey were used to complete a secondary analysis. Descriptive statistics characterize fatalistic beliefs. Four models using four questions assessed fatalistic beliefs as dependent variables and independent variables of having or not having a family member diagnosed with cancer, completing college or not, sex, and age were assessed using ordinal regression.Results:All of the fatalistic beliefs examined were endorsed by large portions of the subjects. When considering the role of being exposed to having a family member with cancer, it was associated with an increase in the likelihood in a belief that one is likely to get cancer, and everything can cause cancer. Being exposed to a family member diagnosed with cancer was not significantly associated with believing, there was little one could do to control their cancer risk. This belief was broadly rejected. While the belief that there are so many different recommendations about preventing cancer, it is hard to know what to do, was broadly endorsed and not associated with having a family member diagnosed with cancer.Conclusions:The major practice implications within oncology nursing suggest the importance in assessing cancer health literacy and providing corrective knowledge in families with a member diagnosed with cancer. While recognizing the need for more knowledge, cancer diagnoses may represent a significant teachable moment for family members enhancing their health knowledge and supporting behavioral change. Two beliefs were contradictory and broadly held with the AA community, thus support will be needed for further public health research.

Buttery Flies: On the Alien Permanence of the InvAsian Irony of Permanent Aliens

Abstract This piece revisits this old Asian American trope, “the perpetual foreigner-stranger over there and here,” by showing how and why irony, “invAsian” irony in particular, becomes the constant in the cultural ontology and phenomenology of Asian Americana, where the Asian American subject still figures as encroaching builder or unbuilding resident, a transfigurative threat to the narrative coherence of the nationalist US imaginary. These particularly “InvAsian,”1 dangerous and honorary “CauASIAN,” characters—however outdated and yellowing they may seem in the year 2015—still seem real enough; they are downwardly mobile noodle delivery men or upwardly mobile medical overachievers, riding up and down on the Great Chain of American Being, except that they are not laterally mobile, for they are still a little too strange, stupidly or smartly. So, the alien permanence of the “invAsian” irony of permanent aliens: how does this diehard cliché of fascination and fear, this contradictory object of condescension and condemnation, exist or subsist? The economized, i.e., selective and “invested”2 performance and mobilization of ethnoracial stereotypes captures the invAsian irony of America, which mirrors the deeper and wider Euro-American irony of identitarian anxieties over mythologized reality or territorialized origin. America, come on, really, where is your originality from?

Buttery Flies: On the Alien Permanence of the InvAsian Irony of Permanent Aliens

Abstract This piece revisits this old Asian American trope, “the perpetual foreigner-stranger over there and here,” by showing how and why irony, “invAsian” irony in particular, becomes the constant in the cultural ontology and phenomenology of Asian Americana, where the Asian American subject still figures as encroaching builder or unbuilding resident, a transfigurative threat to the narrative coherence of the nationalist US imaginary. These particularly “InvAsian,”1 dangerous and honorary “CauASIAN,” characters—however outdated and yellowing they may seem in the year 2015—still seem real enough; they are downwardly mobile noodle delivery men or upwardly mobile medical overachievers, riding up and down on the Great Chain of American Being, except that they are not laterally mobile, for they are still a little too strange, stupidly or smartly. So, the alien permanence of the “invAsian” irony of permanent aliens: how does this diehard cliché of fascination and fear, this contradictory object of condescension and condemnation, exist or subsist? The economized, i.e., selective and “invested”2 performance and mobilization of ethnoracial stereotypes captures the invAsian irony of America, which mirrors the deeper and wider Euro-American irony of identitarian anxieties over mythologized reality or territorialized origin. America, come on, really, where is your originality from?

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture by Jennifer Ann Ho

Reviewed by: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture by Jennifer Ann Ho Elizabeth Fei (bio) Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, by Jennifer Ann Ho. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Xi + 215 pp. $31.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8135-7069-3. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Ho aims to explore the different modes of racial ambiguity embodied, encountered, and undertaken by Asian Americans. In doing so, Ho contributes to a body of work that attempts to de-essentialize the Asian American subject and to destabilize notions of race as a whole. By presenting five separate cases that oscillate between historical, cultural, and literary analysis, Ho’s work both articulates and embodies different manifestations of this ambiguity that marks (though, as she mentions, is not unique to) Asian American experiences (14). In doing so, Ho foregrounds the need for a nuanced understanding of race as we embark on actively antiracist work. Ho’s work is divided into five separate sections, each of which centers on a different subject and illuminates a different aspect of racial ambiguity. While each chapter might be read as its own separate essay, collectively the chapters provide a rounded perspective of Asian American identity. Chapter 1 discusses the unique case of Yoshiko deLeon, a Japanese woman who was able to resist internment during World War II through the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. Drawing on family interviews and military correspondence around the Mixed Marriage Policy, Ho simultaneously chronicles deLeon’s life as well as the historical events that surrounded her and illustrates the mutability of race and its implications on her life and on policy. Chapter 2 discusses how Asian adoptees have begun to utilize blogging communities in order to both explore and create their identities. By citing the blogs of a handful of adoptees, Ho characterizes their racial ambiguity both within their ability to navigate their ambiguous positions and within their ability to craft these identities in an ongoing fashion. Chapter 3 looks at Tiger Woods as a racially ambiguous subject. It construes him as the sum of a multitude of narratives that have fed his [End Page 263] identity. In particular, the chapter aims to recenter his multiraciality in relation to his Asian American mother Tida Woods and contrast this against his often more visible blackness. In doing so, Ho presents Tiger’s Asian American racial ambiguity as an attempt to resist monolithic racial definitions. Chapter 4 most clearly falls into Ho’s stated wheelhouse of literary analysis. In this chapter, Ho expands on notions of “passing” by detailing the ways that authors Paisley Redkal and Ruth Ozeki blur the lines between autobiography and fiction in their respective works. In addition to exploring each author’s literary technique of “passing” between genres, Ho discusses how the characters work and reclaim their racial ambiguity as a form of passing for an identity that they actually have. Ho construes this action, like Tiger Woods claiming his multiraciality, as a form of Asian American ambiguity as well as resistance against essentialized racial categories as a whole. Finally, chapter 5 continues the idea of overturning traditional racial ideas by asking the reader to consider what the canon of Asian American literature might look like if not tethered exclusively to the bodies of Asian Americans. Ho asserts that transgressive texts written by authors who are not Asian American may appropriately be added to the canon of Asian American literature. In doing so, Ho claims we may arrive at a deeper and more understanding of the racial ambiguity of Asian Americans. In addition to thematically visiting themes of racial ambiguity among different Asian American subjects, Ho seamlessly modulates between different analytical methods and different theories in order to craft her analysis. Ho weaves between historical recollection, literary analysis, current events, critical race theory, cultural studies, as well as her own personal experience in a way that mirrors the ambiguity of the subjects she discusses. Ho’s work is adept at exploring the various facets of racial ambiguity within Asian American culture. Her work inspires a several opportunities for continued analysis. Her chapter that discusses Tiger Woods, for example, touches upon the counterpoint of antiblackness as...

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America

ABSTRACT: To explore “racial exception” as a force of Asian American subject formation, Chambers-Letson moves nimbly across examples drawn from everyday life and transnational geopolitics, tying evidence from visual, legal, sonic, and theatrical sources in discrete case studies.

Re-Imagined Homes: Transnational Asian American Writing in Annie Wang’s<i> The People’s Republic of Desire<i/>

This essay proposes that Annie Wang's The People’s Republic of Desire (2006) offers a new home-identity alignment for Asian American subjectivity in the transnational space of the Pacific Rim, an alternative to the predominant cultural nationalist model for home-identity configuration defined within the US nation-state boundaries. It argues that contemporary cosmopolitan life brought about by global capital has created a more flexible, border-defying cultural imaginary across the Pacific for Asian American writing and the making of Asian American identity outside the nation-state, yet its fluidity, by dissolving the traditional bond between home and identity, also signifies Asian Americans' continuous displacement and dividedness between national and transnational imperatives.

Modern, Modular, Model: Mika Tajima and a Racial Good-Enough Environment

This article reconsiders the persistent Asian American stereotype of model minority by analyzing the contemporary visual art practice of Brooklyn-based Mika Tajima through 1960s discourses of the Herman Miller Research Corporation’s Action Office furniture series, the model minority myth, and British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s theory of transitional phenomena. It examines the overlapping aesthetics of modular office furniture and model minority racialization by asking: what would it mean to consider the model minority trope, alongside modular cubicle structures, as transitional objects through which one can create a “good-enough environment” and experiment with alternative forms of relating? What would it mean to play with model minority discourse as a transitional object for Asian American subject formation?

Reproduction, Reincarnation, and Human Cloning: Literary and Racial Forms in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl

Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl is structured on the contrasting themes of reincarnation and cloning as means of human reproduction. Lai's strategic use of distinct literary forms—mythology and science fiction—reveals the ways in which capitalism racially codes and recodes the body in its attendant stages of development. Specifically, the novel's attention to bodily transformations and duplications emphasizes the historical formation of Asian American subjectivity.

"I Will Make of My Scaffold, a Stage": Performing the Asian American Subject in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

"I Will Make of My Scaffold, a Stage": Performing the Asian American Subject in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Alien Enemies in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine

This essay explores a recent reimagination of Japanese internment in order to suggest a way of understanding Asian American subjects as something more than immigrants: they are enemies. Julie Otsuka’s 2002 novel When the Emperor Was Divine subjects an unnamed, typical American family to military detention, evacuation, and forced incarceration. Compelled to identify with Enemy Japan, the members of the family transform into alien, treacherous beings. My reading focuses on small expressions of allegiance to Emperor Hirohito, who becomes a dangerous and tantalizing figure of desire in the novel.

In vivo measurement of skin microrelief using photometric stereo in the presence of interreflections

This paper proposes and describes an implementation of a photometric stereo-based technique for in vivo assessment of three-dimensional (3D) skin topography in the presence of interreflections. The proposed method illuminates skin with red, green, and blue colored lights and uses the resulting variation in surface gradients to mitigate the effects of interreflections. Experiments were carried out on Caucasian, Asian, and African American subjects to demonstrate the accuracy of our method and to validate the measurements produced by our system. Our method produced significant improvement in 3D surface reconstruction for all Caucasian, Asian, and African American skin types. The results also illustrate the differences in recovered skin topography due to the nondiffuse bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) for each color illumination used, which also concur with the existing multispectral BRDF data available for skin.

Listen to Your Body: Ugly Feelings and the Post-Political Japanese American Subject of Susan Choi's American Woman

About halfway through Susan Choi's novel American Woman (2003), the Japanese American protagonist, Jenny Shimada, undergoes a somewhat puzzling physiological experience that can be described as one...

Diaspora, criminal suspicion, and the Asian American: reading Native Speaker and A Person of Interest from across the Pacific

This essay attempts to practice an Asia-based critical reading of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. Lee's protagonist Henry Park is a second-generation Korean American coached to be ‘unapparent and flat’ as part of his role as ethnic spy, while Choi's Professor Lee is a ‘person of interest’ to the FBI as a suspect for the Brain Bomber. Affectless and generic, Park and Professor Lee at once embody the stereotype of poker-faced, emotionally flat Asians, and then find themselves accused of an ‘un-American’ lack of expressiveness that leads to social immiscibility and even potential criminality. Both texts play with the idea of Asian Americans as ‘alien,’ not only figuratively so but interpellated into roles of espionage or possible terrorism, and consider how Asian American subjectivity is linked to diasporic origin. In reading these works within a transpacific context, I discuss the significance of a ‘native speaker’ within a contemporary Korean context and read the Korean language punning behind Lee's novel. In Choi's novel, I consider the significance of the author's refusal to identity her protagonist's Asian country of origin, as well as her imputed linkage between Japan and terrorism.