Do 2 Halves Really Make a Whole?

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2012-12-10 04:48Z by Steven

Do 2 Halves Really Make a Whole?

Center for Asian American Media
1993
30 minutes
VHS

Martha Chono-Helsley, Producer/Director

This video features the diverse viewpoints of people with multiracial Asian heritages. African and Japanese American poet and playwright Velina Hasu Houston lives an “amalgamated existence” and encourages others to take pride in all that they are. Performance artist Dan Kwong constantly struggles with two strong and often conflicting Asian heritages – Japanese and Chinese American. Chinese-Japanese-Chicana-Scots storyteller, actress and performance artist Brenda Wong Aoki uses her unique ethnic mix to intersect social circles.

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Hapa: One Step at a Time

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2012-12-10 00:35Z by Steven

Hapa: One Step at a Time

Center for Asian American Media
2001
26 minutes
DVD

Midori Sperandeo, Producer
KVIE-TV

According to 2000 Census statistics, nearly 7 million Americans identify themselves as multi-racial, or ‘hapa.’ This engaging first-person documentary is about marathon runner and TV producer Midori Sperandeo’s struggles to come to terms with her hapa identity. Comparing her personal path toward self-awareness as a hapa to the challenges she faces training for long-distance running, Hapa touches upon a national history of anti-miscegenation laws, increasing rates of interracial marriages and additional census data to provide a context with which to better understand this rapidly growing demographic group. Interviews with individuals from diverse backgrounds call attention to the pressure many feel to “choose” between cultural heritages; their anxieties of feeling like outsiders in their parents’ communities; and the unique ways in which the hapa community is enriching the cultural fabric of our society.

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A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Three Sisters

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive on 2012-12-08 04:31Z by Steven

A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Three Sisters

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012), Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature
pages 130-146

Elizabeth Liang, Actress, Writer, Producer and co-host of “Hapa Happy Hour

It is an act of courage or foolhardiness to produce theatre in the heart of the film world, depending on your point of view and how large the houses turn out to be. In the fall of 2005, I produced Three Sisters in a 60-seat theatre in Burbank, California (home of Disney and Warner Bros.). The odds were stacked even higher against the show’s success when I stipulated that the main characters, the upper-class and highly educated Russian Prozorov siblings, had to be played by hapa actors. This essay describes my attempt to interpret the play through a multi-ethnic lens while working with a monoracial director, and the challenges this posed, both on the stage and off.

Read the entire article here.

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Dismantling the Race Myth

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Forthcoming Media, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Live Events, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-12-07 16:20Z by Steven

Dismantling the Race Myth

Kyoto International Conference Center
Kyoto, Japan
2012-12-15 through 2012-12-16


Poster (PDF, Japanese)

Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University presents International Symposium.
 
“Race” still has social reality even though it has no biological reality. This symposium aims to dismantle the race myth by bringing together scholars in a wide range of disciplines from Japan and abroad. While race studies have hitherto been confined to trans-Atlantic experiences, we will shed lights on “invisibility,” “ambiguity,” and “in-between-ness” with special reference to Japanese and Asian experiences.

Schedule

  • Saturday, December 15, 2012
    • Part I. Invisibility: Representation of Invisible Race
      • Takashi Fujitani (Toronto University) / Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Tennosei, Global Modernity, and the Anxieties of Ocular-centric Racism
      • Ayako Saito (Meiji Gakuin University) / Note on the Film Representation of the “Hisabetsu Burakumin”
      • Joong-Seop Kim (Gyeongsang National University) / The Formation of an Invisible Race: the case of the Korean “Paekjong”
      • Ariela Gross (University of Southern California) / Laws of Blood: The Science and Performance of Race in U.S. Courtrooms
      • Relay Talk and Poster Session by Junior Researchers
      • Social Hour
  • Sunday, December 16, 2012
    • Part II. Knowledge: Co-production of Science and Society
      • Arnaud Nanta (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) / Critique on the Idea of “Race” in French Anthropology, 1930s-1940s
      • Wataru Kusaka (Kyoto University) / American Colonial Public Health and the Leprosy Patients’ Revolt: Discipline and Desire on Culion Island, Philippines
      • Miho Ishii (Kyoto University) / Blood, Gifts, and “Community” in India: Betwixt and Between Marking and Anonymisation
      • Yasuko Takezawa (Kyoto University), Kazuto Kato (Osaka University), Hiroki Oota (Kitazato University) / Population Descriptors in Genetic Studies and Biomedicine
    • Part III. Hybridity: Beyond the Politics of “Blood”
      • Ryuichi Narita (Japan Women’s University) / Politics of “Mixed Race” in Modern Japan
      • Mika Ko (Rikkyo University) / Cinematic Representations of “Mixed-Race” People in 1930s Japanese Cinema: The Two Faces of Japan’s Modernity
      • Masako Kudo (Kyoto Women’s University) / Border-crossing and Identity Construction by Children of Japanese-Pakistani Marriage
      • Duncan Williams (University of Southern California) / Japan and Its Global Mixed Race History

This is part of a joint research project, a Japan-based Global Study of Racial Representations with Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S). The organizers are grateful to Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for its sponsorship of this event. We are also thankful to Science Council of Japan for their support.

For more information, click here.

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Whiteness and the city: Australians of Anglo-Indian heritage in suburban Melbourne

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Oceania on 2012-12-06 22:25Z by Steven

Whiteness and the city: Australians of Anglo-Indian heritage in suburban Melbourne

South Asian Diaspora
Volume 4, Issue 2, May 2012
pages 123-137
DOI: 10.1080/19438192.2012.675721

Michele Lobo, Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Leslie Morgan
School of Education
Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

This paper uses an auto-ethnographic approach to map how two Melburnians of Anglo-Indian heritage make sense of their belonging through connections to cities within the South Asian diaspora, in particular, Lahore, Kolkata and London. As diasporic writers of mixed descent working within the disciplines of geography and visual culture, we use food and images of public space as entry points to explore our everyday experiences as translocal subjects who inhabit several spaces simultaneously. The exploration of such stories of intercultural encounter is interesting and significant in the field of diaspora studies because as South Asians we were historically an ‘out-of-place’ group of mixed descent in a colonial context, a community without a regional home in independent India/Pakistan, and an imagination that we were entitled to a home in Britain and Australia by virtue of our whiteness and Anglo-ness. Our stories provide a nuanced understanding of the dominance, power and privilege of whiteness in colonial and post-colonial contexts and an insight into how mobility impacts on our sense of belonging.

What do you eat for breakfast?

An interview held at a participant’s home on a cold winter morning was nearing conclusion. The audio recorder was switched off, but Harry, an Anglo-Australian man, a local councillor continued to talk about how Dandenong was changing. He expressed feelings of loss, regret and anxiety when he said that Dandenong, once a white working-class neighbourhood in suburban Melbourne with ‘good-quality homes and good-quality people’ had now become stigmatised as a ‘shit hole’, ‘a ghetto’ with ‘second-class citizens’ (Harry, interview 1 May 2003). Harry then began alluding to the cultural difference between Anglo-Australians and ‘ethnics’ and used food as the principal determinant. He said that ‘they live on the smell of an oily rag. It does not cost them very much to live. They see the food, vegies. jeez, it’s so cheap. Their diet is poor, that is their staple diet until they follow the Australian way of life’ (Harry, research diary entry, 1 May 2003). When Harry described Dandenong with disgust, stigmatised recent settlers, many of who are from India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Sudan, and devalued ‘ethnic’ food as cheap, less nutritious and unhealthy. I was shocked and surprised; as a new resident, this was the first time that I had heard an Anglo-Australian who was an elected community leader speak in such a manner…

Read or purchase the article here.

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Demographic Shifts Redefine What It Means to Be Korean

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science on 2012-12-06 00:53Z by Steven

Demographic Shifts Redefine What It Means to Be Korean

The New York Times
2012-11-29

Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL, South Korea — Jasmine Lee realizes just how Korean she’s become when she breaks out in the language, forgetting that her Filipino mother on the other end of the phone can’t understand her. But she is reminded of the limits of assimilation when Koreans, impressed by her fluency, comment: “You sound more Korean than Koreans do.”

Ms. Lee, 35, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made history in April when she became the first naturalized citizen — and the first non-ethnic Korean — to win a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly. Her election reflected one of the most significant demographic shifts in the country’s modern history, a change Ms. Lee says “Koreans understand with their brain, but have yet to embrace with their heart.”

Only a decade ago, school textbooks still urged South Koreans to take pride in being of “one blood” and ethnically homogeneous. Now, the country is facing the prospect of becoming a multiethnic society. While the foreign-born population is still small compared with countries with a tradition of immigration, it’s enough to challenge how South Koreans see themselves.

“It’s time to redefine a Korean,” said Kim Yi-seon, chief researcher on multiculturalism at the government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute. “Traditionally, a Korean meant someone born to Korean parents in Korea, who speaks Korean and has Korean looks and nationality. People don’t think someone is a Korean just because he has a Korean citizenship.”…

…One of every 10 marriages in South Korea now involves a foreign spouse. Although overall numbers of schoolchildren in South Korea have been declining — to 6.7 million this year from 7.7 million in 2007 — as a result of one of the world’s lowest birth rates, the number of multiethnic students has been climbing by 6,000 a year in the same period.

“A multicultural society is not just coming; it’s already here,” Ms. Lee, a member of the governing Saenuri Party, said in an interview at her office in the National Assembly…

…“They bring religious and ethnic strife to our country, where we had none before,” said Kim Ky-baek, publisher of the nationalist Web site Minjokcorea and a critic of the government’s policy of admitting and providing social benefits to foreign-born brides and migrant workers. “They create an obstacle to national unification. North Korea adheres to pure-blood nationalism, while the South is turning into a hodgepodge of mixed blood.”

The challenge for South Korea is whether it can “redefine the nation, embracing people who do not share the same blood into a broader Koreanness,” said Chung Ki-seon, senior researcher at the IOM Migration Research and Training Center…

…And this year, for the first time, South Korea began accepting multiethnic Korean citizens into its armed forces. Previously, the military had maintained that a different skin color would make them stand out and hurt unity…

Read the entire article here.

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The Modern Girl and the Vamp: Hollywood Film in Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Early Novels

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-12-05 22:23Z by Steven

The Modern Girl and the Vamp: Hollywood Film in Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Early Novels

positions: asia critique
Volume 20, Number 4 (2012)
pages 1067-1093
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-1717672

Deborah Shamoon, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies
National University of Singapore

Chijin no ai (Naomi, 1924) and Nikukai (A Lump of Flesh, 1923), by Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, were seminal texts in forming the image of the “modern girl” in Japan in the 1920s. In both novels, Hollywood actresses famous for playing vamp roles are central to the construction of the modern girl character. The title Chijin no ai references the Japanese title of the US film A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Bara as the prototypical vamp. In a US context, the vamp character embodies not only the threat of the sexual woman but also anxieties surrounding racial mixing. In importing the vamp narrative to a Japanese context, Tanizaki reproduces this racial tension. This article examines the actresses, including Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Bebe Daniels, and others, that Tanizaki uses as models for the modern girl in these two novels. The existing narrative of the Hollywood vamp informs Tanizaki’s description of the modern girl, even as that narrative is necessarily transformed in a Japanese context. Furthermore, Tanizaki in both novels also employs a narrative voice that evokes the filmic mode of seeing, including the close-up and montage. This article examines Chijin no ai and Nikukai as intersections of filmic and novelistic modes of narrative. Tanizaki’s fascination with the new technology of cinema inspired him to experiment with new modes of narrative and intertextuality in prose fiction. However, his use of the cinematic mode of narrative, as well as the vamp character, also results in the highlighting of white/nonwhite racial tension and an attraction/repulsion toward racial impurity.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Multiple Voices: Racial and Ethnic Socialization Within Interracial Asian and White Families

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Dissertations, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2012-12-03 19:33Z by Steven

Multiple Voices: Racial and Ethnic Socialization Within Interracial Asian and White Families

Alliant International University, San Francisco
2012
138 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3517943
ISBN: 9781267486448

Sarah Kasuga-Jenks

Presented to the Faculty of The California School of Professional Psychology San Francisco Campus Alliant International University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology

The current study focuses on racial and ethnic socialization in Asian and White interracial families. A qualitative study was conducted to examine ways in which parents communicate issues of race and ethnicity to their children. Narrative inquiry was utilized to access the lived experiences of members of interracial families. First, parents were interviewed; then, the entire family was interviewed together and finally, the entire family had the opportunity to review transcripts and results. Family stories were the main unit of analysis; family stories from the parent interview were examined in addition to family stories from the family interview. The guiding research questions included: How do individuals within interracial Asian and White families communicate with each other (e.g., do they use verbal or non-verbal styles and are they more proactive or reactive)? How do parents communicate issues of race and ethnicity (e.g., racial and ethnic identity, participation in cultural events, cultural values, discrimination, etc.) to their children?

Four themes emerged from the interviews: cultural practices, effects of interpersonal relationships, experiences of discrimination, and negotiating identity. Parents utilized a range of techniques, verbal and non-verbal, to communicate issues related to race and ethnicity. Responses varied in terms of which parent culture was emphasized and by whom. Many families did not report actively “socializing” their children about race and ethnicity, but incorporated cultural lessons into daily life as a way of communicating their cultural heritage to their children. Significant differences in terms of communication with children about race and ethnicity based on generational status of parents were not found.

Implications of this study include a better understanding of an understudied population, as well as potentially shaping the way in which socialization is understood in less traditional families (e.g., interracial families). Results from this study help to inform future research focused on interracial families, and specific recommendations for future work are made. Clinically, the results from this study provide practitioners with more information about interracial families to help guide interventions. The current study also contributes to theory on ethnic and racial socialization in interracial families as both parents and children were interviewed.

Purchase the dissertation here.

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Eurasian Hybridity in Chinese Utopian Visions: From “One World” to “A Society Based on Beauty” and Beyond

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-12-02 03:24Z by Steven

Eurasian Hybridity in Chinese Utopian Visions: From “One World” to “A Society Based on Beauty” and Beyond

positions: east asia cultures critique
Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2006
pages 131-163

Emma Jinhua Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations; Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 “Can Mixed-Blood Hybrids Really Improve the Chinese Race?” This provocative question appeared in chinesenewsweek.com in August 2001. Columnist and on-line pundit Shangguan Tianyi began his essay by contrasting the racialist thinking of the past with contemporary attitudes:

In the past, the German Nazis promoted the idea of Aryan superiority on the basis of the notion of racial purity…. Ironically, nowadays there are people who are taking an avid interest in racial intermixing and hybridity as a means of improving the Chinese race [Zhongguo renzhong], and of producing a more intelligent new generation….decades after [the Nazi era], the mixed-blood hybrid has unexpectedly become a figure of admiration…. In concrete terms, are we talking about interbreeding with Blacks, American Indians, Australian Aborigines or Pacific Islanders? The answer in each case is, no. Essentially, the scope of intermixing is limited to Whites, preferably Americans.

Shangguan then proceeded, in equally inflammatory terms, to critique what he identifies as a new interest in intermarriage as a tool for genetically reengineering the Chinese race and the fetishization of Eurasians as the breed of choice. This fascination is readily apparent in the Chinese media, particularly the entertainment industry where Eurasian models, actors, and athletes have become hot commodities, purported to be not only exceptionally beautiful and physically superior, but also more intelligent. Declaring this type of “blind faith” in Eurasian physical and mental superiority absurd, Shangguan asserts that only a geneticist in a lab could create the ideal child.

Shangguan’s (rather cantankerous) critique stands in sharp contrast to the celebratory discourses on hybridity current in both postcolonial studies and the emerging field of multiracial studies. The theoretical concept of hybridity as a metaphor for the new transcultural forms produced by the colonizer/colonized relation has become fashionable in academic circles since the late 1980s, thanks, among others, to the influential work of Homi Bhabha. Indeed, hybridity has become one of the most widely employed (and hotly disputed) concepts in postcolonial studies, and is frequently cited as a defining characteristic of “the postcolonial condition.” For example, the editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader write: “Hybridity and the power it releases may well be seen to be the characteristic feature and contribution of the post-colonial, allowing a means of evading the replication of the binary categories of the past and developing new anti-monolithic models of cultural exchange and growth.”

Whereas within postcolonial studies hybridity is largely conceptualized in cultural or discursive terms, multiracial studies concerns itself with hybridity in racial or bodily terms. Multiracial studies has emerged over the past decade in tandem with the growth of a multiracial movement in the United States, and related movements in Britain and elsewhere, dedicating itself to the analysis of the “multiracial experience” and “multiracial identity.” Largely due to its association with multiracial activism, multiracial studies tends to construct racial intermixing as a socially progressive and liberal phenomenon. As in postcolonial theory, hybridity is treated as a disruptive or destabilizing force, with mixed-race identity promising to break down racial boundaries and bring an end to racism, which is equated with the ideology of racial purity. As one of the leading voices of this emergent field, Maria Root, asserts: “The presence of racially mixed persons defies the social order predicated upon race, blurs racial and ethnic group boundaries, and challenges generally accepted proscriptions and prescriptions regarding intergroup relations. Furthermore, and perhaps most threatening, the existence of racially mixed persons challenges long-held notions about the biological, moral, and social meaning of race.” Hybridity, then, seemingly holds the promise of moving us beyond the old identity politics of white and black, colonizer and colonized, toward a boundaryless future where indeterminacy…

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Debra Yepa-Pappan: Dual(ing) Identities

Posted in Arts, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2012-12-01 15:45Z by Steven

Debra Yepa-Pappan: Dual(ing) Identities

Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
108 Cathedral Place
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2012-08-17 through 2012-12-31


SmDivine Spirits

This exhibition focuses on Debra Yepa-Pappan’s reflective group of works that explore her dual identities. Yepa-Pappan is of Jemez Pueblo and Korean heritage. Through this multilayered collection of work, Yepa-Pappan layers instances of history, pop culture, stereotypes, authenticity, family, her identity, and the urban environment together. Through her dual identities, she embraces change in tradition as a reflection of herself, yet she also duels with the labels placed upon her.
 
About the Artist: DEBRA YEPA-PAPPAN was born in Korea in 1971 to a Korean mother and Jemez Pueblo father. She came to the U.S. with her mother when she was 5 months old. At this time, she was enrolled as Jemez Pueblo before becoming a U.S. citizen. In her work, Yepa-Pappan shares her experiences of being a mixed-race Asian/Native American living in an urban area, while exploring the issues of identity and challenging American Indian stereotypes. Having spent the majority of her life in Chicago, she is influenced by contemporary and urban culture, along with her deep connection to Jemez Pueblo. Because of her parents and their own strong ties to their cultures, she has a strong sense of self. She says, “I know who I am and where my people come from.” Yepa-Pappan attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and graduated with an Associates of Fine Arts in two- and three-dimensional art in 1992…

For more information, click here.

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