South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Navigating Cultural Transitions: A Drama Therapy Exploration Of Culture Shock Among International Students From South Asia And East Asia, Rithika Gopalakrishnan

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

South Asia and East Asia drive the recent surge in US global student enrollment, exceeding one million, collectively representing 60.141% of international students, with China and India contributing 53% alone. These figures underscore the need for focused research into the experiences of South Asian and East Asian international students in the United States, an area currently lacking comprehensive study. This thesis examines culture shock among South Asian and East Asian students at a university in the Northeast, exploring relevant theories, role of media portrayals, and drama therapy interventions. It investigates the effects of culture shock, such as strain, loss, rejection, …

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …

“Nararampag Nga Mga Takna . . . Nangangaliding Nga Mga Higayon”: Memory, Nostalgia, Love, And Loss In Victor Sugbo’S Taburos Han Dagat, Jessa A. Amarille

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper explores how the concepts of memory, nostalgia, love, and loss are depicted in the poems 1) “Ha Akon Paglinakaton,” (In My Travels[1]), 2) “May Ada Panahon” (There Comes a Time), 3) “Parada Han mga Sinya” (The Parade of Zinnias), 4) “An Pagdumdum” (On Recalling), 5) “Kawarayan” (Emptiness), 6) “Agurang Mundo” (Old Mundo), 7) “Taburos Han Dagat” (Sea Spray), 8) “La Madonna Alegro,” and 9) “Cadena de Amor” from Victor N. Sugbo’s Taburos Han Dagat (2014) using an ecocritical lens. Published in a post-Haiyan context, the poems may be classified as belonging to the ecopoetry genre with …

The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

Ang Balintuna Ng Pesimismo At Pag-Asa Sa “Ilang Aeta Mula Sa Botolan” Ni Cirilo F. Bautista (The Paradox Of Pessimism And Hope In Cirilo F. Bautista’S “Ilang Aeta Mula Sa Botolan”), Mesándel V. Arguelles

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Sa sanaysay na ito, ginagalugad ang isa sa mga birtud ng panulaan ni Pambansang Alagad ng Sining sa Literatura Cirilo F. Bautista—ang balintuna, sa pangunahin, ang balintuna ng pesimismo at pag-asa kaugnay ng pagpaksa sa mga usapin, suliranin, at penomenong panlipunan ng kanyang panahon hanggang sa kasalukuyan. Pinagninilayan din ang bait at bisa ng kanyang mga tula na nakasalalay sa kabatirang kapwa lubhang mahalaga at di-makasasapat ang wika upang, aniya, ay “ipahayag ang ating isip at damdamin” na nagbunsod sa kanya sa pagbuo ng pormulasyong “sugat ng salita” at “kirot ng kataga”—kapwa ginamit bilang mga susing konsepto ng kanyang dalawang …

The Ecocritical Erotic In Marjorie Evasco's "Elemental", Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This brief article explores the critical entanglements of nature, matter, and the human body in Marjorie Evasco’s poem “Elemental.” Through ecocritical erotic writing, the text establishes the “trans-corporeal” relationships between human desire and the natural environment, the language of the erotic and the craft of poetry, and the writer and the task of ecofeminist writing. Ultimately, this essay suggests that the text and the author engage with the ba’i as an indigenous source of femininity, charting a direction toward native Philippine ecofeminism.

Lives Away From Home And Precarious Writing As Life: Reading Bienvenido Santos’S Postscript To Saintly Life, Ivan Emil A. Labayne

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Towards the end of his writing career, Bienvenido Santos published two autobiographies, Memory’s Fictions and Postscript to Saintly Life—a departure in a writing life mostly devoted to penning fictional works. This paper focuses on the last autobiography which mainly looks at Santos’s experiences as a pensionado in America. It pays attention to how Santos writes about his Philippine home while in exile, taking part in a program that is part of the American colonial period. The range of Santos’s emotions—with shame and pride on both ends—while abroad is also examined. How these emotions were manifested in the book served …

Marginal Voices, Silenced Annotations: Notes On The Life Of Edith L. Tiempo, Cris Barbra N. Pe

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The popular version of National Artist for Literature Edith L. Tiempo is that she holds a central position as the literary matriarch of the Philippines. However, little is known about her background as a partly tribal (indigenous) woman. This paper proposes that biography can be a form of intervention to recuperate silenced narratives and marginal lives. Drawing from the ideas of the Geneva School of Consciousness, biography can be seen as a form of reading, where latent images in an author’s works can be made manifest and reveal hidden narratives in the author’s life. Edith’s life and works yield images …

Silent Music And Sacred Sounds Of The Hoysaḷas: Visual And Aural Sensory Experiences In Jain And Hindu Temples, Vani Vignesh

Jain Studies

This project examines affective responses to temple spaces and investigates how visual and aural sensory stimulations can amplify people’s experiences in Jain and Hindu temples through ethnographic research and qualitative interviews. It involves the study of the traditional Indian methods of designing and planning temples to understand their place in contemporary South Indian devotion. This project focuses on two twelfth century temples built by the Hoysaḷa dynasty in the South Indian state of Karnāṭaka—the Jain Pārśvanātha basadi (temple) at Haḷēbīḍu and the Hindu Vaiṣṇava Chennakēśava temple at Bēlūru—to show that their location, design, and structure were planned to cater to …

The Afterlife Of Jennifer Laude: Trans Necropolitics And Trans Utopias, Max D. López Toledano

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Jennifer Laude is a filipino trans woman who was murdered by a visiting member of the United States army in 2014. Her murder led to several protests in the Philippines and in the United States led by both queer and anti-imperialist movements that urged for the rejection of the 'Visiting Forces Agreement' in the Philippines. This essay explores how Laude's murder is located in a climate of 'trans necropolitics' that allocates death and disposability to unruly trans and brown bodies who fail to comply with cis-normative gender ideals. This essay understands her murder (and her afterlife) beyond her individual body, …

The Demands Of Displacement, The Micro-Aggressions Of Multiculturalism: Performing An Idea Of "Indianness" In Singapore, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper explores the ways in which state-defined discourses of multiculturalism can unintentionally create a framework through which micro-aggressions are enacted against those interpreted as "other". These definitions cascade down from the state to majority and then minority ethno-national groups, who leverage positions of relative dominance to establish the terms of acceptance and integration into society. By negotiating these terms, ethnicity becomes a performative construct through which difference is asserted and reified. We illustrate these ideas through an empirical analysis of Singapore's minority Indian community, and how Singaporean Indians perform an idea of "Indianness" in response to their Singaporean Chinese …

How South Asian Activists Queer The Model Minority Myth: A Critical Oral History Project, Noorie Baig

Communication ETDs

The model minority myth (MMM) is predicated on stereotypical perceptions of Asian Americans as subservient high-achievers who comply with the ideologies of meritocracy, whiteness, and capitalism. However, South Asian American (SAA) activists and community organisers, the focus of this study, are working to confront and abolish racist, heterosexist, and other exclusionary injustices, policies, and practices. This dissertation seeks to understand the historical influences of the MMM, the challenges SAA activists and organisers face, and the communication strategies they use to negotiate the MMM through their activism. Oral history methods and critical thematic analysis are used to elicit and analyse personal …

An Imaginary* Interview With A Philippines Collections Museum Donor, Camille Ungco

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Ontological distance is the dehumanization that emerges from uninterrogated coloniality between colonized subjects and the oppressive systems. This distancing has occurred in the histories of U.S. teachers both domestic-based and abroad, especially in Southeast Asia. In Steinbock-Pratt’s (2019) historiography on the relationships between early 1900s U.S. teachers and their Filipinx students, ontological distance was “The crux of the colonial relationship was intimacy marked by closeness without understanding, suasion backed by violence, and affection bounded by white and American supremacy” (Steinbock-Pratt, 2019, p. 214). This dehumanizing psychological or ontological distance existed during U.S. colonial regimes abroad, specifically in Southeast Asia and …

Lumad Image-Making In Baboy Halas (2016) Through Intercultural Filmmaking, Katrina Ross A. Tan

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This essay examines the processes involved in intercultural filmmaking, a mode of filmmaking practiced in the production of Baboy Halas (2016) directed by Bagane Fiola where the non-Indigenous filmmaker and the Indigenous community of Matigsalug collaborated in creating their screen images. It discusses how intercultural filmmaking allows the Lumad to enact cinematic agency in constructing their identities on screen. In addition to this, it outlines how this mode of production enables groups from different cultures to forge connections through filmmaking and cultivate ethical relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups. I draw from interview data with the filmmaker and an analysis …

“Filipinos In California, Community, And Identity”: A Personal Inquiry, Sam T. Mcclintock

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

The International Academy Of Language And Culture: The Global (Pre)K-12 Charter School Network, Dree-El Simmons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The International Academy of Language and Culture (IALC) is a charter school based on the original concept of charter schools by Ray Budde and Albert Shanker, as an academic environment dedicated and designed to improving the educational outcomes for its students through innovative pedagogy. Committed to American (and global) education reform, the IALC incorporates elements from higher education into the early childhood and adolescent settings. We accomplish this by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach in our language and culture-based program.

The IALC is a multilingual, full-immersion program. Food Studies (including culinary arts), the Arts, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Martial Arts …

An Exploration Of Bengali Identity With Material And Visual Artifacts Through Painting, Farah Billah

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Painting is and always has been, at its root, an exploration of identity for me. My current collection of work explores the stripping of Eurocentric beauty standards and presentation of the divine of the Brown Body to reveal my version of the human spirit. My drawings, paintings, and a hand-tufted rug all made with a surreal, colorful representation of the coming together of body and mind.

Bibliography For "Beyond Borders And Shores: A Display In Celebration Of Asian And Pacific Islander American (Apia) Art And Heritage", Margaret Puentes

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about Asian and Pacific Islander American (APIA) art and heritage in May 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.

Freedom And Complicity: The Case Of Horison And Solidarity, Two Congress For Cultural Freedom Journals In Southeast Asia, Amado Anthony G. Mendoza Iii

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The current project is a two-pronged study of Horison (Indonesia) and Solidarity (Philippines), two journals funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) during the Cold War in its quest to mount a cultural offensive against the rising threat of communism in Southeast Asia. The first part of the project deals with what Ang Cheng Guan sees as the case of the Cold War ceasing to be an actual historical event and, in turn, transforming into an “object” of historical inquiry (1–17). To this end, the article will provide a short account of both journals’ genesis and history during the …

Kritika Ng Kritika Ng Post-Kolonyalismo: Ang Abstraktong Unibersalismo Ni Vivek Chibber (Critique Of A Critique Of Postcolonialism: The Abstract Universalism Of Vivek Chibber), Ramon Guillermo

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Halos magkasabay ang panahon ng pagsibol at pamamayagpag noong dekada ’80 ng “Post-colonialism” (PC) sa Kanluraning akademya at ng Pantayong Pananaw (PP). Kasabay rin ng dalawang penomenong pang-intelektwal na ito ang naganap na pangkalahatang paghina ng Kaliwa dulot ng pagguho ng “Pader ng Berlin” noong 1989. Masalimuot ang ugnayan ng PC at PP sa Marxistang tradisyon ngunit malinaw na maibibilang ang dalawang ito, sa kontekstong Pilipino, sa mga intelektwal na sanhi ng krisis ng Marxismo sa larangang akademiko sa Pilipinas. Bilang tugon sa ganitong sitwasyon, magkasunod na inilathala ang dalawang kritika mula sa Marxistang punto de bista ng PC (Chibber …

Myth, Dream, And Resistance In Ninotchka Rosca And Emmanuel Lacaba’S Fictions, Kathrine Domingo Ojano

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Despite Ninotchka Rosca’s international acclaim as a Feminist novelist and Emmanuel Lacaba’s national renown as a martyred resistance poet, the dearth of scholarship on their collections of short stories—written from around the time of the 1970 First Quarter Storm to the early years of Martial Law—has also left unanswered how their fictions evinced a new paradigm of resistance literature as the critique and revision of modernity in the Third World. In this paper, I address this gap by looking into Rosca’s transformation of fiction into mythopoeic speculations in The Monsoon Collection (1983) and Lacaba’s experimentation with oneiric or dream-like narratives …

Fictionalizing Error In Edberto Villegas’S Barikada, Laurence Marvin S. Castillo

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Barikada (2013), written by the late political scientist, writer, and consultant for the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) Edberto Villegas (1940–2020), is a novel that presents a counterfactual portrayal of an urban insurrection, waged by city-based national democratic (NatDem) revolutionaries who deviated from the Maoist rural-oriented protracted guerrilla warfare sanctioned by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). This essay reads this NatDem fiction in relation to the debates about revolutionary strategy that surfaced during the movement’s crises-ridden years, and were taken up during the Second Great Rectification Movement. I undertake a detailed examination of the novel’s reworking …

Land Use Change In A Pericolonial Society: Intensification And Diversification In Ifugao, Philippines Between 1570 And 1800 Ce, David Max Findley, Stephen Acabado, Noel Amano, Andrea U. Kay, Rebecca Hamilton, Grace Barretto-Tesoro, Greg Bankoff, Jed O. Kaplan, Patrick Roberts

History Department Faculty Publications

Land use modelling is increasingly used by archaeologists and palaeoecologists seeking to quantify and compare the changing influence of humans on the environment. In Southeast Asia, the intensification of rice agriculture and the arrival of European colonizers have both been seen as major catalysts for deforestation, soil erosion, and biodiversity change. Here we consider the Tuwali-Ifugao people of the Cordillera Central (Luzon, Philippines), who resisted Spanish colonial subjugation from the 16th to the mid-nineteenth century, in part through the development of a world-renowned system of intensive wet-rice terrace agriculture. To quantify changes in how the Tuwali-Ifugao used their environment, we …

Re-Envisioning The Tropics: Nick Joaquin's Philippine Gothic, Ella Marie Jaman

Honors Projects

This paper examines selected stories from Filipino author, Nick Joaquin, through a gothic lens. Drawing from recent development in Gothic studies, I work within a tropical gothic and postcolonial gothic framework to suggest a localized "Philippine gothic" represented within Nick Joaquin's work. Stories examined include the novel "The Woman Who Had Two Navels," as well as the short stories "Summer Solstice, Mass of St. Sylvestre," and "The Order of Melkizedek."

Interrogating Whiteness In Graduate Education Culture: A Phenomenological Exploration Of Southeast Asian American Graduate Student Experiences, Lesley Nina Sisaket

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study is to understand the role that whiteness has in shaping the graduate education experiences of Southeast Asian American students in the United States. This study explores two research questions. 1) How do Southeast Asian American graduate students describe their graduate education? 2) How do Southeast Asian American graduate students describe concepts of whiteness, if any, throughout their graduate education? According to the experiences from six selfidentifying Southeast Asian American students, their graduate education experiences were described to be racially taxing, unchallenging, and isolating experiences. These findings stemmed from their graduate education experiences, which …