Asian American Studies Commons^™

Creating Knowledge, Volume 8, 2015

Creating Knowledge

Dear reader,

I am delighted to introduce this eighth volume of Creating Knowledge: The LAS Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship. This volume features 19 essays and 14 art works, representing advanced coursework produced in twenty different departments and programs during the 2014-2015 academic year. Several of the essays have been honored with department awards and several draw on research supported by undergraduate research grants. Many were originally written in senior capstone seminars, research-intensive seminars, and independent studies, and many were presented in some form at one of the numerous conferences and showcases sponsored by departments and programs throughout the year. All …

Melus: A Community Of Intellectuals Scholars, And Teachers.Pdf, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd

A Yęmisi Jimoh

.

The Government Facilitation Of North Korea's Human Rights Abuses Eclipsed By The Threat Of Nuclear War, Kim Kathryn Angstro Doom

Senior Projects Fall 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Out Of Silence: Emerging Themes In Asian American Churches (Book Review), Sunggu Yang

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Fumitaka Matsuoka. Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches. Wipf & Stock Pub., 2009. 178 pages. ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1606081617

The issue of cultural marginalization and forced retreat is one of the key focal points in Fumitaka Matsuoka’s Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches. In that double cultural jeopardy, he points out, the Asian American church has served two functions for the people who are part of it. First, the church has been the reservoir of the original Asian cultural and linguistic heritage. In these churches the people celebrate their own culture and practice …

Staging The Asian American In Hong Kong: Examining Transcultural Performances Of Asian American Identity In Hong Kong English Language Amateur Theatre Productions Of "Thoroughly Modern Millie" And "Yellow Face", Iris Eu Loa Mein

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Silence, Speech, And Solidarity In Contemporary Asian American Literature, Amanda Gersten

Senior Projects Spring 2015

This project seeks to overturn popular misconceptions about Asian American literature by situating it in a political context while also attending to complexities of language and form. Chapter One explores the significance of silence in the work of Toshio Mori, whose Yokohama, California (1949) was the first book of short stories published by a Japanese American in the United States, ultimately finding that Mori’s work resists the notion of silence as indicative of “model minority” assimilation. Chapter Two uses Fredric Jameson's problematic theory of Third World “national allegory” as a compelling framework through which to criticize ongoing concerns about the …

Untold Narratives: Refugee Experiences From Laos To Richmond, California, Laiseng Saechao

Scripps Senior Theses

Untold Narratives: A Refugee Experience from Laos to Richmond, California is focused on the Mien refugee experience from Laos to Richmond, California. This thesis highlights the ways Cold War politics, the Secret War, and heavy industrialization have impacted Mien communities who have been displaced from their homelands into refugee camps, and again through sponsorship into the United States. This thesis looks at political theories that discuss inequalities that exist, particularly through environmental degradation and negative health impacts that Mien refugees are experiencing in their resettlement into Richmond, California. Due to the limited scholarly articles and documented narratives that are available …

Wrestling With Expectations: An Examination Of How Asian American College Students Negotiate Personal, Parental, And Societal Expectations, Michelle Samura

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This research draws on a broader study that situates Asian American college students within larger sociohistorical and political contexts. I examined Asian American college students’ experiences and what it means to be “Asian American” in and through these experiences. Two types of expectations emerged from the data: students’ internal expectations—the expectations that they have for themselves as well as their college and postcollege experiences, and external expectations from family and society. The various ways that students negotiate internal and external expectations translate into particular understandings of freedom and possibility they carry into college. I also discuss students’ precollege racial awareness …

Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’S Cinematic Discontent In A Touch Of Sin, Yanjie Wang

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

This article examines the representation of violence in Jia Zhangke's film A Touch of Sin (2013) in light of Žižek's theory of ‘objective violence’ and the wuxia tradition. Jia attempts to understand the rise of individual violent incidents during China's post-socialist transformations by laying out the social, historical and political milieus in which they take place. He unveils the Žižekian objective violence hidden in the realm of social normality, pinpointing the country's sins of collusion with the global capital to impose injustice on the poor and disadvantaged. Invoking the wuxia genre, Jia portrays the protagonists not so much as perpetrators …

Heterogeneous Time And Space: Han Shaogong’S Rethinking Of Chinese Modernity, Yanjie Wang

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

This article is set against the post-Mao official discourse on modernity, in which the conceptualization of a homogeneous, progressive time dominates the public consciousness. The focus is on Han Shaogong, one of the most important writers and cultural theorists in contemporary China, and on how he imagines a heterogeneous spatiotemporality away from the centralized and teleological paradigm. Han’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of time and space puts the homogenized, Hegelian-Marxist, developmentalist logic at the core of China’s modernization project into question. The article begins by examining how the linear and evolutionary concept of time has determined the perception of history …

A Critical Review Of The Model Minority Myth In Selected Literature On Asian Americans And Pacific Islanders In Higher Education, Oiyan Poon

OiYan Poon

No abstract provided.

Constructing Loyalty, Citizenship, And Identity: A Rhetorical History Of The Japanese American Incarceration, Kaori Miyawaki

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reexamines loyalty, citizenship, and identity in the United States by closely reading historical materials about the Japanese American incarceration. The Japanese American incarceration is a unique and important historical event for studying citizenship and identity, since it was a moment in the U.S. history that citizens of the country were incarcerated by their government. This raises a larger question beyond the incarceration. What does it mean to be a loyal American citizen?

By closely analyzing texts generated by the U.S. government, the Japanese American community, and White American photographers, I identify multiple, conflicting meanings and implications behind the …

Confucius, Yamaha, Or Mozart? Cultural Capital And Upward Mobility Among Children Of Chinese Immigrants, Wei-Ting Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the determinants of upward mobility among children of Chinese immigrants. While most studies emphasize ethnic cultural capital as a primary determinant of Chinese upward mobility, this study proposes three new concepts to illuminate understudied processes promoting mobility. Specifically, this study argues that Chinese immigrants' interactions with classical music schools in the Chinese community help generate globalized cultural capital (resources from immigrants' participation in transnational networks), navigational capital (the ability to connect social networks together to facilitate community navigation through higher-status educational institutions) and aspirational capital (the ability of parents to acknowledge the barriers to upward mobility). These …

Cover Design Of Volume 5, Luke Allis

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

On Popular Visual Culture And Asian American Literature: Interview With Professor Elaine Kim, Karen Chow

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

“Finding” Guam: Distant Epistemologies And Cartographic Pedagogies, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Introduction: On Contemporary Asian American Literature And Popular Visual Culture, Pamela Thoma

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Remapping Chinatown On The Diagonal: Frances Chung’S Crazy Melon, Anastasia Wright Turner

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Disorienting The Vietnam War: Gb Tran’S Vietnamerica As Transnational And Transhistorical Graphic Memoir, Caroline Kyungah Hong

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Graphic Self-Consciousness, Travel Narratives, And The Asian American Studies Classroom: Delisle’S Burma Chronicles And Guibert, Lefèvre, And Lemercier’S The Photographer, Monica Chiu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.