Asian American Studies Commons^™

Inappropriate Attire: Fashion, Nationality, And Shame In Quicksand And Pachinko, Minyoung Park

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, Minyoung Park examines how fashion in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee functions not simply as a visual strategy for passing but as a site where the wearers’ conflicting feelings—shame, desire, and defiance—emerge and persist. Rather than evaluating the success or failure of passing, the article shifts focus to the process of dressing—selecting, maintaining, and reflecting on clothing—through which identity is negotiated and feelings are embodied. The protagonists, Helga and Sunja, often dismissed as failures, are reconsidered as figures whose attention to their inappropriate or excessive fashion reveals their emotional labor and strenuous …

Book Review Of The Squad By Christina Soontornvat And Joanna Cacao, Simon Boonsripaisal

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

The Squad by Christina Soontornvat and illustrator Joanna Cacao is a follow-up to the indie bestseller The Tryout (2022). The graphic memoir is written for educators, parents, and students in K-12. The illustrations are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is humorous, and the facial expressions describe how the characters are feeling. The main character, Christina, is now an 8^th grader in Texas. Set in the 1990s and the cover page shows her friends lifting her up as she strikes a cheerleading pose. Christina tries out for cheer again, encounter’s identity conflict, and grapples with her parents’ divorce. This review discusses …

Feeling Foreign / Foreign Feeling: Affect In Southeast Asian Diasporic Short Story Collections, Francys Aerin Fortes

Theses and Dissertations

Affect studies have long been saturated with scholarship investigating the fluidity of emotions, though a larger turn in the field now prioritizes the felt experiences of marginalized peoples. Sianne Ngai’s work is one part of this turn that seeks to unpack the effects of oppressive systemic forces on Black, Brown, and queer bodies. Sianne Ngai reexamined the nature of emotions in her seminal text Ugly Feelings (2005), particularly concerned with how negative feelings are disproportionately felt by marginalized bodies as a result of conditions of obstructed agency, systems of power, and wage labor capitalism. Drawing from Ngai’s writing, this thesis …

Book Review Of The Tryout By Christina Soontornvat And Joanna Cacao, Simon Boonsripaisal

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Soontornvat’s graphic memoir, The Tryout diversifies the Thai American experience to an audience intended for K-12 teachers and educators, parents, caretakers, and children. Canadian Filipino Joanna Cacao serves as the illustrator for The Tryout and does superb drawing expressions and emotions aligning with text in bubbles and boxes implying thinking or speaking. The story centers on Christina, who is a 7th grader living in a small town in Texas trying out for the middle school’s cheerleading squad. She tries to fit in, deals with racism, maintains friendships, develops new hobbies, and learns more about herself as a multiracial Asian American. …

Promoting Emergent Literacy In Preschool Through Extended Discourse: Covert Translanguaging In A Mandarin Immersion Environment, Robin E. Harvey, Kevin M. Wong

Education Division Scholarship

Rich oral language practices, including the opportunity and ability to participate in cognitively and linguistically challenging extended discourse, are foundational to early literacy development. To meet children’s needs in their first exposure to the languages of schooling, educators may engage students in extended discourse multilingually. The current study focuses on student-centered translanguaging conversations to examine strategies that preschool teachers employ to support young children’s emerging bilingual and biliteracy development in a Mandarin immersion preschool serving primarily nonheritage learners of Mandarin in the United States. Findings indicate that, despite the school’s Mandarin-only policy, teachers engaged in covert translanguaging practices to extend …

Book Review Of Drawn Together By Minh Lê And Dan Santat, Simon Boonsripaisal

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Drawn Together, written by Minh Lê and illustrated by Dan Santat, depicts the story of a grandson and grandfather spending time in the afternoon together. Lê and Santat’s shared experiences and cultures influence the picturebook’s construction. The greatest strength in Drawn Together is the inclusion of family in the creation process. Lê’s meaningful words and phrases complement Santat’s colorful and energetic illustrations. The setting is in the grandfather’s house and away from the site of Thai restaurants and Thai Buddhist temples, to which most of the existing research on Thai Americans hones it on (Bao, 2015; Padoongpatt, 2017). Drawn Together …

Abcs: American Born Chinese Stories, Ethan Peng

English Honors Theses

Inspired by life as an Asian American in New York City, ABC and Other Stories explores family dynamics and perspectives, public perceptions, and emotions throughout twenty-six stories, one for every letter of the alphabet. Real memories and fantastical elements intertwine throughout the collection, all falling under the theme of “ABC,” representing both the English language and “American Born Chinese.” Many of the narrators, left nameless and genderless, recount their stories of growing up in an immigrant household. One recalls the last time their parents physically punished them. Another thinks of being unsettled by a stranger on the subway. Other narrators …

Differentially Unwell: On Mimi Khúc's "Dear Elia", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

[...] Inviting readers to reclaim the stigma of unwellness and collectively to "tend to our unwellness, together," Khúc approaches unwellness as a crucial resource for subverting the "wellness and unwellness" dichotomy entirely. After all, the opposite of "wellness" is not "unwellness"; the opposite of "wellness" does not exist. The opposition itself is an artificial framework, one that reductively harms more than it dialogically helps. We need to move away from these simplistic dualisms, Khúc suggests, and towards more generous, trauma-informed epistemologies. [...]

Autopathography Across Media: Trauma And Fluid Embodied Subjectivity, He (Kristen) Shen

Honors Theses

Illness memoirs with first-person point of view have gained more attention in recent years among medical sociologists and anthropologists. Different from traditional “case histories”written by doctors that are in danger of ignoring patients’ voices, autopathograhical works delineate narrators’ transformative experiences of persons to patients, emphasizing the importance of gaining social understanding of illness. Focusing on three works within the category of autopathography across genres and media forms in the late 1950s and contemporary periods, The Cancer Journals (1980) written by Audre Lorde, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) written by Esmé Weijun Wang, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) directed …

Describing Dictee, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

The visual images in Dictee are famously captionless. They resist straightforward explanation. In writing image descriptions of the images in Dictee, I have tried to preserve the "captionlessness" of the original. The point here is not to explain the pictures—an image description is not identical to a caption—but to make Dictee more accessible to readers who are blind and visually impaired. I realize, of course, that in trying to make Dictee's captionless images more "legible," I have inevitably "mistranslated" Dictee as it was originally designed to be experienced. Its captionlessness is lost in translation despite my efforts to preserve it. …

Course Design As Critical Creativity: Intersectional, Regional, And Demographic Approaches To Teaching Asian American Literatures, Thomas X. Sarmiento

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay offers a theoretical and reflective exploration of critically informed acts of creativity expressed in my course design for and teaching of Asian American literatures at a predominantly white, public land-grant, Midwestern university. I argue that teaching is both a creative and critical activity as it generates new ways of knowing and being through an assessment and curation of extant literary texts and scholarly discourses. Given my geographic, scholarly, and personal orientations, my course features intersectional, regional, and ethnically diverse perspectives that aim to queer what “Asian America/n” signifies. I hope my situated pedagogical insights inspire other scholar-teachers to …

Excerpts From An Anti-Standardized “수능”: A Design-Fictional Approach To Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"Excerpts from an Anti-Standardized '수능'” experiments with design fiction to disrupt overly rehearsed ways of thinking about Korea’s past(s), present(s), and future(s).

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 …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

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 …

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 …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Timothy Yu, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing In The United States, Canada, And Australia, Rei Magosaki

English Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Timothy Yu'sDiasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The Structures Of Intra-National Class Divisions In Neoliberalism: The Women Of “Light” And “Dark” In The White Tiger, Sneha Madimi

Theses and Dissertations

Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, represents gender hierarchies and the class struggle of India’s neoliberal present. Adiga uses elements of satire and allegory to teach us something about how women are differently positioned in the neoliberal system. David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2). I will consider the novel, alongside Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” …

Carlos Bulosan And Filipino Collective Memory: Teaching, Transgression, And Transformation, Jeffrey Cabusao

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

Who is Carlos Bulosan? Why is he significant? Why teach Bulosan in our classrooms? These questions function as points of departure for this lecture delivered in Summer 2021 for the UNITAS International Lecture Series cosponsored by CLASS and Kritika Kultura. By reviewing the significance of Carlos Bulosan, this talk provides an opportunity to examine the continued relevance of Bulosan and his works for the twenty-first century. A pioneering Filipino writer of the twentieth century, Bulosan developed a unique transgressive aesthetic that travels across national and literary boundaries and, in the process, reimagines the boundaries of Filipino identity and literary categorization. …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Orientalism Restated In The Era Of Covid-19, Joey Kim

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay bridges a gap between an analysis of anti-Asian targeting and an analysis of Orientalism. Because histories of Orientalism and anti-Asian targeting pre-date the current moment, I demonstrate the centrality of Orientalism to the evolution of xenophobic language and sentiment in U.S.-foreign historical relations. I recount instances of anti-Asian, xenophobic, and “Yellow-Peril” rhetoric in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, I examine the racialization of COVID-19 as a trope of orientalism. This racialization, I argue, places the Asian-presenting body in a state of heightened visibility, precarity, and susceptibility to plunder. The newfound precarity of the …

Disrupters:Three Women Of Color Tell Their Stories, Dulce María Gray, Denise A. Harrison, Yuko Kurahashi

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

This essay is an amplified version of the presentation we made at the 7th Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues. Our aim is to story back into the world our first experiences and motivations for investing in suffrage and democratic activism. We are three American professors of disciplines in the humanities, who for decades have taught and lived across the United States and have traveled the world. Yuko Kurahashi’s essay tells the story of how Raichō Hiratsuka and Fusae Ichikawa, Japanese activists in their suffrage and peace movements, helped shape her personal and professional life. Denise Harrison talks about the first wave …

Big Community In Little Chinatown: How Asian Americans (Re)Present Their Community Today, Meghan Morrison

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper looks at a series of modern Asian American pieces of media in order to analyze how women and LGBT+ depict and create their community, especially in relation to another marginalized ethnic group. By examining the relationship between these groups within popular media, we can uncover how Asian Americans choose to represent themselves and gain a deeper understanding on how marginalized groups choose to portray themselves.

Imagining An Asian American Superhero Of North Korean Origin: A Design Fiction, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

My talk, a thought-experimental blend of literary criticism and speculative "design fiction," will introduce you to an Asian American superhero of North Korean origin. In this science-fictional superhero, whom I have tentatively named "구름"/"☁️"/"Ku-reum," Korea's elusive realities coalesce into legible form. More specifically, they become available for narrative experience and relatable to us as an anthropomorphic character, a person with whom we might identify, come face-to-face, sympathize, interact dynamically, and have a conversation. Ku-reum is designed to reflect Korea's complex past and hopes for the future. Existing beyond division systems, Ku-reum uses the non-binary pronouns "one"/"they." Neither "South" nor "North," …

Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

In her classic 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry explores the impacts of generations of violence, exploitation, and discrimination on an African American family in Chicago’s Southside. Throughout the play, a family house plant comes to symbolize the matriarch's hopes for her children, and her ability to nourish the plant reflects on her ability to fulfil her own modest dreams and provide for the dreams of her progeny. Similarly, we see plants fulfilling the same role in another tale of American racial injustice, namely Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, an illustrated personal account of the artist’s experience …

Relationship Counseling For The U.S.: Understanding White America's Role In Asian American Experiences, Alison N. Lawrence

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

This paper explores the relationship between White Americans and Asian Americans in an effort to discover the root of the difficulties that first and second generation Asian Americans experience while attempting to integrate into American society. Through an analysis of perspectives from Asian American literature as well as historical and current events, it highlights the racist systems that are ingrained in our everyday lives, continuously reminding Asian Americans that they are out of place in their own country. It concludes with a discussion of White America's necessary role in dismantling these systems, and offers strategies to create a more welcoming …

Movement Upstream, Downstream: A Lyric Essay, Mong- Lan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Early on, without knowing I was part of a movement, I was part of the movement of the Asian American cultural and literary phenomenon.

Because it was necessary to bear witness, to tell my story, my stories, our stories, the collective story, my observations, which keeps on unravelling, I began to write.