Asian American Studies Commons^™

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 …

"'Joo Wa Dare?' Who Is The Queen?" Queen Contests During The Wartime Incarceration Of Japanese Americans, Bailey Irene Midori Hoy

Madison Historical Review

This paper examines beauty pageants held at incarceration centers during the Japanese-American internment. Although there has been literature created on beauty pageants before and after WWII, there is very little information on these war-era pageants, despite their prolific nature. Using mostly primary sources and material culture, the paper examines the coverage of the contestants, clothing, and presentation within the Center’s newspapers and in coverage by the Wartime Relocation Authority, whilst also problematizing uncritical readings of these documents. This paper highlights the difficulty in determining agency within spaces of incarceration, and calls for further research on the subject.

One Among Many: Charlotte Kolmitz, Assistant U.S. Attorney In Seattle, 1918–1925, Anna Synya

Digital Legal Research Lab

One Among Many: Charlotte Kolmitz, Assistant U.S. Attorney in Seattle, 1918–1925

Research poster prepared for Digital Legal Research Lab, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The Perseverance Of Play: An Archaeological Analysis Of Residential Blocks With Preschools At The Amache National Historic Site, Megan Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to expand on the understanding of experiences of Japanese American children, specifically preschool-aged children, within the Amache National Historic Site, a WWII Japanese American internment facility located in Granada, Colorado. Through archaeological methods, GIS analysis, oral histories, and archival research, I analyzed the landscape and material culture of the five residential blocks within Amache that had designated preschools. I then compared these blocks with preschools to residential blocks without preschools to determine if there are any patterns and discernable differences between the two study areas. The findings of this research provide insight into how …

The Erotic Work Of Asian American Activism: Harnessing Kink, Queer, And Sex Worker Praxis, Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This thesis discusses the harnessing of alternative, kink, and queer sexualities within the Asian American community towards anti-racist and sex work positive activism during the COVID-19 pandemic era of anti-Asian violence. It opens by tracing the shooting on Asian massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia in 2021 to historic immigration legislation such as the Page Act of 1875 that enshrined hypersexualized racism. The paper then analyzes the role of race and racial representation in the history of the BDSM (Bondage/Dominance, Dominance/Submission, and Sadomasochism) subculture from the 1950s to 2020s, tracking the emergence of groups like the Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC) …

From Farm To Table To Factory: Paths Of Cambodian American Foodways, A. C. Smith

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes the history of Cambodian Americans using theoretical frameworks utilized by food studies scholars. Cambodian refugees and their families experienced a historical process that I describe as being “from farm to table to factory.” Many Cambodians maintained a self-sufficient agricultural lifestyle prior to the Cambodian Civil War. As Cambodian refugees resettled in the United States, they faced a slew of challenges in navigating urban infrastructures and governmental institutions, as well as in adjusting to hegemonic discourses. Such issues constitute a metaphorical table to which Cambodians needed to adjust as they made their lives in the US. Adaptation also …

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 …

Model Minority Or Myth? Reexamining The Politics Of S.I. Hayakawa, Vivian Yan-Gonzalez

Asian American Studies Faculty Articles and Research

This article problematizes the model minority myth as an analytic in discussions of Asian American conservatism by reassessing the personal and political development of S.I. Hayakawa, Acting President of San Francisco State College during the Third World Liberation Front strike of 1968–1969. Contemporary activists and Asian American studies scholars influenced by the strike’s legacy have seen Hayakawa as a staunch conservative and an advocate of the model minority myth. However, Hayakawa was primarily motivated by his lifelong identification with the liberal tradition and his work as an advocate for racial equality. His realignment as a neoconservative Republican reflected the shifting …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

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

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”

A Grave Issue-Lone Fir Cemetery, Block 14, And Chinese Exclusion With Charlie Huxley, Charlie Huxley

PDXPLORES Podcast

Lone Fir Cemetery, located in inner Southeast Portland, Oregon, was established in 1855 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Block 14 within the cemetery was a segregated section reserved for Chinese immigrants in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this episode of PDXPLORES,

Charlie Huxley (History, '22) discusses how their research illustrates how community engagement with Block 14 in the nineteenth century was defined by discrimination, aggression, and racism toward Portland's Chinese immigrant community.

Click on the "Download" button to access the audio transcript.

Hypervisible (In)Visibility: Black Amerasians, Angelica J. Allen

Africana Studies Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"In this essay, I foreground the experiences of Black Amerasians in the Philippines. Drawing upon interviews from a larger ethnographic study, I explore how analysis of this community’s lived experiences unsettles singular conceptualizations of Filipinx American identity and reveals the transnational dimensions of anti-Blackness. Through this analysis, we can begin to explore the possibilities for cross-disciplinary dialogue between Black studies—namely, the indispensable insights of Black feminist theory—and Filipinx American studies, forging new political alliances as we consider timely issues that are relevant to both fields. I begin with a brief account of Filipinx Amerasian history, followed by an analysis of …

Asian Americans Challenge The Official Racial Nationalism Of The United States, Frank Wu

Publications and Research

The very definition of “Asian American,” which historically has been based upon the formal exclusion of this grouping, demonstrates the racial nationalism of the United States Racial nationalism is not new. It has been the norm in America (and arguably remains the norm elsewhere, including throughout Asia) to identify belonging to a shared race as essential to membership within a nation-state. This essay uses the Wong Kim Ark case, recognizing birthright citizenship for an individual of Chinese descent, and the Korematsu case, allowing the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, as a means of showing how government officials conceived …

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 …

Legal Strategies Used By Black Men During The Antebellum Period, A. D. Banse

Digital Legal Research Lab

AD Banse, "Legal Strategies Used by Black Men During the Antebellum Period" [Research Poster]

Digital Legal Research Lab REU Site, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2022

The Missouri Statute of 1807 existed as the primary act that somewhat ensured the freedom of those enslaved and pursuing their freedom. The act refuted laws such as the Futgitive Slave Clause of 1793 and 1850, and the Missouri Compromise, which were evidence that slaveholders held decisive political influence and could cast the Constitution in proslave terms (Baker 2012). These clauses essentially gave enslavers the right to seize enslaved people who escaped to free states deepening …

Habeas Corpus: Breaking Reservation Boundaries, Samantha Byrd

Digital Legal Research Lab

Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky’s Petitioning for Freedom examines marginalized peoples’ use of habeas corpus in the American West from 1812 to 1924. This project has uncovered Indigenous manipulation of the American legal system to counter the challenges of colonialism. Indigenous peoples used habeas to protest, and sometimes successfully mitigate boarding school experiences, forced removal, and confinement on reservations. This study aims to show how Indigenous peoples and other minorities had a complex understanding of the law and used it to their advantage.

Advisor: Katrina Jagodinsky

A Home Shielded By Laws: Freedom Suits And Enslaved Mothers, Heidi Martin

Digital Legal Research Lab

This project collects, digitizes, and makes accessible the freedom suits brought by enslaved families in the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the United States Supreme Court. This project places families in the foreground of our interpretive framework of slavery and national formation.

Using TEI encoding, we focused on outcomes, relationships between individuals and the claim for freedom made. Using these data sets, I focused specefically on mothers petitioning for their children. Of the 508 cases I utilized, 131 included children and a parental figure. I set out to distinguish the additional burden mothers had …

In The Waiting: The Role Of The Slave Bastille In Antebellum D.C., Ellyzabeth Morales-Ledesma

Digital Legal Research Lab

In 1808 the Transatlantic Slave Trade ended and in turn the government created a federally protected human market. As the South's demand for human labor force increased the domestic slave trade rocketed and in turn created even more turmoil for the Black population if the United States. Slave Traders and Man-Dealers took advantage of the market and kidnapped Free Black men women and children. While waiting to be sold enslaved people would be admitted into holding cells and jails; this was the creation of slave jails and Slave Bastilles. Slave jails served as places where the horrors of a human …

Habeas Corpus As A Means For Economic Freedom In The Progressive Era, Janana Khattak

Digital Legal Research Lab

Habeas corpus protects individual freedom by allowing detained individuals proper trial. Economic liberty, or the “right to earn a living in an occupation of choice without unnecessary government interference,” is a key component of individual freedom. Following the depression of 1893, the Progressive Era ushered in a sharp increase in productivity. This was in part because of an immigration boom. While immigrants sought economic opportunities for the betterment of themselves and their families, ideologies of nativism rose.

Advisor: Katrina Jagodinsky

Roots Of Justice: Historical Truth And Reconciliation In Lincoln And Nebraska, Veronica Nohemi Duran, Crystal Dunning, Kathleen A. Johnson, Paul Olson

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

A bibliography of resources about the history in Nebraska of Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Recent Refugees

We hope that these five bibliographies will prove fruitful in helping us to understand what our history has been, where we have gone astray, and what we can do to help bring about reconciliation in our community and in our state.

The discovery of what has happened in Nebraska in the last hundred and seventy years is not an easy task, but it is our goal in putting together this bibliography to begin that task. By putting together a picture …

“It’S War That's Cruel”: The Evolution Of Wartime Representation And ‘The Other’ In The American Musical, Leana Sottile

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

Musical theater has historically been a venue for Americans to come to terms with our past and present on both a national and an individual level as it stages and restages war mythology on the Broadway Stage. As the nation has won, lost, and abandoned foreign conflicts, the connotation, remembrance, and commemoration of war in American memory has shifted from romanticizing former conflicts to renegotiating their memory. Thus, this project examines how twentieth-century war memory is represented in the American musical, starting in the 1940s and continuing up to the present day. To do so, the phenomenon will be examined …

“Unspoken Understanding”: The Evolution Of Chinese American Adoption Communities, Annie Abruzzo

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

While scholarly work on adoption, transnational adoption, and specifically international adoption from China has been robust, it has tended to focus on studying parents and parenting. This paper analyzes the resources used by both parents and children to discuss race, culture, and adoption, and seeks to understand the effects of these parenting strategies on Chinese American adoptees, who have begun to reach young adulthood in the last ten years. Examination of the recent growth of adoptee communities reveals that a shared and complex adoptee identity is a more powerful nexus than shared Chineseness.

Review: War Stories By Gabrielle Atwood Halko, R.C. Miessler

All Musselman Library Staff Works

War Stories, a digital project created by Gabrielle Atwood Halko of West Chester University, seeks to frame the narrative of World War II (WWII) through the stories of children, particularly children in internment or under occupation. Halko starts with the assumption that visitors to the website are unaware of these stories, and the site largely frames itself as an educational tool that aggregates primary and secondary sources related to children during WWII. [excerpt]

The Colonial Marginalization Of Filipino And Filipino American Soldiers In The Us Army During World War Ii, Corey Joseph Tinay

Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the structural paradigms in place within American society as multifaceted tools of colonialism and how they impacted the experiences of minority and colonized soldiers in the United States Army during the Second World War. The history is analyzed through the postcolonial lens, observing factors in place such as; denial of place in history, identity, and recognition of service. The research questions that this thesis addresses are as follows: What are the colonial implications in the experience of Filipino and Filipino American soldiers experience during the Second World War? Are colonial soldiers treated as more expendable than white …

Sovereignty, Statehood, And Subjugation: Native Hawaiian And Japanese American Discourse Over Hawaiian Statehood, Nicole Saito

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Although discourse over Hawaiian statehood has increasingly been described by scholars as a racial conflict between Japanese Americans and Native Hawaiians, there existed a broad spectrum of interactions between the two groups. Both communities were forced to confront the prejudices they had against each other while recognizing their shared experiences with discrimination, creating a paradoxical political culture of competition and solidarity up until the conclusion of World War Two. From 1946 to 1950, however, the country’s collective understanding of Japanese American citizenship began to shift with recognition of the community’s military service record and an increased proportion of veterans elected …

3rd Place Contest Entry: Sovereignty, Statehood, And Subjugation: Native Hawaiian And Japanese American Discourse Over Hawaiian Statehood, Nicole Saito

Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize

This is Nicole Saito's submission for the 2021 Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize, which won first place. It contains her essay on using library resources, a three-page sample of her research project on the consequences that Japanese American advocacy for Hawaiian statehood had on Native Hawaiians, and her works cited list.

Nicole is a junior at Chapman University, majoring in Political Science, History, and Economics. Her faculty mentor is Dr. Robert Slayton.

Shikata Ga Nai: Statelessness And Sacrifice For Japanese-American Volunteers During The Second World War, Kenzo E. Okazaki

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Through a Philosophical analysis of the nature of Internment Camps as well as oral histories of veterans who volunteered to serve in the US military from the camps, this paper will argue that the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was an event that the Supreme Court and surrounding legal discourse placed outside of legal jurisdiction. Those within the camps were thus condemned to a life lacking political qualification and juridical personhood. Faced with the dangers of this condition, interned Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. Army consciously laid claim to the American political community through the sacrifice of …

The Past As "Ahead": A Circular History Of Modern Chamorro Activism, Gabby Lupola

Pomona Senior Theses

This is not a traditional thesis of the Pomona College History Department. Spanning over a century from start to finish, this work tracks the history of Guam’s political status from 1898 to 2021. To support such a lengthy timeline, snapshots of key events and trends are recounted each chapter. Chapter 1 focuses on the Spanish-American War and the local struggle for acting governorship. Chapter 2 documents the impact of World War II, the Organic Act of Guam, modernization and early Chamorro activism on island. Chapter 3 depicts the evolution of late 20^th century Chamorro activism through a model of …

The Right To The City: San Francisco's Chinatown Before And After The 1906 Earthquake, Alexandra Hsu

Scripps Senior Theses

The development of San Francisco, much like many American cities, is deeply entwined with the spatial process of settler-colonialism. Fueled by White supremacist processes of appropriation, dispossession and exclusion, city officials and White San Franciscans legally, financially, and socially segregated Chinese immigrants who entered into the U.S. context to a dense and degraded ethnic enclave. Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey theorize on The Right to the City, the social production of space and the ways in which social processes can be concretized by space. This thesis applies these concepts to the racialized space of San Francisco’s Chinatown. An examination of …