Asian American Studies Commons^™

Covid-19 Asian American Oral History Project: Reflecting On Identity And Oral History At A Community College, Thomas Cleary

Publications and Research

In this article, I share narrators’ stories from the Covid-19 Asian American Oral History Project based at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, to illustrate how Covid-19 and increased anti-Asian hate during the pandemic shaped Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) identities in Queens, New York. Narrators’ stories shed light on how Black Lives Matter impacted their own understanding of race and racialization, particularly as AAPI identity and race relate to the Model Minority Myth. This project also laid the groundwork to develop a broader oral history culture at the college, developing faculty pedagogy to incorporate oral history interviews and interviewing into …

Tradwives: The Housewifization Of The Girl Boss, Gagan Kaur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the reemergence of a particular performance of domesticity in the post-pandemic era, focusing on the rise of the "tradwife" (traditional wife) movement alongside the normalization and spread of Alt-Right ideology through popular social media platforms. It argues that the tradwife is not a return to tradition, but a commodified performance of domesticity built on the erasure of social reproductive labor. Tracing the lineage of the “housewife” from the enclosure of the commons to imperial domesticity and from the “girl boss” to tradwife influencer culture, this project situates the tradwife within a longer history of "housewifization"—wherein women's labor …

East Asian And “Extraordinary”: Intersecting Racial And Musical Identities In The Classical Music Solo Career, Audrey Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A performer’s success within the classical music industry is reliant not only on musical merit but also on extramusical factors like race, gender, class, and culture, all of which influence a musician’s upbringing. For East Asian musicians, distinctions of merit can be accompanied by racialized and often paradoxical narratives about Asian identity that essentialize their performance, personality, and background. This dissertation examines how Asian and Asian-American performers of Western classical music navigate this interplay of racial and musical identity within their careers, with a specific focus on string players and pianists.

Chapter 2 introduces five major racialized narratives used to …

A Seat At The Schoolhouse Table: Reimagining Education Through Afrofuturist And Womanist Theory, Natasha M. Capers

Student Theses

“A Seat at the Schoolhouse Table: Reimagining Education Through Afrofuturist and Womanist Theory” critically examines how curriculum, even when well-intentioned, can perpetuate harm by excluding the lived experiences of marginalized communities—especially Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ students. Using a real middle school immigration assignment given to the author's son as a case study, this capstone deconstructs the structural biases embedded in curriculum design and proposes a radical reimagining through the liberatory lenses of Afrofuturism and Womanism. Blending scholarly inquiry, personal narrative, and community-based interviews, this project offers a restructured assignment that centers joy, identity, and speculative storytelling as tools for educational …

Drone Strikes In Pakistan, Muhammad Shumail

Capstones

my capstone maps all the drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 to 2018. it show how many drone strikes were conducted during each president tenure and how many civilians were killed.

https://techman96.github.io/drone-strikes/

Placemaking And Placewashing In Manhattan's Chinatown: Capitalist Vs. Community Interests, Mary Chu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the late 1890s, there have been internal and external placemakers in Manhattan’s Chinatown. They take the form of city government, real estate developers, and community organizations vying for space, and seeking to define what this neighborhood should be, for whom it should serve, and how it should look. Sometimes these would-be placemakers operate with neoliberal goals and overt orientalist and/or racist views. They push those narratives through via media representations and as a tactic to attract tourism, but with little regard for how it affects the community. In this work, I examine connections between historic ideas of placemaking and …

The Migration Of South Asians From India To Guyana: The Journey, Struggles In A New Land, Reasons For Changes Over Time And Their Cultivation Of A New Culture., Cynthia C. Harry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indians from different regions of India arrived in Guyana through indentureship in 1838. They were under a five-year contract and had to work on the sugar plantations for the duration of their indentureship. While they tried to persist their Indian culture, assimilation in their new environments and interaction with people of different cultures, allowed them to develop a culture unique to Indo Guyanese heritage.

This thesis focuses on the history of Indian diaspora in Guyana. It evokes the struggles they faced on the ships, and during and after indentureship. It also touches on the political and racial issues they had …

Corridors, Miguel Antonio Alfredo V. Luarca

Theses and Dissertations

After twenty years away, Anj has come home to the Philippines, where three generations of women mourn the death of her estranged father. But one day in her family’s ancestral house is enough to remind her why she left. And why she might never escape.

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. [...]

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. …

Archiving A Generation: Filipino Artists And Cultural Workers In Queens, Kimberly Izar

Capstones

While census data shows roughly 86,000 Filipinos live in New York City, data on Filipino artists has been sparse. Art is an expression of one’s being and more often than not, broader social resistance — but it’s also work that has left artists criminalized, ostracized, and even killed.

Over the last year, journalist Kimberly Izar collaborated with Filipino artists and cultural workers across Queens. Queens boasts the largest population of Filipinos compared to any other borough, but this enclave has gradually declined in numbers due to waves of gentrification and migration. Through in-depth coverage and a mix of engagement tools …

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).

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 …

Does Political Advertising Persuade? A Quantitative Assessment Of The Effects Of Campaign Contact In The Context Of Race, Ethnicity, And Immigrant Origin In New York City Council Primary Elections From 2001 Through 2017, Laura M. Tamman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a quantitative analysis of the relationship between New York city council campaigns’ spending and election results between 2001 and 2017, controlling for key factors such as incumbency, I find substantial and statistically significant positive effects for radio advertising on election outcomes. I find small but significant effects for mail, and smaller sized effects for canvassing. My findings underscore the need for further study of the role of ethnic and community media outlets, such as radio, in shaping voter behavior. Moreover, I argue that the fixation of the current persuasion literature on television ads in presidential general elections misses critical …

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.

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” …

The Wisdom In Our Stories: Asian American Motherscholar Voices, Cathery Yeh, Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, Betina Hsieh, Judy Yu

Publications and Research

This article centers the counternarratives of four Asian American motherscholar teacher educators presented as letters to our children in which we apply tenets of AsianCrit to parenting and education, with racial realism at the forefront. Using Asian Critical Theory and motherscholar research to frame our analysis, themes within and across the data include pressures of cultural assimilation and identity loss, intersectional identities, compliance and resistance to Asianization, and learning from our children. Our Asian American motherscholar stories serve as examples of motherhood as an asset to critical scholarship and praxis.

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.”

"Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History Of Sexual Violence" By Seo-Young Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomplete Compilation of Links to Sources Documenting Stanford’s History of Sexual Violence, in Chronological Order”—should be mandatory reading for administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and stakeholders at both Stanford and CUNY. #MeToo #MeTooAcademia

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 …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Control, Allegiance, And Shame In Male Qing Dynasty Hairstyles, Carolle Pinkerton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is about the politicization of hairstyles in imperial China. They indicated conformity with social norms, or rebellion against them. This was especially true under the country’s last dynasty. The Manchu conquerors imposed their own hairstyle, the queue, on their Han Chinese subjects to make their rule palpable to China’s illiterate millions. “Hair martyrs” who refused to accept this “barbarous” hairstyle were ruthlessly eliminated. The Manchus had feared assimilation into the much larger Han population. But the introduction of one uniform male hair style for both Manchus and Han blurred the lines between the two groups. In this way …

Cùng Với Nhau Chung Tay: A Collaborative Project With Vietnamese American Youth, Khanh Le

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of my research is to document, remember and reflect on the experiences of Vietnamese Americans. To create a space in which Vietnamese American youth can co-labor (García, 2020) and co-produce knowledge to disrupt the silence surrounding their lived experience in the U.S., I drew across methodological traditions for this collaborative project. In doing so, I seek to answer the following questions:

1. How do Vietnamese American youth view/narrate their lives and relationships to the past and the present in the U.S. and Vietnam?
2. What do youths’ narratives communicate about their transtrauma?

This collaborative project drew from translanguaging and …

Community Resilience: Stories About Chinatowns In Nyc During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Wendy W. Tan

Publications and Research

After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sentiment that future is still insecure, and fluid has been widely shared by all the American communities. However, for this essay, I touched upon the effects and their measures of staying strong in a few Chinese American communities in New York City.

The Nature Of Anti-Asian American Xenophobia During The Coronavirus Pandemic: A Preliminary Exploration Into Envy As A Key Motivator Of Hate, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

Background. The current Coronavirus pandemic has been linked to a dramatic increase in anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate incidents in the United States. At the time of writing, there does not appear to be any published empirical research examining the mechanisms underlying Asiaphobia during the current pandemic. Based on the stereotype content model, we investigated the idea that ambivalent attitudes toward AAPIs, marked primarily with envy, may be contributing to anti-AAPI xenophobia. Methods. Study 1 (N = 140) explored, through a survey, the link between envious stereotypes toward AAPIs and Asiaphobia. Study 2 (N = 167), …

Relationships Between Sports, Physical Activity Participation, And Phys-Ed Gpa: Results And Analyses From A National Sample Of Asian American Students, Howard Z. Zeng, Raymond E. Weston, Juan Battle

Publications and Research

Relationships among sports, physical activity (PA) participation, and educational outcomes have been studied in various venues, however, used a longitudinal method with a national sample of Asian-American High-School Students (AAHSS) was barely covered. This study employed the latest National High-School Longitudinal Study data (Participants, N = 950); hierarchical regression modeling and intersectionality theory examined, analyzed, and evaluated the relationships among sports, PA participation, and the outcomes on the physical education grade point average (Phys-Ed GPA). Moreover, the demographics factors impact on the participants' Phys-Ed GPA was also analyzed and evaluated. The primary results included: 1) the female students who participate …

Effectively Educating Asian Americans On Rank Choice Voting, Justin Balwan, Darren Jin, Mathew Marrone, Jasmine H. Namdar

Publications and Research

Our poster demonstrates the most effective way to educate the Asian American community on Rank Choice Voting.

To The Studio, In The Studio, Home, Miquel R. Veldkamp

Theses and Dissertations

A curated series of poems and mini essays that reflect on personal life, politics, art history, folklore, science, identity and race. It addresses the questions that inform my work, and echoes its ethos of play, exploration, curiosity, vulnerability.

Asian American Perspectives On Immigration Policy, Van C. Tran, Natasha K. Warikoo

Publications and Research

Despite the rapid growth in both documented and undocumented Asian Americans, their attitudes toward immigration policy are not well understood. Drawing on data from the 2016 National Asian American Survey, this article examines both interracial and intra-Asian differences in views toward immigration. Relative to other racial groups, Asians are as likely to support legal migration, but less likely to support undocumented migration. We document significant diversity among Asians. As labor migrants, Filipinos support a congressional increase in annual work visas. As economic migrants, Chinese and Indians support an increase in annual family visas. As refugees, Vietnamese are least supportive of …