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Organizing Principles: The Myth of the Model Minority
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Posted by Andrew on Tuesday, June 28 @ 10:00:00 EDT (8278 reads) |
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By Ronald Takaki
Excerpted from Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), pp. 474-487
Today Asian Americans are celebrated as America's "model minority." In 1986, NBC Nightly News and the McNeil/Lehrer Report aired special news segments on Asian Americans and their success, and a year later, CBS's 60 Minutes presented a glowing report on their stunning achievements in the academy. "Why are Asian Americans doing so exceptionally well in school?" Mike Wallace asked, and quickly added, "They must be doing something right. Let's bottle it." Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report featured Asian-American advances in a cover story, and Time devoted an entire section on this meteoric minority in its special immigrants issue, "The Changing Face of America." Not to be outdone by its competitors, Newsweek titled the cover story of its college-campus magazine "Asian-Americans: The Drive to Excel" and a lead article of its weekly edition "Asian Americans: A 'Model Minority.'" Fortune went even further, applauding them as "America's Super Minority," and the New Republic extolled "The Triumph of Asian-Americans" as "America's greatest success story." |
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Engaging 'Mystique' Challenges Asian Stereotypes
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Posted by Andrew on Wednesday, June 08 @ 10:00:00 EDT (5732 reads) |
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cb5 writes "Sheridan Prasso, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient. New York: Public Affairs Press, 2005, 437 pp., $27.95.
By Renée Graham
The Boston Globe
June 6, 2005
Anyone who has seen singer Gwen Stefani lately has noticed the gaggle of giggling Asian women silently shadowing her at various red carpet appearances and performances.
They're supposed to represent Harajuku girls from Tokyo's fashion-forward shopping district of the same name where they personify radical, hip insouciance. Yet Stefani, who once sang of her own frustrations at being undermined because of her gender in ''Just a Girl" and should know better, has reduced them to mute props, Oriental dolls who exist only for her own glorification. " |
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A Korean-American Journey
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Fu Manchu Doesn't Live Here
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Posted by Andrew on Friday, October 08 @ 10:00:00 EDT (5168 reads) |
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By Andrew Ng
©2004 The Star (Malaysia)
October 1, 2004
Lê Thi Diem Thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For.
Anchor, 2004, 176pp., $11.95.
Asian American literature, until about 15 years ago, was predominated by
Chinese and Japanese American writers who chronicled their immigrant experience
of trying to negotiate between their new-found subjectivity and their
disassociated cultural origins.
With Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (considered by many to be the
urtext of Asian American literature), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Amy
Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Asian American writing soon became largely a
women’s affair (this is not to imply that there are no Asian male writers, but
they are not as commercially or critically successful). It focused on the
mother-daughter relationship which directly portrays the generational and
cultural conflict experienced by and between many first and subsequent
generations of Asian Americans. |
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Kites, Cookies and Being Chinese
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Posted by Andrew on Saturday, August 07 @ 10:00:00 EDT (3848 reads) |
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Korean American writers find their own voices in genre fiction
By Annie Nakao
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
August 1, 2004
When he's not dodging bullets or fending off low-lifes in a dark
alley, Private Eye Allen Choice -- a.k.a. the Block -- loves to read
Kierkegaard, sip lattes and run 5 miles a day in the Berkeley hills.
Unless he's brooding about his girlfriend's parents:
"The Block doesn't work well under pressure, and can already imagine
himself screwing up. He will say the wrong thing or underwhelm them in some
way. And he will be overtly self-conscious of his lack of ethnic ties. He
can't speak Korean, and knows very little about Korean culture. Serena says he
is a gyupo, an Americanized Korean. Serena, however, speaks the language and
actually studied in Seoul for two summers, and this mere fact puts Allen at a
disadvantage with her parents. He is starting in negative territory. He is an
ethnic dunce."
Choice, the philosopher/PI protagonist of Leonard Chang's mystery series,
is at it again in the Oakland writer's latest mystery, "Fade to Clear." With
his third Allen Choice novel, Chang has established himself as one of a cadre
of Asian American writers who march to a different drummer in a publishing
world that, for the most part, still hankers for "the next Amy Tan." |
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Of Model Minorities and Racism
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Posted by Andrew on Monday, March 29 @ 10:00:00 EST (5792 reads) |
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By M.V. Ramana
©2001 Frontline
July 6, 2001
Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000. 253 pp. $24.95 (hardbound).
There is difference and there is power and who holds the power shall
decide the meaning of difference.
- June Jordan in Technical Difficulties
Addressing the Indian American Forum of Political Education in September
1997, Jesse Helms, the notorious senator from North Carolina, acclaimed:
"Indian Americans represent the best and the brightest the United States
has to offer." Over the last decade, such lavish praise has become
commonplace as Indians shot to prominence in the U.S. If in India newspapers
prominently featured Bill Clinton's visits, The New York Times carried a long
story about Neera Tanden, a second generation Indian who managed Hillary
Clinton's Senate campaign. Jhumpa Lahiri figured on the covers of literary
magazines. And so on. All this cannot be explained merely by the 106 per cent
growth in the Indian population since 1990. Much more important is the status
afforded to Indians as a "model minority". |
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Way Past Fortune Cookies and Mah-Jongg
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Posted by Andrew on Wednesday, March 24 @ 10:00:00 EST (4947 reads) |
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ronbo writes "Jessica Hagedorn, ed., Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. Penguin, 2004. 576 pp. $18 paperback.
By Wesley Yang
© 2004 San Francisco Chronicle
March 21, 2004
You pick up "Charlie Chan is Dead 2: At Home in the World," and you think, "Aha, Asian American fiction -- another of those books about Mama's damn dumplings, with wronged wives and prostitutes running around everywhere, and being "between two cultures,'' with Grandma spouting her infernal wisdom during endless mah-jongg games." And you're wrong. This is precisely what this updated collection of contemporary Asian American fiction is not.
Oh, sure, there's some of that, but plenty else besides. The plenty else lays waste to any ignorant presumptions you might have about Asian American fiction and, by extension, Asian American life. Almost none of it is tepidly P. C., almost all of it is highly competent (there are at least a few glaring exceptions), and quite a lot of it is brilliant. Some of its best work comes from people you wouldn't have thought of, and many of the writers you'd expect to be here aren't here at all. " |
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Defining America Through Immigration Policy
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Posted by Andrew on Monday, February 23 @ 10:00:00 EST (3082 reads) |
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ac2004 writes "Americans Tolerate Only 'Ideal' Immigrants, New Book Says
UC Davis News Service
February 9, 2004
Even with a 400-year history of attracting immigrants from around the world, the United States continues to prefer newcomers with white faces, says UC Davis immigration historian Bill Ong Hing.
In his new book "Defining America Through Immigration Policy," Hing explores links between traditional racial concepts of who is a true American and how we enforce federal immigration policies.
"Immigration policies are not simply reflections of whom we regard as potential Americans, they are vehicles for keeping out those who do not fit the image and welcoming those who do," says Hing, a professor of law and Asian American studies.
" |
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Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body
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Posted by Andrew on Wednesday, January 21 @ 23:52:13 EST (4530 reads) |
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Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women,
Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1999. xiii +
304 pages. $45 cloth; $17.95 paper.
By Cynthia Wu
Melus
Spring 2002
Traise Yamamoto's Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women,
Identity, and the Body makes a significant contribution to the study of Asian
American literature, being the first book-length text devoted entirely to
Japanese American women authors. It is a likely companion for the
foundation-laying work of those such as King-Kok Cheung and Amy Ling who have
addressed the intersectionality of race and gender in the study of Asian
American literature. Drawing on the work of Trinh T. Minhha, Franz Fanon, Rey
Chow, Kaja Silverman, and Judith Butler, Yamamoto explores the gender- and
ethnic-specific strategies of masking as a form of subversive resistance to
Anglo-American racism and patriarchy. She argues that Japanese American women
authors "employ the trope of masking--which at its most literal level, is
directly connected to the Japanese face as the mark of difference--for their own
ends." |
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Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
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Posted by Andrew on Wednesday, January 07 @ 10:00:00 EST (2201 reads) |
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David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial
Frontier. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999. vi plus 504
pp. By
Peggy Pascoe
©2001 Journal of Social History
Summer 2001 Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier is a book that historians will likely find more suggestive than definitive, but it is nonetheless one of the most insightful books currently available on twentieth-century Asian American history. The author, David Palumbo-Liu, exemplifies the best of the emerging field of cultural studies, combining history, literary criticism, and political critique to offer pointed analyses of American pasts and presents. Building on the work of a dozen cultural theorists, from Arif Dirlik and Lisa Lowe to Saskia Sassen and David Harvey, as well as recent social histories of Asian America and careful readings of films, short stories, and autobiographies,
Asian/American offers a new framework for understanding twentieth-century Asian American history, culture, and literature. |
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