De-Privileging Positions: Indian Americans, South Asian Americans, and the Politics of Asian American Studies

2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilpa Dave ◽  
Pawan Dhingra ◽  
Sunaina Maira ◽  
Partha Mazumdar ◽  
Lavina Dhingra Shankar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
South Asian Americans ◽  
Indian Americans

The (Asian) American Dream

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilpa S. Davé
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
American Culture ◽  
National Identities ◽  
South Asian Americans ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Film Comedy

This chapter focuses on the film comedy Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), an alternative to the immigrant journey often seen in Hollywood films where the old country is full of hardships, but the new country of America offers freedom and opportunity. Because the film is a stoner comedy, it is not readily recognizable as an Asian American story. However, within the genre of the stoner comedy, these films create a new narrative that normalizes Asian Americans and South Asian Americans as a central part of American culture and in the process redefines the boundaries of American regional, cultural, and national identities.

Animating Gandhi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilpa S. Davé
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
South Asians ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Masculinity ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
American Character ◽  
South Asian Americans ◽  
Asian History

This chapter discusses how the Indian American character is the accent or the suburban “sidekick” character to the dominant narratives of young, white masculinity that are prevalent in American culture. The representation and use of the historical figure Mohandas Gandhi in the MTV animated series Clone High revisits and challenges American representations of Asian Americans and South Asian Americans as model minorities. The use of the historical leader Gandhi as a teenage “geek” sidekick without recognition of how Gandhi fits into South Asian history and influences South Asian American communities shows how American stereotypes dwarf any other representation of South Asians or South Asian Americans in the United States.

Asian Americans and Digital Games

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Video Game ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Open World

Asian Americans have frequently been associated with video games. As designers they are considered overrepresented, and specific groups appear to dominate depictions of the game designer, from South Asian and Chinese immigrants working for Microsoft and Silicon Valley to auteur designers from Japan, Taiwan, and Iran, who often find themselves with celebrity status in both America and Asia. As players, Asian Americans have been depicted as e-sports fanatics whose association with video game expertise—particularly in games like Starcraft, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike—is similar to sport-driven associations of racial minorities: African Americans and basketball or Latin Americans and soccer. This immediate association of Asian Americans with gaming cultures breeds a particular form of techno-orientalism, defined by Greta A. Niu, David S. Roh, and Betsy Huang as “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.” In sociology, Asian American Studies scholars have considered how these gaming cultures respond to a lack of acceptance in “real sports” and how Asian American youth have fostered alternative communities in PC rooms, arcades, and online forums. For still others, this association also acts as a gateway for non-Asians to enter a “digital Asia,” a space whose aesthetics and forms are firmly intertwined with Japanese gaming industries, thus allowing non-Asian subjects to inhabit “Asianness” as a form of virtual identity tourism. From a game studies point of view, video games as transnational products using game-centered (ludic) forms of expression push scholars to think beyond the limits of Asian American Studies and subjectivity. Unlike films and novels, games do not rely upon representations of minority figures for players to identify with, but instead offer avatars to play with through styles of parody, burlesque, and drag. Games do not communicate through plot and narrative so much as through procedures, rules, and boundaries so that the “open world” of the game expresses political and social attitudes. Games are also not nationalized in the same way as films and literature, making “Asian American” themes nearly indecipherable. Games like Tetris carry no obvious national origins (Russian), while games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike do not explicitly reveal or rely upon the ethnic identities of their Asian North American designers. Games challenge Asian American Studies as transnational products whose authors do not identify explicitly as Asian American, and as a form of artistic expression that cannot be analyzed with the same reliance on stereotypes, tropes, and narrative. It is difficult to think of “Asian American” in the traditional sense with digital games. Games provide ways of understanding the Asian American experience that challenge traditional meanings of being Asian American, while also offering alternative forms of community through transethnic (not simply Asian) and transnational (not simply American) modes of belonging.

Epistemic Decolonization

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-224
Author(s):  
Bao Lo
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Curriculum And Pedagogy ◽  
The University

This article extends critical discussions on decolonization and settler colonialism specifically as it relates to Asian American Studies. The author argues for a centering of settler colonialism in Asian Americans Studies as epistemic decolonization of the imperial practices of the university. Focusing on the curriculum and pedagogy in courses she teaches in Asian American Studies, the author offers meaningful suggestions for engaging settler colonialism in the implementation of Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies in higher education.

Asian Americans, Disability, and the Model Minority Myth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoonmee Chang
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Model Minority Myth

Chapter 14 engages a sustained critique of the ableist aspects of Asian American studies. Such ableism, as Chang maintains, obscures through minoritized exceptionalism the possibility of a disabled Asian American personhood, rendering such bodies as “impossible subjects.”

The Crip Tarot Card

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-391
Author(s):  
Matt Hyunh ◽  
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ◽  
curated by Mimi Khúc
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Original Art ◽  
Book Arts ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Material Life ◽  
Visual Artist

The Crip is one of thirty cards in the Asian American Tarot, an original deck of tarot cards I curated as part of my hybrid book arts project on mental health, Open in Emergency (first published in 2016 and then in an expanded second edition in 2019/2020). Each card names an archetype that structures the psychic and material life of Asian Americans, and draws upon knowledge production in Asian American studies and Asian American communities to theorize that archetype’s shape and reach. Each features original art and text, a collaboration between a visual artist and a scholar or literary writer. Each ends with guidance, a gentle directive to the reader for what to do now that they have drawn this card in a tarot reading. The Asian American Tarot is art-meets-scholarship-meets-wellness-practice-equals-magic-for-our-times. The Crip is the twenty-sixth card in the major arcana, and it is here welcoming us all on our disability journeys.

scholarly journals Social Media Use and Misinformation Among Asian Americans During COVID-19

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella K. Chong ◽  
Shahmir H. Ali ◽  
Lan N. Ðoàn ◽  
Stella S. Yi ◽  
Chau Trinh-Shevrin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Health Behaviors ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Social Media Use ◽  
South Asian Americans ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Vaccine Decision Making

Social media has been crucial for seeking and communicating COVID-19 information. However, social media has also promulgated misinformation, which is particularly concerning among Asian Americans who may rely on in-language information and utilize social media platforms to connect to Asia-based networks. There is limited literature examining social media use for COVID-19 information and the subsequent impact of misinformation on health behaviors among Asian Americans. This perspective reviews recent research, news, and gray literature to examine the dissemination of COVID-19 misinformation on social media platforms to Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian Americans. We discuss the linkage of COVID-19 misinformation to health behaviors, with emphasis on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and vaccine decision-making in Asian American communities. We then discuss community- and research-driven responses to investigate misinformation during the pandemic. Lastly, we propose recommendations to mitigate misinformation and address the COVID-19 infodemic among Asian Americans.

From Multiculture to Polyculture in South Asian American Studies

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-204
Author(s):  
Vijay Prashad
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
South Asians ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Southeast Asians ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
American Book

In 1997, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (Maira and Srikanth). This was unexpected, not because of the quality of the book, but principally because of the little attention hitherto given to those who write about the “new immigrants” of the Americas (including South Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Africans, and West Asians). Prior to 1997, scholars and writers of South Asian America had been known to skulk in the halls of even such marginal events as the Asian American Studies Association and complain about the slight presence of South Asian American panels. That complaint can now be put to rest.

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