Suspicious Characters: Realism, Asian American Identity, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue-Im Lee
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian American Identity

From Merging Histories to Emerging Identities: An “Asian” Museum as a Site of Pan-ethnic Identity Promotion

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Chong-suk Han ◽  
Edward Echtle
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Pacific Islander ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian Pacific Islander ◽  
Common Problems ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Asian Pacific ◽  
A Site

In this paper, we explore the significance of the Wing Luke Asian Museum (WLAM) in Seattle, Washington as a site where pan-ethnic Asian American identity can be promoted by analyzing the strategies employed by the staff and artists of the WLAM to promote, foster and disseminate a larger Asian Pacific Islander American pan-ethnic identity. We argue that museums are a significant site that can “provide a setting for persons of diverse Asian backgrounds to establish social ties and to discuss their common problems and experiences.”

Parody, Pastiche, and Intertextuality in Asian American Novels

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Tang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Cultural Integrity ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Asian American Identity

The repetition and reframing of styles, forms, and texts variously known as pastiche, parody, intertextuality, appropriation, or sampling is a pervasive practice in Asian American literature. Since the emergence of Asian American literary studies in the 1970s, such strategies have formed a key site for negotiating the terms of Asian American identity, politics, and culture. While pastiche has been recognized as a signature style of postmodern culture at large, it has held particular significance for Asian American literary and cultural studies because of its resonance with Asian American identity. Because Asian Americans have long been stereotyped as mimics of Western culture, and because the category Asian American refers to a coalition of multiple and diverse ethnic groups, Asian American identity itself seems constituted by the formal operations of imitation and recombination central to parody and pastiche. The close alignment between Asian American identity and these formal practices has made shifting critical attitudes toward parody, pastiche, and intertextuality into a telling register of evolving conceptions of Asian American identity. In the cultural nationalist era of the 1970s, pastiche was seen as the formal expression of Asian Americans’ tendency to repeat and reproduce dominant ideologies, a sign of complicity with white racism, and a lack of cultural integrity. By contrast, a second wave of Asian American criticism in the 1990s embraced strategies of textual repetition as subversive parody rather than complicit pastiche, reinterpreting them as articulations of a politically oppositional, hybrid and heterogeneous Asian American subject. Since the turn of the millennium, the use of parody, pastiche, and intertextuality in Viet Nguyen’s prize-winning 2015 novel The Sympathizer intimates yet another iteration of Asian American identity centered on the war refugee, a model of Asian American subjectivity which shifts attention from traditional topics of immigration and assimilation to urgent questions of imperialism and militarism. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how the formal strategies of parody, pastiche, and intertextuality have served as crucial sites for the invention and reinvention of Asian American identity, politics, and aesthetics.

Mixed Race Asian American Identity on Display

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Lily Anne Welty Tamai ◽  
Cindy Nakashima ◽  
Duncan Ryuken Williams
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian American Identity

What's the Matter?: Shakti's (Re)Collection of Race, Nationhood, and Gender

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-95
Author(s):  
Anita Kumar
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
School Community ◽  
American Identity ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Essay Contest

The 2005 Student Essay Contest winner weaves together the narratives of members of Viji Prakash's Shakti bharatanatyam school community, dancing in and out of positions of marginality to unravel the notion of group identity as cohesive, homogenous, and pure as she confronts her own performance and corporealization of South Asian American identity.

scholarly journals "Writing into the Rupture": Visual Selves in Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment

Meliora ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hana Rivers
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Lyric Essay ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Asian American Identity

Multimedia texts are gaining more footing in the Asian American literary world, especially following Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s pre-eminent Dictee (1982). While lesser known, Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment (2018) is a highly referential lyric essay that employs visual elements, including personal ephemera, to consider the unrelenting complexities of Asian American identity. Analyzing Arnold’s formal intervention into Asian American literature through Francesca Woodman’s photography and Roland Barthes’ photography theory reveals that visual subjects are evasive and unknowable. Paradoxically, memorabilia has the power to rupture linear notions of time and cast into doubt what we know about past and present selves. Arnold’s engagement with the visual also extends to the body, and throughout the text she unsettles hegemonic constructions of gender and racial signification. Ultimately, an analysis of Litany for the Long Moment reveals that visual subjects rupture the concept of a stable self. Throughout this thesis, I draw from the fields of photography, poststructuralism, and critical race studies to argue that visual representation is not a sufficient mode of racial empowerment. Building off of Arnold’s claims about “writing into the rupture,” lack is not a closure, but an opening through which we can interrogate what it means to be a self.

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