Download or read book Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture written by Sucheng Chan and published by Asian American History & Cultu. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last two decades, many U.S. universities have restructured themselves to operate more like corporations. Nowhere has this process been more dramatic than at New York University, which has often been touted as an exemplar of the "corporate university." Over the same period, an academic labor movement has arisen in response to this corporatization. Using the unprecedented 2005 strike by the graduate student union at NYU as a springboard, The University Against Itself provides a brief history of labor organizing on American campuses, analyzes the state of academic labor today, and speculates about how the university workplace may evolve for employees. All of the contributors were either participants in the NYU strike -- graduate students, faculty, and organizers -- or are nationally recognized as writers on academic labor. They are deeply troubled by the ramifications of corporatizing universities. Here they spell out their concerns, offering lessons from one historic strike as well as cautions about the future of all universities. Contributors include: Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Bowen, Andrew Cornell, Ashley Dawson, Stephen Duncombe, Steve Fletcher, Greg Grandin, Adam Green, Kitty Krupat, Gordon Lafer, Micki McGee, Sarah Nash, Cary Nelson, Matthew Osypowski, Ed Ott, Ellen Schrecker, Susan Valentine, and the editors.
Download or read book Race Resistance written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viet Nguyen argues that Asian American intellectuals need to examine their own assumptions about race, culture and politics, and makes his case through the example of literature.
Download or read book The Racial Logic of Politics written by Thomas P. Kim and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As he systemically studies the barriers that Asian Americans face in the electoral and legislative processes, Thomas Kim shows how racism is embedded in America's two-party political system.Here Kim examines the institutional barriers that Asian Americans face in the electoral and legislative processes. Utilizing approaches from ethnic studies and political science, including rational choice theory, he demonstrates how the political logic of two-party competition actually works against Asian American political interests. According to Kim, political party leaders recognize that Asian Americans are tagged with "ethnic markers" that label them as immutably "foreign," and as such, parties cannot afford to be too closely associated with (racialized) Asian Americans. In publicly repudiating Asian American efforts to gain political power, Kim asserts, party elites are making rational, strategic calculations.Although other commentators have blamed the diversity of the Asian American population for its lack of political success, Kim argues convincingly that race itself is the chief barrier to political participation—and it will not be overcome simply by electing or appointing more Asian Americans to political office.
Download or read book Chinese Americans written by Jonathan H. X. Lee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth historical analysis highlights the enormous contributions of Chinese Americans to the professions, politics, and popular culture of America, from the 19th century through the present day. While the number of Chinese Americans has grown very rapidly in the last decade, this group has long thrived in the United States in spite of racism, discrimination, and segregation. This comprehensive volume takes a global view of the Chinese experience in the Americas. While the focus is on Chinese Americans in the United States, author Jonathan H. X. Lee also explores the experiences of Chinese immigrants in Canada, Mexico, and South America. He considers why the Chinese chose to leave their home country, where they settled, and how the distinctive Chinese American identity was formed. This volume is organized into four sections: historical overview; political and economic life; cultural and religious life; and literature, the arts, and popular culture. Detailed essays capture the essence of everyday life for this immigrant group as they assimilated, established communities, and interacted with other ethnic groups. Alphabetically arranged entries describe the political, social, and religious institutions begun by Chinese Americans and explores their roles as business owners, activists, and philanthropic benefactors for their communities.
Download or read book Race and Resistance written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, Viet Nguyen argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. This idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with their culture's ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as the selling of racial identity. Making his case through the example of literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, Nguyen demonstrates that literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture.
Download or read book Immigrant Acts written by Lisa Lowe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant--at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation--displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.
Download or read book Race and Politics written by Leland T. Saito and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located a mere fifteen minutes from Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley is an incubator for California's new ethnic politics. Here, Latinos and Asian Americans are the dominant groups. Politics are Latino-dominated, while a large infusion of Chinese immigrants and capital has made the San Gabriel Valley the center of the nation's largest Chinese ethnic economy. The white population, meanwhile, has dropped from an overwhelming majority in 1970 to a minority in 1990. Leland T. Saito presents an insider's view of the political, economic, and cultural implications of this ethnic mix. He examines how diverse residents of the region have worked to overcome their initial antagonisms and develop new, more effective political alliances. Tracing grassroots political organization along racial and ethnic lines, Race and Politics focuses on the construction of new identities in general and the panethnic affiliation "Asian American" in particular.
Download or read book The Good Immigrants written by Madeline Y. Hsu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites—intellectuals, businessmen, and students—who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness. The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act. Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.
Download or read book Asian American Politics written by Don T. Nakanishi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Envisioning America written by Tritia Toyota and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envisioning America is a groundbreaking and richly detailed study of how naturalized Chinese living in Southern California become highly involved civic and political actors. Like other immigrants to the United States, their individual life stories are of survival, becoming, and belonging. But unlike any other Asian immigrant group before them, they have the resources—Western-based educations, entrepreneurial strengths, and widely based social networks in Asia—to become fully accepted in their new homes. Nevertheless, Chinese Americans are finding that their social credentials can be a double-edged sword. Their complete incorporation as citizens is bounded both by mainstream discourse in the United States, which paints them racially as perpetual foreigners, and by an existing Asian-Pacific American community not always accepting of their economic achievements and transnational ties. Their attempts at inclusion are at the heart of a vigorous struggle for recognition and political empowerment. This book challenges the notion that Asian Americans are apathetic or apolitical about civic engagement, reminding us that political involvement would often have been a life-threatening act in their homeland. The voices of Chinese Americans who tell their stories in these pages uncover the ways in which these new citizens actively embrace their American citizenship and offer a unique perspective on how global identities transplanted across borders become rooted in the local.
Download or read book Asian American Sexual Politics written by Rosalind S. Chou and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian American Sexual Politics explores the topics of beauty, self-esteem, and sexual attraction among Asian Americans. The book draws on sixty in-depth interviews to show how constructions of Asian American gender and sexuality tend to reinforce the social and political dominance for whites, particularly white males, even in the supposed “post-racial” United States. Drawing on established scholarship on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality, Asian American Sexual Politics shows how power dynamics shape the lives of young Asian Americans today. Asian American women are often constructed as hyper-sexual docile bodies, while Asian American men are often racially “castrated.” The book’s interview excerpts show the range of frames through which Asian Americans approach the world, as well as the counter-frames they construct. In the final chapter, author Rosalind S. Chou offers strategies for countering racialized and sexualized oppression. This provocative book shows how persistent racism affects Asian American body image, self-esteem, and intimate relationships.
Download or read book Making Of Asian America written by Pei-Te Lien and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian Americans are widely believed to be passive and compliant participants in the U.S. political process—if they participate at all. In this ground-breaking book, Pei-te Lien maps the actions and strategies of Asian Americans as they negotiate a space in the American political arena. Professor Lien looks at political participation by Asian Americans prior to 1965 and then examines, at both organizational and mass politics levels, how race, ethnicity, and transnationalism help to construct a complex American electorate. She looks not only at rates of participation among Asian Americans as compared with blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and non-Hispanic whites, but also among specific groups of Asian Americans—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Vietnamese. She also discusses how gender, socioeconomic class, and place of birth affect political participation. With documentation ranging from historical narrative to opinion survey data, Professor Lien creates a picture of a diverse group of politically active people who are intent on carving out a place for themselves in American political life.
Download or read book Mobilizing an Asian American Community written by Linda Trinh Võ and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on San Diego in the post-Civil Rights era, Linda Trinh Vo examines the ways Asian Americans drew together - despite many differences within the group - to construct a community that supports a variety of social, economic, political, and cultural organizations. Using historical materials, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews, Vo traces the political strategies that enable Asian Americans to bridge ethnicity, generation, gender, language, and class differences, among others. She demonstrates that mobilization is not a smooth, linear process and shows how the struggle over ideologies, political strategies, and resources affects the development of community organizations. Vo also analyzes how Asian Americans construct their relationship with Asia and how they forge relationships with other racialized communities of color. Vo argues that the situation in San Diego illuminates other localities across the country where Asians face challenges trying to organize, find sufficient resources, create leaders, and define strategies.
Download or read book Becoming Chinese American written by Him Mark Lai and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004-06-04 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Chinese American discusses the historical and cultural development of Chinese American life in the past century. Representing a singular breadth of knowledge about the Chinese American past, the volume begins with an historical overview of Chinese migration to the United States, followed by critical discussion of the development of key community institutions, Chinese-language schools, newspapers, and politics in early Chinese American life. Rather than emphasize experiences of discrimination, the collection focuses on Chinese American community formation that tested the racially-imposed boundaries on their new lives in the United States. Written by noted Chinese American scholar Him Mark Lai, the essays in this volume will be of interest to scholars of Asian and Asian American studies, as well as American history, ethnicity, and immigration.
Download or read book Love Across Borders written by Kelly H. Chong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High rates of intermarriage, especially with Whites, have been viewed as an indicator that Asian Americans are successfully "assimilating," signaling acceptance by the White majority and their own desire to become part of the White mainstream. Comparing two types of Asian American intermarriage, interracial and interethnic, Kelly H. Chong disrupts these assumptions by showing that both types of intermarriages, in differing ways, are sites of complex struggles around racial/ethnic identity and cultural formations that reveal the salience of race in the lives of Asian Americans. Drawing upon extensive qualitative data, Chong explores how interracial marriages, far from being an endpoint of assimilation, are a terrain of life-long negotiations over racial and ethnic identities, while interethnic (intra-Asian) unions and family-making illuminate Asian Americans’ ongoing efforts to co-construct and sustain a common racial identity and panethnic culture despite interethnic differences and tensions. Chong also examines the pivotal role race and gender play in shaping both the romantic desires and desirability of Asian Americans, spotlighting the social construction of love and marital choices. Through the lens of intermarriage, Love Across Borders offers critical insights into the often invisible racial struggles of this racially in-between "model minority" group -- particularly its ambivalent negotiations with whiteness and white privilege -- and on the group’s social incorporation process and its implications for the redrawing of color boundaries in the U.S.
Download or read book Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture written by Jennifer Ann Ho and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sheer diversity of the Asian American populace makes them an ambiguous racial category. Indeed, the 2010 U.S. Census lists twenty-four Asian-ethnic groups, lumping together under one heading people with dramatically different historical backgrounds and cultures. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American. Exploring a variety of subjects and cultural artifacts, Ho reveals how Asian American subjects evince a deep racial ambiguity that unmoors the concept of race from any fixed or finite understanding. For example, the book examines the racial ambiguity of Japanese American nisei Yoshiko Nakamura deLeon, who during World War II underwent an abrupt transition from being an enemy alien to an assimilating American, via the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. It looks at the blogs of Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese Americans who were adopted as children by white American families and have conflicted feelings about their “honorary white” status. And it discusses Tiger Woods, the most famous mixed-race Asian American, whose description of himself as “Cablinasian”—reflecting his background as Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Native American—perfectly captures the ambiguity of racial classifications. Race is an abstraction that we treat as concrete, a construct that reflects only our desires, fears, and anxieties. Jennifer Ho demonstrates in Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism.
Download or read book The Asian American Achievement Paradox written by Jennifer Lee and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups. For the Chinese and Vietnamese in Los Angeles, Lee and Zhou find that the educational attainment of the second generation is strikingly similar, despite the vastly different socioeconomic profiles of their immigrant parents. Because immigration policies after 1965 favor individuals with higher levels of education and professional skills, many Asian immigrants are highly educated when they arrive in the United States. They bring a specific “success frame,” which is strictly defined as earning a degree from an elite university and working in a high-status field. This success frame is reinforced in many local Asian communities, which make resources such as college preparation courses and tutoring available to group members, including their low-income members. While the success frame accounts for part of Asian Americans’ high rates of achievement, Lee and Zhou also find that institutions, such as public schools, are crucial in supporting the cycle of Asian American achievement. Teachers and guidance counselors, for example, who presume that Asian American students are smart, disciplined, and studious, provide them with extra help and steer them toward competitive academic programs. These institutional advantages, in turn, lead to better academic performance and outcomes among Asian American students. Yet the expectations of high achievement come with a cost: the notion of Asian American success creates an “achievement paradox” in which Asian Americans who do not fit the success frame feel like failures or racial outliers. While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding how and why certain immigrant groups succeed.
