Acknowledging “absence” as a powerful and accurate political charge against the continuing exclusion of Asian Americans in American theater, dance, and the larger mainstream US performance landscape, Asian American feminist performance has inspired a critical mass of articles and monographs. A broad range of works by feminist performance scholars address productions that center on Asian American women, gender, and sexuality, and also explore and contest Asian American subject formation. Although they provide different ways of thinking about feminist approaches to Asian American performance, all emphasize how racialized bodies are produced within specific historical and political conditions and are invested in resisting cultural limitations and in interrogating power. Whether drawing on theater, dance, music, drag, or performances of everyday life, this scholarship can provide a glimpse of the critical concerns of overlapping academic fields. Whether mapping theoretical frameworks, archival politics, uses of dance as method, epistemologies of the body, fandom, affect, or alternative or unconventional performance spaces, Asian American feminist performance studies scholars move away from rigid definitions of identity, form, geographic location, or audience. At the intersection of Asian American, performance, and feminist studies, the multiple strategies of feminist praxis—such as archiving and analyzing historical documents, foregrounding bodily performance alongside text-based materials, and reconceptualizing theoretical and artistic paradigms—signal the capaciousness of the categories “Asian American,” “feminist,” and “performance.”
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Article
Monica Chiu and Jeanette Roan
Asian American graphic narratives typically produce meaning through arrangements of images, words, and sequences, though some forgo words completely and others offer an imagined “before” and “after” within the confines of a single panel. Created by or featuring Asian Americans or Asians in a US or Canadian context, they have appeared in a broad spectrum of formats, including the familiar mainstream genre comics, such as superhero serials from DC or Marvel Comics; comic strips; self-published minicomics; and critically acclaimed, award-winning graphic novels. Some of these works have explicitly explored Asian American issues, such as anti-Asian racism, representations of history, questions of identity, and transnationalism; others may feature Asian or Asian American characters or settings without necessarily addressing established or familiar Asian American issues. Indeed, many works made by Asian American creators have little or no obvious or explicit Asian American content at all, and some non-Asian American creators have produced works with Asian American representations, including racist stereotypes and caricatures.
The earliest representations of Asians in comics form in the United States were racist representations in the popular press, generally in single-panel caricatures that participated in anti-immigration discourses. However, some Asian immigrants in the early to mid-20th century also used graphic narratives to show and critique the treatment of Asians in the United States. In the realm of mainstream genre comics, Asian Americans have participated in the industry in a variety of different ways. As employees for hire, they created many well-known series and characters, generally not drawing, writing, or editing content that is recognizably Asian American. Since the 2010s, though, Asian American creators have reimagined Asian or Asian American versions of legacy characters like Superman and the Hulk and created new heroes like Ms. Marvel. In the wake of an explosion of general and scholarly interest in graphic novels in the 1990s, many independent Asian American cartoonists have become significant presences in the contemporary graphic narrative world.
Article
What is Asian American popular music? How do we identify it, define it, and listen to it? What work is being done by naming a genre as such, and need it even be named? Asian Americanist scholars and music critics have grappled with these questions, articulating the political desires for Asian American representation, recognition, and inclusion, while at the same time remaining wary of how such desires reiterate liberal multiculturalist discourses of assimilation and inclusion. A growing body of interdisciplinary work in American studies, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, queer studies, and sound and popular music studies has addressed the historical emergence, visibility, and representation of Asian Americans in popular music. This work has become less concerned with finding out what “Asian American popular music” is and more interested in how Asian Americanist critique can be rooted in minoritarian listening practices so that one might consider the myriad ways Asian Americans—as professional and amateur performers, musicians, virtuosic singers, karaoke goers, YouTube users, listeners, critics, and fans—actively shape and negotiate the soundscapes of US popular music with its visual, sonic, and other sensorial markers of Asian racialization.
Article
Tamara Bhalla
Asian American literary studies, and multi-ethnic literatures more broadly, have maintained a constant faith in the power of literature as a potential tool of anti-racist education. This faith in literature’s potential is not naïve, since it also recognizes how even the most diverse and ideal literary education can be co-opted by the workings of capitalism and neoliberalism. These fields are founded in an enduring and powerful belief that literature affects the social, cultural, and political esteem of a minority group in the United States. Within the field of Asian American studies, academics, activists, and cultural critics have sought to harness the power of various forms of cultural discourse and literature by mediating the stories told about (and at times by) Asian Americans. As Asian American literature has grown in popularity, there has been increasing attention to questions of who is represented within Asian American literature and who is deemed worthy to produce these representations. Such concerns have over time produced an abiding if somewhat tacit interest in questions of literary reception in the field. In fact, although many of the major literary controversies in Asian American studies have circulated around questions of representation and reception and ushered in paradigm shifts in how the field has conceptualized itself, it is an area that remains understudied. Asian American literary reception study and studies of readership are still emerging and crucial areas of analysis that could pose and posit answers to questions of literature’s possibilities and limitations as a tool of anti-racism in 21st-century America.
Article
Kella Svetich
Any discussion of “Asian American literature” must address the inadequacy of the term to describe the array of writings that spring from a multiplicity of cultures and experiences. Ultimately, the phrase has come to encompass writers of Asian heritage living in, writing about, born in, or having sojourned to America. This set of definitions is not limited to written literatures or those originally created in the English language; it can also be extended to transcribed Chinese oral narratives, narratives written in Vietnamese and translated into English, or Chinese characters carved into walls. The term Asian American literature also prompts questions regarding national boundaries. “America” need not be limited to the United States; the fluid concept of nation can spill over geographical boundaries to reach neocolonies where complex constructions of “America”—economic and cultural—significantly affect other countries.
Article
Douglas S. Ishii
Though Asian American literary studies bears its critical legacy, the Asian American Movement (1968–1977) is largely invisible within Asian American literary studies. This has led to a critical murkiness when it comes to discerning the extent of the Movement’s influence on Asian American literary criticism. The Movement is often remembered in literary scholarship as the activities of the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP)—a collective of four writers who were only loosely associated with Asian American Movement organizations. As metacritical scholarship on “Asian American” as a literary category has suggested, CARP’s introductory essay to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) is simultaneously held as the epitome of cultural nationalism’s misogynist tendencies and as the prototypical theorization of Asian American literature. However, this essentializing of CARP as the Movement ignores how the collected writings of the Asian American Movement, Roots (1970) and Counterpoint (1976), identify literary production and criticism as sites of racial critique in distinction from CARP’s viewpoints.
Literary and cultural scholarship’s deconstruction of “Asian American” as a stable term has provided the tools to expand what constitutes the literature of the Movement. As Colleen Lye notes, the Asian American 1960s novel has emerged as a form that challenges the direct association of the era with the Movement. The historical arc of the Movement as centered on campuses highlights the university as an institution that enables Asian American student organizing, from the 1968 student strikes to contemporary interracial solidarity actions, as well as their narrativization into literary forms. Expanding what counts as literature, the decades of Asian American activism after the Movement proper have been documented in the autobiographies of organizers. In this way, the Asian American Movement is not a past-tense influence, but a continuing dialectic between narration and organizing, and literature and social life.
Article
Robert T. Hayashi
As a group, Asian Americans in particular have been portrayed by American society as incapable or uninterested in American sporting practices and traditions. When individuals have realized public acclaim for athletic prowess, their achievements have been characterized in media and elsewhere as an exception to the Asian American experience, even when their success also represents its common collective narratives. NBA (National Basketball Association) basketball player Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise in 2012 was often defined through the trope of the model minority. Conversely, Pacific Islanders, in particular males, have been represented as possessing innate athletic prowess but with limited intellect. These tropes of Asian American and Pacific Islander identity in American society have long obscured their relation to sports and recreation, and there has been little scholarship in either sports studies or Asian American studies on the unique sporting cultures of these groups and their relations to American sporting practices and institutions. Asian American and Pacific Islander relations to American sport are best understood as a unique history defined by their relation to American colonialism, racism, global capitalism, and the transnational nature of modern sport.
Article
Vivian L. Huang
Asian American queer performance indexes racialized, gendered, and sexualized forms and modes of performance created by, for, and about Asians in an American context. Since the 1980s, queer and ethnic studies have conceptualized performance not only as object of study (e.g., staged performance, visual art, film) but also as a method of critique and hermeneutic for troubling knowledges of Asian American encounter and subject formation. Performance in this sense can be understood as Asian American and queer in its engagement with and critical rescripting of histories and ideologies of empire, nationalism, war, globalization, migration, missionizing, white supremacy, and cis-normative heteropatriarchy that constitutes themes of Asian American studies. The interdisciplinary field of performance studies offers quotidian performance, racial performativity, and gender performativity as discursive tools with which to consider social conventions and scripts that render Asian American queer formation legible and dynamic toward future rewritings.
Article
Christopher B. Patterson
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.
Article
Ninochka McTaggart and Oliver Wang
This entry surveys the history of Asian Pacific Islander Americans participation and involvement in expressive forms of hip-hop culture. While acknowledging that hip-hop has its roots in Afro-diasporic traditions, the entry highlights the various ways in which Asian Pacific Islander Americans have been both key participants and innovators within that culture. Particular attention is paid to specific forms of hip-hop: graffiti writing, dancing, rapping/MCing and DJing/turntablis. Each of these include succinct historical summaries of their development. The participation of Asian Pacific Islander Americans are then discussed, ending with annotated lists of select, key figures within each form.
Article
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Chinese opera in America has several intertwined histories that have developed from the mid-19th century onward to inform performances and representations of Asian Americans on the opera stage. These histories include Chinese opera theater in North America from 1852 to 1940, Chinese opera performance in the ubiquitous Chinese villages at various World Fairs in the United States from 1890 to 1915, the famous US tour of Peking opera singer Mei Lanfang from New York to Chicago and San Francisco in 1930, a constellation of imagined “Chinese” opera and yellowface plays from 1880 to 1930, and the more recent history of contemporary opera created by Asian Americans commissioned by major opera houses. Some of these varied histories are closely intertwined, not all are well understood, and some have been simply forgotten. Since the mid-19th century, Chinese opera theater has become part of US urban history and has left a significant imprint on the collective cultural and historical memory of Chinese America. Outside of Chinese American communities arose well-known instances of imagined “Chinese” opera, yellowface works that employ the “Chinese opera trope” as a source of inspiration, or Western-style theatrical works based on Chinese themes or plotlines. These histories are interrelated, and have also significantly shaped the reception and understanding of contemporary operas created by Asian American composers and writers. While these operatic works of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are significantly different from those of earlier moments in history, their production and interpretation cannot escape this influence.
Article
Philippa Gates
From the dawn of cinema in 1895 to the coming of World War II, the representation of Asian immigrants on the American screen shifted from unwanted aliens to accepted, if exotic, citizens—in other words, from Asian immigrants to Asian Americans. Since World War II, American race relations have been defined mainly through the comparison of white and black experiences; however, in the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, white American fears about racial and cultural purity focused on Asian immigration. Although there was immigration from other Asian countries, at the time, the vast majority of Asian immigrants were arriving from China. In newspaper articles and popular fiction, writers exploited and extended Yellow Peril fears about Chinese immigration through tales of Chinese immorality and criminality. American filmmakers then capitalized on these familiar stories and repeated the stereotypes of the evil “Oriental villain” such as Dr. Fu Manchu and the benign “model minority” such as detective Charlie Chan. American culture more broadly, and American film more specifically, conflated different Asian peoples and cultures and represented Asian immigration, for the most part, through white American attitudes toward Chinese immigrants. In film, this resulted in Japanese and Korean American actors playing Chinese and Chinese American characters before the war, and Chinese and Korean American actors playing Japanese characters during and after the war. More notoriously, however, American films often cast white actors in Chinese roles, especially when those characters were more prominent in the narrative. This practice of “yellowface” contributed to the continuance of stereotyped representations of Chinese characters in film and exposed the systemic racism of a film industry that rarely allowed Asian Americans to represent themselves. With World War II, the Japanese replaced the Chinese as America’s Yellow Peril villain, and American race relations turned from the question of Asian immigration to that of African American civil rights.
Article
Alison Yeh Cheung and Kent A. Ono
For the vast majority of TV history, Asian Americans have played a minimal yet nevertheless infamous role. From the “yellow peril” to the “model minority,” racial stereotypes have been used to characterize Asians and Asian Americans on the television screen. In the rare instances when Asian American actors did appear, they either were in minor roles or as figures from a bad racist dream. Research on Asian Americans on TV comes from many disciplines and cuts across multiple fields such as media studies and Asian American studies. This article discusses the early history of Asian Americans on TV, traces notable figures in contemporary television, and concludes with the role of digital convergence and the development of delivery and recovery platforms. It also provides an overview of scholarly literature written about Asian Americans on TV, including articles and books written about Asian American TV shows, the history of Asian American TV representation, and research on TV and digital media, including YouTube and other transmedia convergence cultural materials.
Article
Esther Kim Lee
Asian American theater was created in the 1960s and the 1970s as a national movement by actors, playwrights, designers, directors, and producers who wanted to promote the inclusion and representation of Asian Americans in American culture. At the beginning of the 1960s, the concept of “Asian American theatre” did not exist, and “Asian American drama” was not a known genre. Instead, there were “oriental” actors who wanted to play non-stereotypical roles and to fight the practice of yellowface, a makeup convention in which white actors alter their face to look Asian. The “oriental” actors had a two-pronged agenda of art and activism to be taken seriously for their talent and experience. The first Asian American theater company, the East West Players, was founded in 1965 by actors in Los Angeles to further the agenda. In the 1970s, other Asian American theater companies and groups emerged around the country, and original Asian American plays began to be produced. Playwrights such as Frank Chin, Wakako Yamauchi, and Philip Kan Gotanda had their first plays produced at Asian American theater companies founded in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1980s, Asian American plays began to be produced in mainstream theater, which includes Broadway, off-Broadway, and regional theaters. The success of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, which received the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play, brought much attention to Asian American drama, and a number of plays were produced and published subsequently. Playwrights such as Velina Hasu Houston, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga had their plays produced at major theater companies, and Asian American theater companies continued to support new playwrights. In nontraditional theater venues, multimedia and avant-garde artists such as Jessica Hagedorn and Ping Chong were active in creating original performance pieces. Additionally, solo performance became a major performance genre for Asian American artists who wanted to use their body and voice to tell their own stories. Dan Kwong, Denise Uyehara, and Brenda Wong Aoki were forerunners in launching the genre of Asian American solo performance. A number of Asian American actors such as B. D. Wong, John Lone, and Mia Katigbak also received significant opportunities and recognition, but their two-pronged agenda of art and activism remained relevant and urgent. In the early 1990s, Asian American actors led the protest of the Broadway production of the mega-musical Miss Saigon that featured a white actor in yellowface makeup in the original London production. The protest galvanized Asian American theater artists around the country and inspired a new generation of writers, actors, designers, directors, and producers to create what would become one of the fastest growing sectors of American theater.
Article
Patricia P. Chu
The plot of return from America to Asia to search for origins is central to Asian diasporic literature of the past 120 years. By returning to Asia and writing about their ancestors, Asian North Americans (those born or raised in the United States or Canada) expand their cultural understanding and produce narratives that serve as “countermemory,” contributing to a communal memory that is “oppositional . . . the memory of the subordinated and the marginalized, memory from below versus memory from above,” in the words of Viet Thanh Nguyen. For immigrants and their offspring, Asian diasporic narratives of return typically reflect experiences of “racial melancholia,” described as unresolved mourning for the losses associated with migration, in the context of social discrimination, exclusion, or marginalization due to race. For Asians, racial melancholia is exacerbated by its incompatibility with ideals of America as equal, inclusive, and race-blind. Writers sometimes use narratives of return to comprehend and resolve their parents’ melancholia by remembering their stories and articulating their grievances; this process of countermemory typically requires a lengthy cultural apprenticeship. In addition to family histories, narratives of return encompass essays, memoirs, novels, poems, plays, and films. They may also be written by or about protagonists born and raised in Asia who return, perhaps to reform or improve their homeland, after living abroad.
Article
Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, intellectuals and politicians have focused on three main groups as foundational to national and cultural identities: indigenous, African, and European. Mestizaje or racial mixing as a political project has worked to silence the presence and contributions of people of African and Asian descent, while favoring intermixing among European and indigenous. Researchers in the fields of history, anthropology, and sociology have long debated the role of Asians in the transition from slavery to wage labor and produced studies on the transnational and diasporic dimensions of Asian migration and settlement in the region. However, literature and cultural production captures aspects of the Asian presence in the Caribbean Latina/o world that remain absent or underplayed in most empirical studies. Prominent Latina/o writers and artists from the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) incorporate Asian characters and themes into their work on history, migration, and diaspora. They explore the Asian dimensions of Caribbean Latina/o racial, ethnic, gendered, and class identities and pose a challenge to foundational discourses of national and cultural identities based on mestizaje and syncretism that serve to subsume and erase the Asian presence. Secondary migrations of Asians from Latin America and the Caribbean to North America has produced a small but significant demographic of Asian Latina/os, some of whom reflect on their experiences through essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and art. The cultural production of Asian Latinas/os resists hegemonic concepts of race, nation, citizenship, and identity.
Article
Jenny Heijun Wills
Transnational adoption from Asia began in the 1950s as an institutionalized practice. Since, hundreds of thousands of young people from countries such as South Korea, China, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines have been adopted and raised primarily in white families in places like the United States, Canada, and Australia but also Scandinavian countries and countries in western Europe. What began as a relief program for multiracial “war orphans” in South Korea has blossomed considerably and affects countries and people around the world; transnational adoption has become a popular industry that targets young people in countries including Guatemala, Brazil, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Haiti, and Russia. Today, transnational adoption continues to be a lucrative industry, though the practice seems to be dwindling in popularity and certain “sending nations” have recently declared its abolition (i.e., Ethiopia in 2017). The United States is by far the most prolific “receiving nation,” and is implicated as one of the greatest instigators, given that nation’s military presence in places such as South Korea and Vietnam in and around the years that transnational adoption expanded from those countries. While not nearly as many Canadians (in comparison to Americans) adopt from countries in Asia, adoptees raised in that country have unique experiences mainly due to vastly distinctive regionalism, that makes, for instance, the identities of Asian/Québécois adoptees uniquely precarious. Mexico is considered a “sending nation,” and since race and class factors rarely see young people both immigrating and migrating from the same nation under the auspices of transnational adoption (though it is not always the case; see, e.g., the United States’ history of sending black children for adoption to various European nations), it is mostly not included in conversations about transnational Asian/North American adoption.
For decades, literature about transnational Asian/American adoption centered on adoptive parents, social workers, and pro-adoption activists. In the 1990s, Asian adoptees around the world began to recount their experiences of racial and cultural alienation, among other things, in life writing and poetry. Adoptees in North America were no exception. Asian/North American authors (as well as non-Asian writers) began exploring these subjectivities, too, usually in the context of examining racial, cultural, and national issues related to other Asian/North American subjects who were not subjects experienced. Across most of these representations—by adoptees and non-adoptees alike—the theme of personal and collective history is a notable focus, and adoptees are imagined as another meaningful example of the paradoxical and complex ways Asian/North Americans’ paper histories, immigration rights, and so-called model minorityhood have been levied. Transnational Asian/North American adoption continues to be a topic of fascination for so many writers and audiences and these representations cross genres, aesthetic modes, and narrative styles.
Article
Performers of Asian ancestry worked in a variety of venues and media as part of the American entertainment industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some sang Tin Pan Alley numbers, while others performed light operatic works. Dancers appeared on the vaudeville stage, periodically in elaborate ensembles, while acrobats from China, India, and Japan wowed similar audiences. Asian immigrants also played musical instruments at community events. Finally, a small group lectured professionally on the Chautauqua Circuit.
While on the stage, these performers had to navigate American racial attitudes that tried to marginalize them. To find steady work, performers of Asian ancestry often had to play to stereotypes popular with white audiences. Furthermore, they faced oversight by immigration authorities, who monitored their movements in and around the country and made it difficult for foreign entertainers to work in the country for long periods of time.
Despite these hurdles, Asians and Asian Americans have appeared in the performing arts in the United States for over one hundred years.
Article
This essay considers the expressive and figurative dynamics of Asians in science fiction in the early 20th century. Racial sentiment and policy in the era saw and defined Asians as “ineligible aliens” to exclude from immigration and citizenship. Asian figures expressed these dynamics in science fiction, adapting Orientalist tropes and Yellow Peril themes to the imperatives of the emergent genre. The invisible menace of villainous masterminds like Fu Manchu from crime and detective fiction were refigured as visible science fiction foes whose defeat redeemed the power and potential of science from its degenerate and dehumanizing application. Asian racial tropes aligned particularly with science fiction’s concern about extra-terrestrial life forms. While the term “alien” was not used in the period for such creatures, its later prominence expressed valences and associations, particularly with “invasion,” that Asians originally represented in the genre.
Article
Philip Hobsbaum
Wystan Hugh Auden was born on 21 February 1907 in the cathedral city of York. He was the youngest of three sons of a physician, George Auden, and his wife, Constance, née Bicknell. His unusual name was a result of his father's archaeological interests, which included the editorship of the Historical and Scientific Survey of York and District (1906). St. Wystan was a Mercian prince whose martyrdom led to the foundation of the church of that name in Derbyshire. In 1908 his father left a lucrative practice to serve as the first-ever school medical officer in Birmingham. The family lived outside that industrial city in the then village of Solihull, which today is a Birmingham suburb. When Auden was eight years old, he went as a boarder to a preparatory school called St. Edmund's in Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, who was to become a close friend and also, in due course, a distinguished writer. In 1920 Auden went to the public school, Gresham's, where his parents had to pay high fees. It had developed under the headmastership of G. W. S. Howson from being a local school to a leading establishment with an interest in science. Although brought up by his mother to be a High Anglican, Auden began to lose his religious beliefs. This may have been coincidental with his recognition that he had homosexual proclivities. Robert Medley, a schoolfellow and later a noted theatrical designer, interested him in writing poetry.
