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.
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Asian American and Pacific Islander Sport
Robert T. Hayashi
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Contemporary Asian American Art
Laura Kina
Contemporary Asian American art includes artworks created by artists of Asian heritage in the Americas as well as contemporary works that engage with Asian American or Asian diasporic communities, history, aesthetics, politics, theory, and popular culture. This includes Modern and Postmodern works created in the post-World War II era to the present. Asian American art is closely tied to the birth of the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 70s as well as a wide range of art movements of the same time period from minimalism, to community murals, to the birth of video art, to international conceptual movements such as Fluxus. “Asian American art” is associated with identity based works and began to be institutionalized during the multicultural era of the 1980–1990s. From the early 2000s onwards, Asian American art has shifted to more transnational framework but remains centered on issues of representation, recovery, reclaiming, recuperation, and decolonization of marginalized bodies, histories, and memories. Common themes in Asian American art include narratives of immigration, migration, war, trauma, labor, race and ethnicity, assimilation, dislocation, countering stereotypes, and interrogating histories of colonization and U.S. imperialism.
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Indian Dance in Diaspora: US and Australian Contexts
Priya Srinivasan
This article takes a critical and historical look at how South Asian performers and performances circulated in the late 19th and 20th centuries in the United States and Australia. It compares how dance practices, both in the United States and in Australia, are interwoven with 19th- and early 20th-century Orientalism and anti-Asian immigration law in both countries, as primarily white dancers engaged with Indian dance practices to develop intercultural styles of Western contemporary dance. While the comparisons of Indian dance in the United States and Australia highlight the similarities of national policies that curtailed Asian immigration, they also suggest that the patterns of migration and travel, particularly where dance is concerned, are much more complex. Dancers and dance forms moved from India to Australia to the United States in an intricate triangle of exchange and influence.
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Literary and Cultural Representations of Asians in Latin America and the Caribbean
Zelideth María Rivas
Representations of Asians in Latin America and the Caribbean have been caught in the fissures of history, in part because their presence ambivalently affirms, depends upon, and simultaneously denies dominant narratives of race. While these populations are often stereotyped and mislabed as chino, Latin American countries have also made them into symbols of kinship and citizenship by providing a connection to Asia as a source of economic and political power. Yet, their presence highlights a rupture in nationalistic ideas of race that emphasize the European, African, and indigenous. Historically, Asian Latin American and Caribbean literary and cultural representations began during the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade (1565–1815) with depictions of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino slaves and galleon laborers. Soon after, Indian and Chinese laborers were in demand as coolie trafficking became prevalent throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Toward the end of the 19th century, Latin American and Caribbean countries began to establish political ties with Asia, ushering in Asian immigrants as a replacement labor force for African slaves. By the beginning of World War II, first- and second-generation immigrants recorded their experiences in poetry, short stories, and memoirs, often in their native languages. World War II disrupted Asian diplomacy with Latin America, and Caribbean and Latin American countries enacted laws that ostracized and deported Japanese immigrants. World War II also marked a change for Asian immigrants to Latin America and the Caribbean: they shifted from temporary to permanent immigrants. Here, authors depicted myriad aspects of their identities—language and citizenship, race, and sexuality—in their birth languages. In other words, late 20th century and early 21st century literature highlights the communities as Latin American and Caribbean. Finally, the presence of Asians in Latin America and the Caribbean has influenced Latin American and Caribbean literature and cultural production, highlighting them as characters and their cultures as themes. Most importantly, however, Latin American modernism emerged from a Latin American orientalism that differs from a European orientalism.
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The Transpacific Subject in Asian American Culture
Erin Suzuki and Aimee Bahng
The use of the term transpacific in Asian American studies should be reevaluated vis-à-vis Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, and Oceanic studies. In particular, following Lisa Yoneyama’s model for examining “decolonial genealogies of transpacific studies,” such a reevaluation emphasizes interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and, above all, a reckoning with settler taxonomies of intellectual production as vital to the continued use of the term. Beginning with a review of key scholarly interventions into the “settler colonial grammar of AA/PI,” this article relates the US histories and logics that first produced the categories “Asian American” and “Pacific Islander” and brought them into categorical relation with one another. These historical entanglements between diasporic and Indigenous movements across and through the Pacific, can be understood through cultural analysis of literary works that reconfigure transpacific studies around Oceanic passages and Pacific currents highlighting an Indigenous-centered regional formation. Rather than allowing transpacific discourses to dismiss the Pacific Islands as distant or remote “islands in a far sea,” such an approach recasts the region along the lines of what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa formulates as an interconnected “sea of islands.” It concludes by considering the ongoing harm produced by settler epistemologies of possessive liberal humanism and by inviting a decolonial approach to Asian American cultural politics.
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(The) Transpacific Turns
Tina Chen
The concept of the “transpacific” has inherent asymmetries that must be explored in order to generate a more nuanced interpretive logic of transpacific possibility. Such epistemic asymmetry should be considered not simply as a description of the massive inequalities undergirding the geopolitical arrangements of the transpacific world, but also as a catalyst through which transpacific knowledge and critical orientations of the transpacific are produced. Scholarship evidences three key turns—through militarization, the ecological, and indigeneity—that collectively work to map the uneven terrain of the transpacific. The poet Lawson Inada’s wry observation about the epistemic, economic, and aesthetic challenges posed by the transpacific—that “the problem . . . is water”—provides a starting point from which to trace a fluid genealogy of transpacific literary and cultural production. This fluid genealogy traces alternative versions of the transpacific as “imaginable ageographies” to counterbalance the existing architectural ideas about security, economics, and militarization that have delimited this arena. Analysis of a wide range of texts demonstrates that transpacific asymmetry and transpacific interconnection can both be usefully leveraged to disrupt hierarchies of knowledge and practice.
