The Racial Mundane

The Racial Mundane PDF Author: Ju Yon Kim
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479897892
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association Across the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked quotidian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. In The Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body’s uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim’s study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, The Racial Mundane invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.

The Racial Mundane

The Racial Mundane PDF Author: Ju Yon Kim
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479897892
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association Across the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked quotidian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. In The Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body’s uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim’s study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, The Racial Mundane invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.

The Racial Railroad

The Racial Railroad PDF Author: Julia H. Lee
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479812811
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Reveals the legacy of the train as a critical site of race in the United States Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music. The Racial Railroad highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played—and continues to play—in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives. Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement—from the Chinese American construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the depictions of Native Americans in landscape and advertising, to the underground railroad and Jim Crow segregation—the train becomes one of the exemplary spaces through which American cultural works explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. By considering the train through various lenses, The Racial Railroad tracks how racial formations and conflicts are constituted in significant and contradictory ways by the spaces in which they occur.

Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States

Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States PDF Author: Travis M. Foster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192575163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
How are we to comprehend, diagnose, and counter a system of racist subjugation so ordinary it has become utterly asymptomatic? Challenging the prevailing literary critical inclination toward what makes texts exceptional or distinctive, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States underscores the urgent importance of genre for tracking conventionality as it enters into, constitutes, and reproduces ordinary life. In the wake of emancipation's failed promise, two developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy; and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new racial ordinary came into being through new literary and cultural genres—including campus novels, the Ladies' Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons. Through the postemancipation interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms, genre became a major influence in how Americans understood their social and political affiliations, their citizenship, and their race. Travis M. Foster traces this thick history through four decades following the Civil War, equipping us to understand ordinary practices of resistance more fully and to resist ordinary procedures of subjugation more effectively. In the process, he provides a model for how the study of popular genre can reinvigorate our methods for historicizing the everyday.

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850–1930: Volume 1

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850–1930: Volume 1 PDF Author: Josephine Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108911668
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
The years between 1850 and 1930 witnessed the first large-scale migration of peoples from East Asia and South Asia to North America and the emergence of the US as an imperial power in the Pacific. This period also produced the first instances of Asian North American writing, theater, and film. This exciting collection examines how the many literary and cultural works from this period approached questions of migration, exclusion, and identity. Covering an extensive ranges of topics including anticolonialist writing, the erotics of queer modernist poetry, interracial desire, and the racial gaze in silent film, the book shows the diverse and multi-ethnic nature of literary and cultural production at a crucial period in modern formations of race as well as literary and cultural aesthetics.

Pop with Gods, Shakespeare, and AI

Pop with Gods, Shakespeare, and AI PDF Author: Iris H. Tuan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811572976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Applying the theories of Popular Culture, Visual Culture, Performance Studies, (Post)Feminism, and Film Studies, this interdisciplinary and well-crafted book leads you to the fascinating and intriguing world of popular film, (musical) theatre, and TV drama. It explores the classical and contemporary cases of the literature works, both Eastern and Western, adapted, represented and transformed into the interesting artistic medium in films, performances, TV dramas, musicals, and AI robot theatre/films. ‘Iris Tuan’s book is wide ranging in scope and diversity, examining theatre, music, film and television productions from both Western and Asian countries. Tuan also surveys an extensive range of critical and theoretical perspectives, especially from performance studies and popular cultural studies, to offer context for her descriptions of the many different works. Some of her examples are well-known (Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Disney’s The Lion King) while others little known outside their place of origin (such as the Hakka Theatre of Taiwan) -- all are approached by the author with enthusiasm.’ —Susan Bennett, Professor of English, University of Calgary, Canada ‘Tuan takes us through multiple examples of contemporary popular performance in theatre/film/TV ranging from "high" art sources (Shakespeare or Journey to the West in films, Hirata's robotic theatre experiments) to "low" (Taiwanese TV soap operas Hakka Theatre: Roseki and Story of Yangxi Palace, Korean film Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds). The reader moves at a speed-dating pace through contemporary culture production and interpretive theories, encountering significant works, controversies (i. e., yellow face), and conundrums selected from China, Korea, Japan and the U. S. and filtered through a Taiwanese female gaze.’ —Kathy Foley, Professor of Theatre Arts, University of California Santa Cruz, USA

Beyond Shakespeare

Beyond Shakespeare PDF Author: Iris H. Tuan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811994021
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
With joy and grace to accompany the readers to have the translocal tour to visit about thirty-seven works, this monograph applies the academic critical theories of Performance Studies, Film Studies, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and Visual Culture, to interpreting the special selection works. The focus and common theme are on race, body, and class. With the background of COVID-19 since 2019 up to the present, the book offers the readers with the remarkable insight of human beings’ accumulated wisdom and experiences in surviving with the dreadful diseases like the plagues in Shakespeare’s time. After the supreme reading, may the global readers in the world acquire the knowledge and power to live in sustainability with education and entertainment of films, performances, and online streaming Netflix TV dramas.

Sensual Excess

Sensual Excess PDF Author: Amber Jamilla Musser
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147983095X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Surface Relations

Surface Relations PDF Author: Vivian L. Huang
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478023627
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
In Surface Relations Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Tonal Intelligence

Tonal Intelligence PDF Author: Sunny Xiang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Why were U.S. intelligence organizations so preoccupied with demystifying East and Southeast Asia during the mid-twentieth century? Sunny Xiang offers a new way of understanding the American cold war in Asia by tracing aesthetic manifestations of “Oriental inscrutability” across a wide range of texts. She examines how cold war regimes of suspicious thinking produced an ambiguity between “Oriental” enemies and Asian allies, contributing to the conflict’s status as both a “real war” and a “long peace.” Xiang puts interrogation reports, policy memos, and field notes into conversation with novels, poems, documentaries, and mixed media work by artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. She engages her archive through a reading practice centered on tone, juxtaposing Asian diasporans who appear similar in profile yet who differ in tone. Tonal Intelligence considers how the meaning of race, war, and empire came under pressure during two interlinked periods of geopolitical transition: American “nation-building” in East and Southeast Asia during the mid-twentieth century and Asian economic modernization during the late twentieth century. By reading both state records and aesthetic texts from these periods for their tone rather than their content, Xiang shows how bygone threats of Asian communism and emergent regimes of Asian capitalism have elicited distinct yet related anxieties about racial intelligibility. Featuring bold methods, unlikely archives, and acute close readings, Tonal Intelligence rethinks the marking and making of race during the long cold war.

The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature

The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature PDF Author: Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009204173
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Whether invisible or hyper-visible, adored or reviled, from the inception of American literature the Black body has been rendered in myriad forms. This volume tracks and uncovers the Black body as a persistent presence and absence in American literature. It provides an invaluable guide for teachers and students interested in literary and artistic representations of Blackness and embodiment. The book is divided into three sections that highlight Black embodiment through conceptual flashpoints that emphasize various aspects of human body in its visual and textual manifestations. This Companion engages past and continuing debates about the nature of embodiment by showcasing how writers from multiple eras and communities defined and challenged the limits of what constitutes a body in relation to human and nonhuman environment.