Law and Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Chang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
The 19Th Century

The place of Asian Americans in the American national narrative has always been mediated through the laws, particularly relating to citizenship and immigration. In the 19th century, Asian Americans were marginalized and omitted from the national narrative through discriminatory laws that excluded them from naturalized citizenship, civic participation, and eventually immigration. During this era, Asians were stereotyped in literature and popular culture as threatening menaces that required restriction and surveillance, which was later exacerbated by the hostilities between the United States and Japan during World War II. Asian American writers during this era sought to challenge the stereotypical representations of Asians and provided voice to the silences produced by the discriminatory laws. Following World War II, as the United States redefined itself as the leader of the free world during the Cold War, the discriminatory laws were reformed, and Asian Americans were reconstructed into a model minority that now served the dominant narrative of America as a nation of equality and opportunity. Asian American authors in this era resisted such co-opting of Asian American experiences by writing counter-histories that challenge the grand narrative of American exceptionalism produced by seemingly progressive laws that these authors critique as reifying and perpetuating racist and xenophobic biases that continue to be applied to not only Asian Americans but also other minority groups.

Post-World War II Asian American Suburban Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Padoongpatt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Grocery Stores ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii

Substantial numbers of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants moved into suburbs across the United States after World War II, bringing distinctive everyday lifeways, identities, worldviews, family types, and community norms that remade much of American suburbia. Although Asian Americans were excluded from suburbs on racial grounds since the late 19th century, American Cold War objectives in Asia and the Pacific and domestic American civil rights struggles afforded Asian Americans increased access to suburban housing in the 1950s, especially Chinese and Japanese Americans. Following passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, new groups of Asian Americans, particularly Filipino, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and South Asian Indian, joined Chinese and Japanese Americans in settling in earnest into all kinds of suburban neighborhoods. At the turn of the 21st century, a majority of Asians resided in the suburbs, which also became the preferred gateway communities for new immigrants who often bypassed urban cores and moved straight to the suburbs when they arrived. Entrance into highly racialized postwar suburbs defined by white middle-class norms and segregated white privilege did not, however, mean that Asian Americans gained entry or assimilated into whiteness. While many certainly aspired to and reinforced long-standing white suburban ideals, others revamped, contested, and outright fractured dominant notions of the suburban good life. By the 1980s Asian Americans of various ethnic and national backgrounds had transformed the sights, sounds, and smells of suburban landscapes throughout the country. They made claims on suburban space and asserted a “right to the suburb” through a range of social and cultural practices, often in physical places, especially shopping plazas, grocery stores, restaurants, religious centers, and schools. Yet as Asian Americans tried to become full-fledged participants in suburban culture and life, their presence, ethnic expressions, and ways of life sparked tensions with other mostly white suburbanites that led to heated debates over immigration, race, multiculturalism, and assimilation in American society. The history of post-World War II Asian American suburban cultures highlights suburbia as a principal setting for Asian American experiences and the making of Asian American identity during the second half of the 20th century. More broadly, the Asian American experience reveals how control over the suburban ideal and the making of suburban space in the United States was and remains a contested, layered process. It also underscores the racial and ethnic diversification of metropolitan America and how pressing social, political, economic, and cultural issues in US society played out increasingly on the suburban stage. Moreover, Asian Americans built communities and social networks precisely the moment in which the authentic “American” community was supposedly in decline, providing a powerful counterpunch to those who lament nonwhite populations, particularly immigrants, for fracturing an otherwise unified American culture or sense of togetherness.

Asian Americans and the Cold War

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Strategic Alliances ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
The Cold War

The global political divides of the Cold War propelled the dismantling of Asian exclusion in ways that provided greater, if conditional, integration for Asian Americans, in a central aspect of the reworking of racial inequality in the United States after World War II. The forging of strategic alliances with Asian nations and peoples in that conflict mandated at least token gestures of greater acceptance and equity, in the form of changes to immigration and citizenship laws that had previously barred Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”1 During the Cold War, shared politics and economic considerations continued to trump racial difference as the United States sought leadership of the “free” capitalist world and competed with Soviet-led communism for the affiliation and cooperation of emerging, postcolonial Third World nations. U.S. courtship of once-scorned peoples required the end of Jim Crow systems of segregation through the repeal of discriminatory laws, although actual practices and institutions proved far more resistant to change. Politically and ideologically, culture and values came to dominate explanations for categories and inequalities once attributed to differences in biological race. Mainstream media and cultural productions celebrated America’s newfound embrace of its ethnic populations, even as the liberatory aspirations inflamed by World War II set in motion the civil rights movement and increasingly confrontational mobilizations for greater access and equality. These contestations transformed the character of America as a multiracial democracy, with Asian Americans advancing more than any other racial group to become widely perceived as a “model minority” by the 1980s with the popularization of a racial trope first articulated during the 1960s. Asian American gains were attained in part through the diminishing of barriers in immigration, employment, residence, education, and miscegenation, but also because their successes affirmed U.S. claims regarding its multiracial democracy and because reforms of immigration law admitted growing numbers of Asians who had been screened for family connections, refugee status, and especially their capacity to contribute economically. The 1965 Immigration Act cemented these preferences for educated and skilled Asian workers, with employers assuming great powers as routes to immigration and permanent status. The United States became the chief beneficiary of “brain drain” from Asian countries. Geometric rates of Asian American population growth since 1965, disproportionately screened through this economic preference system, have sharply reduced the ranks of Asian Americans linked to the exclusion era and set them apart from Latino, black, and Native Americans who remain much more entrenched in the systems of inequality rooted in the era of sanctioned racial segregation.

From American Exceptionalism to the Great Compression

2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.

3. Living in the margins

2016 ◽  
pp. 52-82
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
World War ◽  
Birthright Citizenship ◽  
Economic Discrimination

“Living in the margins” considers the lived realities of immigrants’ efforts to foster community, livelihood, and family under exclusion. Birthright citizenship was a key steppingstone to securing some rights in the United States, but still did not protect the American-born from racial discrimination. Asian Americans remained primarily associated with demarcated residential and employment niches that confined their perceived threat, but also facilitated the pooling and sharing of resources necessary for survival in an openly hostile society. Anti-Asian hostilities became institutionalized through laws, government bureaucracies, and social and economic discrimination. The nadir was World War II when Japanese, even American-born citizens, were removed into “relocation camps” as “enemy aliens.”

Comedy, Humor, and Asian American Representation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Kyungah Hong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Culturally Different ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

Asian Americans have had and continue to have a complicated relationship with comedy and humor. On the one hand, comedy and humor have always been a vital and dynamic part of Asian American culture and history, even if they have rarely been discussed as such. On the other hand, in mainstream US culture, Asian Americans are often represented as unfunny, unless they are being mocked for being physically, socially, or culturally different. Asian Americans have thus been both objects and agents of humor, a paradox that reflects the sociocultural positioning of Asian Americans in the United States. Examples of how Asian Americans have been dehumanized and rendered abject through comedy and humor, even as they also negotiate and resist their abjection, reach as far back as the 19th century and continue through the 21st. The sheer volume of such instances—of Asian Americans both being made fun of and being funny on their own terms—demonstrates that comedy and humor are essential, not incidental, to every part of Asian American culture and history.

Gateways and Gates in American Immigration History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
World War ◽  
Immigration History ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Immigration Studies ◽  
Transcontinental Railroad

This chapter discusses how Asian Americans have featured most prominently in U.S. history in the Gold Rush period—as workers on the transcontinental railroad, and as the innocent victims of incarceration during World War II. The impossibility of Asians becoming U.S. citizens was established early in America's history. Much of immigration studies scholarship has usefully focused on the goal of restriction—the targeting of certain populations as unwanted in the United States. By focusing on restriction, however, the scholarship has neglected the selective aspects of immigration laws, which not only erected gates barring entry to unwanted persons but also established gateways that permitted admission to peoples deemed assimilable but also strategic, as determined by a variety of revealing rationales.

Post-1965 Changes in Asian America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
World War ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
The 1960S

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...

Creating an Inclusive, Centralized Intelligence Agency

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Brian Masaru Hayashi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Qualified Personnel

The intelligence agency the Asian Americans joined was established by William Donovan, lawyer and Medal of Honor recipient from World War I. Donovan turned to his trusted friends who organized the various sections of his agency and staffed them with personnel they knew and trusted through their old boy network. To gather strategic and tactical intelligence against Japan, however, Donovan required experts, field agents, and available military personnel with experience in East Asia. But he found there were fewer available through the old boy network. Out of necessity, therefore, he turned to the Asian American communities in the United States to recruit linguistically and culturally qualified personnel with the correct racial uniforms.

Americanists in Unexpected Places

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
International Diffusion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”

Howard Fast and the Refashioning of Postwar Protest

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 489-513
Author(s):  
Lily Phillips
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
American Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

The American Century began in 1945. In the Cold War national narrative that arose in the United States after World War II, America was the hero of the world, a glorious empire called to victory in the war and destined to help others along the road to the American Dream. This narrative advanced a tropology that anchored the construction of the United States as culturally supreme and morally preeminent. It was a nationalistic, self-congratulating celebration — and in the midst of it Howard Fast appeared, the ultimate “Party” crasher.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document