Apu’s Brown Voice

Author(s):  
Shilpa S. Davé

This chapter discusses the character Apu, exploring how his appearance on the television show The Simpsons in the 1990s was a departure from previous Hollywood and television representations of South Asians in the United States. Whereas South Asians were previously depicted as brief visitors or exotic foreigners, Apu symbolizes a permanent Indian immigrant presence in the United States. Yet, his brown-voice performance racializes and differentiates him from other Americans. The chapter theorizes the use of brown voice and discusses how animated characters, in particular, become a significant subject to study vocal accents and voiceovers. Animated characters are unique because one of their most important defining features is their voice, and, thus, animation emphasizes the voice as a site of interest in thinking about racial performance.

Author(s):  
Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the United States and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our worldviews. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel must be borne.


2021 ◽  
pp. 088626052110152
Author(s):  
Abha Rai ◽  
Y. Joon Choi

Domestic violence is a pernicious social problem in the United States and a cause of national concern. The South Asian culture disempowers individuals experiencing domestic violence from recognizing and reporting victimization. Structural inequities may also discourage reporting victimization. These issues have led to inconsistent findings of domestic violence prevalence rates. Additionally, domestic violence studies with South Asians in the United States have predominantly focused on women, omitting men from this purview of research. The purpose of this study was to examine domestic violence victimization rates as well as their correlates among South Asian immigrant men and women. The sample for this cross-sectional study included 468 South Asians across the 50 U.S. states. Descriptive statistics were used to establish rates of domestic violence victimization. Hierarchical logistic regression was used to examine the correlates of domestic violence victimization. All of the sociodemographic information was added in step 1, and acculturation and gender-role attitudes were added as covariates in step 2. The most prevalent type of domestic violence victimization was physical violence (48%), followed by emotional (38%), economic (35%), verbal (27%), immigration-related (26%), in-laws related (19%), and ultimately sexual abuse (11%). Prevalence rates were higher for women than for men in each type of violence. According to the logistic regression results, education, generational position, family type, and employment were significant correlates of domestic violence victimization. Prior to development of prevention programs by community agencies, it is essential to understand the nature and prevalence of domestic violence experiences among South Asians. The victimization of men in addition to women adds to the novelty of this research study and paves the way for practitioners and scholars to engage in conversations about providing both male and female victims of domestic violence with the needed resources and support. The article will discuss implications for research, practice, and policy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 3093-3103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annalise G. Blum ◽  
Stacey A. Archfield ◽  
Richard M. Vogel

Abstract. Daily streamflows are often represented by flow duration curves (FDCs), which illustrate the frequency with which flows are equaled or exceeded. FDCs have had broad applications across both operational and research hydrology for decades; however, modeling FDCs has proven elusive. Daily streamflow is a complex time series with flow values ranging over many orders of magnitude. The identification of a probability distribution that can approximate daily streamflow would improve understanding of the behavior of daily flows and the ability to estimate FDCs at ungaged river locations. Comparisons of modeled and empirical FDCs at nearly 400 unregulated, perennial streams illustrate that the four-parameter kappa distribution provides a very good representation of daily streamflow across the majority of physiographic regions in the conterminous United States (US). Further, for some regions of the US, the three-parameter generalized Pareto and lognormal distributions also provide a good approximation to FDCs. Similar results are found for the period of record FDCs, representing the long-term hydrologic regime at a site, and median annual FDCs, representing the behavior of flows in a typical year.


1991 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
David S. Wiley

Late in the 1980s, several major U.S. private foundations concluded that the concern for Africa in the country was weak. This weakness was reflected in the faint focus on U.S. foreign policy toward Africa in all three branches of government, in the halting voice for Africa or for U.S. interests there in the non-governmental organizations (think-tanks, religious organizations, lobbies), and in the small concern for U.S. policy or for affecting it in the African studies scholarly community. Indeed, the voice for Africa in the United States was neither strong nor effective.


Author(s):  
Keith L. Camacho

This chapter examines the creation and contestation of Japanese commemorations of World War II in the Mariana Islands. As an archipelago colonized by Japan and the United States, the Mariana Islands have become a site through which war memories have developed in distinct and shared ways. With respect to Japanese commemorations, the analysis demonstrates why and how they inform and are informed by Chamorro and American remembrances of the war in the Mariana Islands. By analyzing government, media, and tourist accounts of the war from the 1960s to the present, I thus show how we can gain an understanding and appreciation for the complex ways by which Japanese of various generations reckon with a violent past.


2019 ◽  
pp. 67-96
Author(s):  
Yossi Harpaz

This chapter studies the growth in U.S. dual nationality in Mexico, and specifically the phenomenon of strategic cross-border births. This involves middle- and upper-class Mexican parents who travel to the United States to give birth, aiming to secure U.S. citizenship for their children. The families who engage in this practice typically have little interest in emigrating. Instead, they mainly view the United States as a site of high-prestige consumption and wish to provide their children with easy access to tourism, shopping, and education across the border. The American passport is also an insurance policy that allows easy exit at times of insecurity in Mexico. This strategic acquisition of U.S. dual nationality by upper-class Mexicans can be juxtaposed with another recent trend: the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Mexican undocumented immigrants, who take their U.S.-born children with them to Mexico. For the former group, dual nationality is voluntary and practical; for the latter, it is an imposed disadvantage.


Author(s):  
Himanee Gupta-Carlson

The introduction introduces the central themes of the book and highlights its significance. It opens by exploring the wedding of the (a Hindu female of Indian ancestry) to a white, Christian male and places racial and religious tensions embedded in that event within the larger context of race and religion as organizing forces in American life. The introduction also describes auto-ethnography and discourse analysis, and discusses how these methods are used throughout the work. It also offers a profile of the South Asian American community in Muncie and of South Asians in the United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (9) ◽  
pp. 4590-4600 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackson G. Lu ◽  
Richard E. Nisbett ◽  
Michael W. Morris

Well-educated and prosperous, Asians are called the “model minority” in the United States. However, they appear disproportionately underrepresented in leadership positions, a problem known as the “bamboo ceiling.” It remains unclear why this problem exists and whether it applies to all Asians or only particular Asian subgroups. To investigate the mechanisms and scope of the problem, we compared the leadership attainment of the two largest Asian subgroups in the United States: East Asians (e.g., Chinese) and South Asians (e.g., Indians). Across nine studies (n= 11,030) using mixed methods (archival analyses of chief executive officers, field surveys in large US companies, student leader nominations and elections, and experiments), East Asians were less likely than South Asians and whites to attain leadership positions, whereas South Asians were more likely than whites to do so. To understand why the bamboo ceiling exists for East Asians but not South Asians, we examined three categories of mechanisms—prejudice (intergroup), motivation (intrapersonal), and assertiveness (interpersonal)—while controlling for demographics (e.g., birth country, English fluency, education, socioeconomic status). Analyses revealed that East Asians faced less prejudice than South Asians and were equally motivated by work and leadership as South Asians. However, East Asians were lower in assertiveness, which consistently mediated the leadership attainment gap between East Asians and South Asians. These results suggest that East Asians hit the bamboo ceiling because their low assertiveness is incongruent with American norms concerning how leaders should communicate. The bamboo ceiling is not an Asian issue, but an issue of cultural fit.


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