Mixed Race Studies

AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics

New York University Press
November 2006
342 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814775806
Paper ISBN: 9780814775813

Edited by:

Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Professor of English
University of Maryland in Europe

Shannon Steen, Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
University of California, Berkeley

With a Foreword by Vijay Prashad and an Afterword by Gary Okihiro

How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Paul Robeson’s support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian American youth culture?

AfroAsian Encounters is the first anthology to look at the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas. While these two groups have often been thought of as occupying incommensurate, if not opposing, cultural and political positions, scholars from history, literature, media, and the visual arts here trace their interconnections and interactions, as well as the tensions between the two groups that sometimes arise. AfroAsian Encounters probes beyond popular culture to trace the historical lineage of these coalitions from the late nineteenth century to the present.

A foreword by Vijay Prashad sets the volume in the context of the Bandung conference half a century ago, and an afterword by Gary Okihiro charts the contours of a “Black Pacific.” From the history of Japanese jazz composers to the current popularity of black/Asian “buddy films” like Rush Hour, AfroAsian Encounters is a groundbreaking intervention into studies of race and ethnicity and a crucial look at the shifting meaning of race in the twenty-first century.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: “Bandung Is Done”—Passages in AfroAsian Epistemology / Vijay Prashad
• Introduction: AfroAsian Encounters—Culture, History, Politics / Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen
• Part I Positioning AfroAsian Racial Identities
  • 1. “A Race So Different from Our Own”: Segregation, Exclusion, and the Myth of Mobility / Sanda Mayzaw Lwin
  • 2. Crossings in Prose: Jade Snow Wong and the Demand for a New Kind of Expert / Cynthia Tolentino
  • 3. Complicating Racial Binaries: Asian Canadians and African Canadians as Visible Minorities / Eleanor Ty
  • 4. One People, One Nation? Creolization and Its Tensions in Trinidadian and Guyanese Fiction / Lourdes López Ropero
  • 5. Black-and-Tan Fantasies: Interracial Contact between Blacks and South Asians in Film / Samir Dayal
• Part II Confronting the Color Hierarchy
  • 6. “It Takes Some Time to Learn the Right Words”: The Vietnam War in African American Novels / Heike Raphael-Hernandez
  • 7. Chutney, Métissage, and Other Mixed Metaphors: Reading Indo Caribbean Art in Afro Caribbean Contexts / Gita Rajan
  • 8. These Are the Breaks: Hip-Hop and AfroAsian Cultural (Dis)Connections / Oliver Wang
• Part III Performing AfroAsian Identities
  • 9. Racing American Modernity: Black Atlantic Negotiations of Asia and the “Swing” Mikados / Shannon Steen
  • 10. Black Bodies/Yellow Masks: The Orientalist Aesthetic in Hip-Hop and Black Visual Culture / Deborah Elizabeth Whaley
  • 11. The Rush Hour of Black/Asian Coalitions? Jackie Chan and Blackface Minstrelsy / Mita Banerjee
  • 12. Performing Postmodernist Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff, and Ghost Dog in Yellowface/Blackface / Cathy Covell Waegner
• Part IV Celebrating Unity
  • 13. Persisting Solidarities: Tracing the AfroAsian Thread in U.S. Literature and Culture / Bill V. Mullen
  • 14. Internationalism and Justice: Paul Robeson, Asia, and Asian Americans / Greg Robinson
  • 15. “Jazz That Eats Rice”: Toshiko Akiyoshi’s Roots Music / David W. Stowe
  • 16. Kickin’ the White Man’s Ass: Black Power, Aesthetics, and the Asian Martial Arts Fred Ho Afterword: Toward a Black Pacific / Gary Y. Okihiro
• About the Contributors
• Index

Introduction: AfroAsian Encounters Culture, History, Politics / Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen

For a long time, many critics understood W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous diagnosis of the twentieth century as plagued by the problem of the color line as a description of white/nonwhite antagonisms. However, in the aftermath of identity movements on the part of a variety of racial and ethnic groups, as well as saddening clashes between them, it has become impossible to construe the twentieth century as riven by a single color line. Instead, we now conceive of the modern world as having been fractured by a network of lines dividing a range of racial and ethnic groups. How else can we comprehend the identity struggles of South Asian visual artists in the Caribbean, the treatment of the Vietnam War by African American novelists, or the absorption of hip-hop by Asian American youth culture?

AfroAsian Encounters addresses an important connection that until recently has received only scant attention: the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas in the Americas. Across the Americas, these two groups have often been thought of as occupying radically incommensurable cultural and political positions. In this collection, we examine AfroAsian interconnections across a variety of cultural, political, and historical contexts in order to examine how the two groups have interacted, and have construed one another, as well as how they have been set in opposition to each other by white systems of racial domination. We build here on the burgeoning interest in AfroAsian cultural histories reflected in a number of venues. From the conferences hosted by Boston University’s African American studies department (2002, 2003, 2004), to special editions on AfroAsian studies in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (2002) and positions: East Asia cultures critique (2003), to the numerous essays and books generated by scholars across a number of disciplines from Gary Okihiro and Vijay Prashad to Claire Jean Kim and Frank Wu, as well as work by contributors we include here, research on black-Asian racial interactions and formations has expanded at a rapid pace during the last decade. We seek to widen the energetic investigations that AfroAsian studies have provided relative to histories of diasporic and racial formations and globalization across a variety of fields, and with this book we hope to offer an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate. We have framed our treatment of black-Asian interactions within a neologism—rather, we have altered the typography for the term: AfroAsian. While there have been references to the “Afro-Asian” century and the “Afro-Asian” world, we have decided to drop the hyphen from the term in order to denote a unique, singular set of cultural dynamics that our authors analyze.

This collection constitutes the first interdisciplinary anthology to treat AfroAsian encounters. In keeping with the systems of intellectual inquiry established within African American and Asian American studies, we have gathered here essays that reflect a wide disciplinary range, including literary studies, musicology, history, and performance and visual studies.With this array we follow the recent move in the scholarly academy to allow interdisciplinary analysis to bridge the traditional divides that reflect the specialization of academic knowledge to the detriment of actual cultural and social processes. These essays provide rich, progressive, innovative directions in AfroAsian studies and invigorate the status of current thought on interracial encounters across multiple disciplines. This work does not just present a medley of essays with AfroAsian encounters in the Americas as their only common denominator; rather, we have taken Claire Jean Kim’s discussion of “racial triangulation” in Asian American studies as an invitation to further the discourse of AfroAsian encounters. Moving beyond the traditional black/white binary, the essays claim that to understand historical and contemporary AfroAsian encounters, the third, white, signifier, cannot be separated from a discussion as this signifier has informed or influenced AfroAsian binary encounters in the Americas, often without being visibly or literarily present.

Race in the past century and a half has not functioned within national or ethnic boundaries. The cultural and racial groupings examined by our contributors indicate the ways in which these groups do not exist in isolation but within complicated interactions, and they ask us to reevaluate how we define the category “race” itself. Perhaps the most important contribution of AfroAsian studies lies in its potential ability to disrupt the black/white binary that has so persistently characterized race and ethnic studies.Within the last ten years or so, the stability of the term “race” has come under growing scrutiny. Increasingly, race is considered to be not an ontological, coherent category but a dynamic system of affiliation, exclusion, and disavowal that is constantly being reinvented. This sense of “performing” race, of its contingent, assumed nature, has come to be understood in relation to processes of national self-conception, such that “race” is seen as a category produced by the nation itself. As Paul Gilroy, Lisa Lowe, and Etienne Balibar have pointed out in different ways, national and racial boundaries are concomitant; race subtends dominant nationalist discourses—it extends underneath or functions in opposition to definitions of the nation. While the strategic, tactical fluidity of terms like race and nation in this formula are crucial to our understanding of their unstable, changing processes, the logic of opposition that has underwritten this conception of race has also had the unfortunate effect of reinscribing its terms within binary relations and has somewhat perniciously limited our understanding of “race” to dichotomous models largely cast in terms of black and white. To this point, the great intervention in this binary system has been the assertion by postcolonial theorists of an “interstitial” position that occupies the spaces between these oppositions. But this is not our only option.

Scholars in Asian American studies have mounted energetic campaigns to move beyond the conceptual limitations of the racial binary in the last decade or so—we might think here of Claire Jean Kim’s above-mentioned discussion of “racial triangulation,” Gary Okihiro’s question “Is Yellow Black or White?,” and Frank Wu’s assertion that Asian American identities constitute something “beyond” either. For the most part, this work has demanded that we begin to understand race in terms of a polymorphous, multifaceted, multiply-raced immigration diaspora in combination with the histories of the African slave diaspora. However, race scholars still struggle to produce a flexible model that answers calls to move “beyond the binary.” In AfroAsian Encounters we contribute to this dialogue around racial formation by moving away from the focus on black-white interactions; moreover, we do so by examining the interactions of two racial groups now set up in opposition to one another within, for example, contemporary U.S. racial systems. We hope that the essays gathered here can intervene in these binary systems—methodologically, in terms of expanding the objects of race studies and, conceptually, through the expansion of the reigning paradigm of race studies away from blackness/antiblackness and whiteness/antiwhiteness schemas.

To understand contemporary U.S. racial systems, we must step more boldly into Europe’s past, as Paul Gilroy urges us. He writes:

We must be prepared to make detours into the imperial and colonial zones where the catastrophic power of race-thinking was first institutionalized and its distinctive anthropologies put to the test, above all, in the civilizing storms of colonial war. . . . That redemptive movement must be able to pass beyond a compensatory acknowledgement of Europe’s imperial crimes and the significance of its colonies as places of governmental innovation and experiment. The empires were not simply out there—distant terminal points for trading activity where race consciousness could grow—in the torrid zones of the world at the other end of the colonial chain. Imperial mentalities were brought back home . . . and altered economic, social, and cultural relations. . . . Europe’s openness to the colonial worlds it helped to make, might then be employed to challenge fantasies of the newly embattled European region as a culturally bleached or politically fortified space, closed off to further immigration.

With this mindset, Europeans “created” their “New World,” and the Americas became their dream, their geographically locatable paradise. That their creation contained problematic cross-cultural and cross-racial encounters from the start was not problematic for white ideology and imagination; the European colonial color hierarchy was designed to regulate such problems. Racial divisions were arranged according to the white/nonwhite binary. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782, 1793) John de Crèvecoeur provided a definition of the only true American “race”:

What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither a European nor the descendant of a European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced . . . and the new rank he holds. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. . . . The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared…

…Key to the history of interaction between the two groups is the process by which their intermixing was made possible. The first AfroAsian contact can be traced back to antiquity through the great spice routes that we normally think of as a characteristic of the Greco-Roman cultural world. These routes also provided the conditions for cultural and economic exchange between what we now refer to as Tanzania, Somalia, Egypt, Persia, India, and China, as these empires traded precious commodities such as cinnamon and myrrh (in fact, the archeological record is unclear as to whether the AfroAsian routes preceded the Greco-Roman involvement in the spice trade). Two millennia later, the early- to mid-nineteenth-century abolition of the slave trade produced the context of AfroAsian encounters of modernity. In the wake of the British abolition of the trade in African lives, cheap labor sources were needed to fuel British colonial industries around the globe. Indians were transplanted to southern Africa to build railroads, and Chinese were taken to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations. A similar economic necessity drove the importation of Asian labor to the United States. As the national debate over slavery grew over the course of the early nineteenth century, and more states (especially western states) were added to the “free soil” roster, the need for cheap labor did not abate. The early development of new states like California happened to coincide with the massive displacement of peoples in Guangdong province in the wake of the Opium Wars. As John Kuo Wei Tchen has pointed out, prior to the construction of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 it took two to three months to travel overland to San Francisco from Boston or New York, but only two weeks to travel from Canton by clipper ship, creating circumstances that made Chinese immigrants the perfect candidates to step into the labor shortage caused by booming industries in mining, shipping, transportation, and agriculture in California.  AfroAsian relations, then, are the issue and, potentially, the subversion of the European dream of “the new world.” Given the extraordinary richness of AfroAsian interactions of modernity, particularly those created within the shadow and against the force of this colonialist history, we have chosen to focus the volume within the period beyond emancipation. The colonial processes that created the Americas made possible the very connections our authors investigate.

For these AfroAsian encounters in the Americas, the twentieth century invented another problematic triangulated concept—the “model minority” myth. This construct enabled white society to pit Asian Americans against many other groups, not just African Americans. Yet, for the Afro-Asian mutual perspective of each other and for their encounters, the concept has carried additional problems: while Asian Americans have been constructed as model minorities, their economic success heralded as proof of the availability of the American Dream to all, African Americans have continued to be plagued by negative associations and to be systematically excluded from the American political economy.

Read the entire Introduction here.

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity

Beacon Press
2001
232 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-080705011-8

Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

Selected as One of the Village Voice’s Favorite 25 Books of 2001

In this landmark work, historian Vijay Prashad refuses to engage the typical racial discussion that matches people of color against each other while institutionalizing the primacy of the white majority. Instead he examines more than five centuries of remarkable historical evidence of cultural and political interaction between Blacks and Asians around the world, in which they have exchanged cultural and religious symbols, appropriated personas and lifestyles, and worked together to achieve political change.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 (review) [Sheffer]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 37, Number 4, Winter 2012
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2012.0061
pages 203-205

Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

Julia H. Lee’s Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 offers new insights on how African American and Asian American identities were defined in relation to one another during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. As Lee explains, the book seeks to show how “American identity emerges from the interplay between the fantasies of the ‘Negro Problem’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’” (5). Lee focuses on iconic texts and court cases, as well as lesser-known novels, memoirs, and films in order to show how widely the trope of interracial encounter traveled, and how varied were its permutations.

Interracial Encounters follows from a recent wave of works committed to comparative and interethnic analysis, such as Vijay Prashad’s Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2001), Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen’s edited collection AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (2006), Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (2009), and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials’s Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (2011). These books continue the ground-breaking work of Werner Sollors and Elizabeth Ammons to see patterns across ethnic literary traditions while carefully attending to the particular ways American ethnic and racial identities have been negotiated in relationship to other minority groups. Lee maintains the specificity of each group’s experiences in the United States and offers an important contribution to the study of American racial formation.

Lee makes coherent sense out of the complex and contradictory laws, court cases, and racial ideologies of the period she analyzes. Her re-reading of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is particularly impressive, providing a powerful contribution to the scholarship of this pivotal court case while also shedding new light on its influence on literature and culture. Interracial Encounters does not oversimplify or selectively celebrate scenes of inter-racial solidarity; instead, Lee shows the “multiple logics of exclusion”  that were deployed in the period (5). While she provides ample evidence of cross-racial identification, she also illustrates the pattern of one group demanding inclusion at the expense of the other. Interracial Encounters reveals the tensions and alliances between Asian Americans and African Americans, as well as these groups’ shifting relationship to normative whiteness. For example, her readings of the films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and The Cheat (1915) illustrate the contradictory ways African American and Asian American racialization appeared in popular cultural texts.

Lee is attuned to the complexity in how racial ideologies affect minority populations whose rights were (and still are) unevenly recognized and enforced. As she notes, “an American national identity was natural, desirable, universal—and utterly impossible for African Americans and Asians to attain” (10). While underscoring the US historical context for African American and Asian American literary production, Lee also traces the transnational and at times post-national implications of Afro-Asian encounters. Racial ideologies travel beyond the nation’s borders, particularly in this period when the US became a global superpower.

The introduction lays out Lee’s major claims and the theoretical concepts undergirding her work. Chapter Two contextualizes Asian American and African American racialization in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly through the spatialization of the segregated train car, a site central to Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapter Three continues the discussion of segregated train travel by analyzing key scenes in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Wu Tingfang’s memoir America, through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (1914).

Chapter Four addresses the transnational and imperial dimensions of racialization and orientalism as illustrated by the writings of the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian-American sisters Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far). By studying their fiction and nonfiction set in the US and Jamaica, Lee shows the women’s competing strategies for asserting their status as representative Americans. Edith Eaton depicts Asian Americans and African Americans (and Afro-Caribbeans)…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Citizen Sure Thing” or “Jus’ Foreigner”?: Half-Caste Citizenship and the Family Romance in Onoto Watanna’s Orientalist Fiction

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 13, Number 1, February 2010
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.0.0067
pages 81-105

Jolie A. Sheffer,  Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In “a contract” (1902), one of Winnifred Eaton’s popular orientalist romances published under the pen name Onoto Watanna, O-Kiku-san, a young Japanese woman, explains to her suitor, the Japanese-born but racially white businessman Masters, the difference between citizenship and belonging. She tells him, “You Japanese citizen sure thing . . . all the same you jus’ foreigner, all the same.” Masters protests, insisting, “You are trying to rob me of my birthright. Am I or am I not Japanese?” (56). Kiku’s answer is unwavering: “Japanese citizen, yes. . . . Japanese man? No, naever” (56). Speaking as a full-blooded Japanese woman in Japan, Kiku articulates the vast gap between legal rights and social recognition, between being a “sure” citizen under the law while nevertheless (“all the same”) being perceived as “jus’ foreigner,” one who is virtually indistinguishable from all other foreigners (as indicated by the repetition of “all the same”). In this scene, Masters wants to be recognized as Japanese, and the most effective means by which he imagines achieving recognition is to marry a Japanese woman, with the hope that “the next of our line possibly may be partly Japanese, and the next” (56). In this story, as throughout Eaton’s body of work, those who look different on account of race—whether as a white man in Japan or a biracial woman in the United States—are perpetually seen as “jus'” foreigners. The white man’s status as perpetual foreigner in Japan neatly reverses the far more common experience of Asians in early-twentieth-century America, particularly since Kiku’s judgment of Masters’s foreignness is also based on his apparent failure to assimilate: he was educated in the West and lives in the English colony within Japan. Here, as throughout Eaton’s fiction, mixed blood is the primary measure of and means to cultural acceptance, more powerful than the legal rights granted by citizenship and more persuasive than residency.

Eaton’s formulation of the “citizen sure thing” who is nonetheless a perpetual foreigner complicates Lisa Lowe’s now-paradigmatic account of the ways that “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally.” Again and again in Eaton’s fiction, the route to recognition is imagined through romance, breeding, and familial ties, embodied by the figure of the “half-caste,” the offspring of a white man and a Japanese woman. With her focus on the plight of the biracial figure born of the West’s previous encounters with the East, Eaton’s stories should be read as aggressive dramas of national belonging in which white men desire mixed-race women, and mixed-race children demand recognition in the U.S. family. In the story “A Half Caste” (1899) in particular, Eaton merges the interracial love story with a familial reunification plot in order to make the controversial claim that the threat of incest may be productive, serving as the means by which the half-caste can secure her rights as daughter and citizen. In Eaton’s fiction, the moment of incestuous desire and its disclosure occasions recognition of the half-caste’s rights as a member of the family and, by extension, as a citizen of the American “fatherland.”

The term “half-caste,” which was invented to define the mixed-race children of European fathers and Indian mothers on the subcontinent, relies upon the entrenched gendering of raced bodies and the racialization of women. In America as in Europe, masculinity and fatherhood have long been associated with the West, while femininity and motherhood have been aligned with racial and cultural Otherness. In the United States, ever since Commodore Matthew Perry “opened” Japan to American trade in 1853, American audiences have responded enthusiastically to the image of an American captain penetrating the mystical, oriental East via military and economic might—symbolized by the cannons extending from Commodore Perry’s ships when he entered Tokyo Bay. This “scenario” of Western political-sexual conquest, to use Diana Taylor’s term for the “predictable, formulaic, hence repeatable” forms that tropes of…

Read or purchase the article here.

Artists explore the image of mixed race Asian-Americans in DePaul exhibit

Medill Reports, Chicago
2013-04-18

Zhiyu Wang

Medill Reports is written and produced by graduate journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill school.

In college, Wei Ming Dariotis used to want a T-shirt with “war baby” on the front and “love child” on the back. That way whenever people asked her “what are you?” she could just point to the T-shirt and say, “take your pick.”

Now her imaginary T-shirt has turned into an actual exhibition. The “War Baby/Love Child” show at DePaul University features artworks from 19 contemporary artists, all of whom are of mixed heritage, meaning either they are mixed-raced or they are transracial adoptees.

“This is part of a beginning that people can see visually what it means to be mixed raced,” said Debra Yepa-Pappan, a Jemez Pueblo and Korean artist who lives in Chicago.

The title “War Baby/Love Child” comes from the experience Dariotis, co-curator and associate professor of Asian-American studies at San Francisco State University, had when she was young. When she said her mom is Chinese and her father is Greek /Swedish /English /Scottish /German /Pennsylvania Dutch, people would always ask, “did your parents meet in the war?”…

Read the entire article here.

Opening 4/25: “War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art”

DePaul Art Museum
Chicago, Illinois
2013-04-16

CHICAGO — The DePaul Art Museum explores the construction of mixed-heritage Asian American identity in the United States with “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” which opens April 25.

“It gives visibility to the increasingly mixed generation coming of age by highlighting artworks that map personal biography and the construction of mixed heritage Asian American identity against U.S. and transnational histories,” said Laura Kina, exhibit curator. Kina is a Vincent de Paul Professor and founding member of Global Asian Studies at DePaul University, where she also is an associate professor of art, media and design in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. April 25 at the museum, located at 935 W. Fullerton Ave., just east of the CTA’s Fullerton ‘L’ stop. The museum is free and open to the public every day. The exhibition runs through June 30.

“Through traditional media as well as video, installation and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including U.S. wars in Asia, multiculturalism and identity politics, racialization, gender and sexual identity, citizenship and nationality, and transracial adoption,” said Kina. She co-edited a book of the same title with Wei Ming Dariotis, an associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Mequitta Ahuja, Albert Chong, Serene Ford, Kip Fulbeck, Stuart Gaffney, Louie Gong, Jane Jin Kaisen, Lori Kay, Li-Lan, Richard Lou, Samia Mirza, Chris Naka, Laurel Nakadate, Gina Osterloh, Adrienne Pao, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jenifer Wofford and Debra Yepa-Pappan…

Read the entire press release here.

JANM Show Looks at Mixed Ancestry

Los Angeles Downtown News
2013-04-15

Richard Guzmán

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES – The very title of the new Japanese American National Museum exhibit indicates the complex factors at play in a single community.

The show, Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History, examines the diverse history of the Japanese American community as well as the still evolving notion of family and race. It opened April 7 and continues through Aug. 25 at the Little Tokyo museum.

Through photos, videos, artifacts and paintings, the shows traces the history of mixed-race Japanese American families — hapa is a term for a person of mixed race who is part Asian or Pacific Islander — going back to the late 1800s. It also looks at the challenges these families faced due to segregation and laws that criminalized mixed race marriages.

It’s a history, said Duncan Williams, the exhibit co-curator, that is often plainly visible in the faces of biracial individuals. However, he said the topic is also invisible, since it is rarely discussed in open forums.

“One of the major points we’re trying to make is that increasingly the Japanese American community is changing,” said Williams, who is also director of the USC Center for Japanese Religion and Culture.

He said that by the next U.S. Census in 2020, it is expected that more than half of the members of the Japanese American community will identify themselves as multiracial…

Read the entire article here.

A Foot in Both Worlds: Asian Americans’ Perceptions of Asian, White, and Racially Ambiguous Faces

Group Processes & Intergroup Relations
Volume 11, Number 2 (April 2008)
pages 182–200
DOI: 10.1177/1368430207088037

Eve C. Willadsen-Jensen
University of Colorado, Boulder

Tiffany A. Ito, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
University of Colorado, Boulder

Past research on racial perception has often focused on responses from White participants, making it difficult to determine the role of perceiver race in the perception of others. Similarly, studies examining perceptions of individuals whose racial category membership is unclear have not systematically examined responses from non-Whites. This was addressed by showing Asian participants pictures of Whites, Asians, and racially ambiguous White-Asian faces. Event-related potentials were recorded to measure early attention responses. Participants initially oriented more to outgroup White than ingroup Asian or racially ambiguous faces. Shortly after that, they showed sensitivity to the racial context in which the faces were presented, more deeply processing ingroup Asian and racially ambiguous faces when they were seeing lots of other Asians, but more deeply processing outgroup White and racially ambiguous faces when they were seeing lots of other Whites. Still later, responses were more sensitive to the objective physical properties of the faces, with racially ambiguous faces differentiated from both Whites and Asians. These results demonstrate the fluidity of racial processing, and when compared to responses obtained from White participants, show how perceiver race and racial context influences attention to racial cues.

Read the entire article here.

Japanese American Student Alliance: Ha-fu: Exploring Half Asian Identity

George Washington University
Marvin Center, Amphitheater (view map)
800 21st Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20052
2013-04-28, 12:00-16:00 EDT (Local Time)

Learn more about GW’s multiracial experience as a student panel discusses their perspectives and shares their stories.

The George Washington University Presents:
2013 Asian Pacific Islander Celebration
Many Voices, One Song

Sponsored by the George Washington University Student Association, Asian Student Alliance, Chinese American Student Association, Hawaii Club, Japanese American Student Alliance, Korean Cultural Organization, Kappa Phi Lambda, Inc., Philippine Cultural Society, Pi Delta Psi, Inc., Sigma Psi Zeta, Inc., Vietnamese Student Association.

For more information, click here.

Hapa, Amerasian, Euro-Asian, or ‘Other’

Asian Week: The Voice of Asian America
2005-12-16

Nathalie Ishizuka

From day one, I was labeled, “other.” Singing my ABCs, looking Japanese and asking for a “bonbon,” it was hard not to notice me. My French mother and Japanese father told me that it was my terrible singing voice that drew attention, so being an “other” never went to my head.

What did go directly to my head and heart, was the feeling that I was indeed different — as Katherine Knorr of the International Herald Tribune put it so well, “Someone at home in two places and a stranger in both as well.”

After hearing from other hapas, Amerasians, Euro-Asians, Nisei and countless “others,” I have often thought about what it means to never entirely fit into one category — nor to entirely want to…

Read the entire article here.