Graduate Student Panel on Asian American Studies | May 9, 2016
Monday, May 9, 2016 | 4:30pm
CRES Talks presents Asian American Studies at UChicago
(in order of presentation)
Michael Park is a PhD student at the School of Social Service Administration. His research interests include Asian immigrant families and youth.
The influence of racialization process on Asian immigrants’ lives both in the context of home and host society
Description: Asians immigrants have been categorized as “honorary white” and depicted as racially triangulated. Yet, due to their diverse experiences that these immigrant groups are brining from their home countries, just understanding the racial position or the racialization process of Asian subgroups within the U.S. context would not provide a complete picture of their lives in the U.S. We also need to understand how they have been racialized back in their home countries as well. The current ML-SAAF (Midwest Longitudinal study of Asian American families) project is unique in a sense that it tries to capture how these two influences interplay with one another in the lives of Asian immigrants in the U.S. and aims to help maximize Asian immigrant youth’s healthy development.
Sonia Gomez is a PhD student in History whose work explores the intersection of race, gender, and immigration legislation in post-World War II America by examining the history, experiences, and memories of Japanese war brides.
Japanese Women, Black Men, and Racial Hierarchy in Postwar America
Description: In 1945, at the end of World War II, young Japanese women began immigrating to the United States as wives of American servicemen. Their arrival came at a particularly paradoxical moment in United States history, for the nation was undergoing vast political, economic, and social changes. Most of the scholarship on Japanese war brides focuses on the relationships between Japanese women and white American GIs. Yet a significant number of these Japanese women came to the United States with their African American husbands. In this presentation I will interrogate the ways in which Japanese war brides who married African American GIs complicated the changing racial politics of the time.
Omie Hsu is an Asian-American who Studies. As a PhD student in the Department of Political Science, her work is focused on the conceptual conditions of being political – on how articulations of some of the axiomatic categories of political life and political theory (life/death, public/private, affect/rationality) track adjustments to and strategies of power, while they may also be the scenes and objects of political activity.
Body Politics: on “Gastropoetics” and Reading Chinese Food into American Politics and Political Theory
Description: Within the context of these interests, the material discussed on the “gastropoetic” and culinary communities is less a study of Asian-American life and more a site, or an exemplary case, through and on which to anchor critical orientations towards liberal democratic thought with respect to community, nationalism, and identity. Most experimental, it asks what reading culinary practices and the narratives that surround them could teach us about how social and cultural activities become and register politics – what do we learn, for instance, about public life, social contact, and political possibility if we take Jennifer 8. Lee to be right when she writes that “there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Wendy’s, Domino’s, and Pizza Huts combined”? What happens to traditional conceptions of political activity if we shift our attention away from the state and towards more everyday practices, such as culinary and consumptive ones?