National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage
... In this context, I follow David Palumbo-Liu (1999) and Kang (2020) and insert the slash between Asian and American to demonstrate the choice the Asian/American women performer must make between the terms that mark the tension in the linkage of being Asian and American women on Broadway. The split in Asian/American women also exemplifies what such scholars as Rey Chow (1998), Kandice Chuh (2003, Ju Yon Kim (2015), Lisa Lowe (1996), and Karen Shimakawa (2002) have argued as an epistemic violence: Asian Americans, both presented as constituent elements of US identity and marginalized as the racial other, have been foundational to the formation of US Americanness. Subsequently, as Celine Parreñas Shimizu (2007) further intervenes with the slash, I too use it to capture the conflation of being Asian and Asian American for women performers on Broadway. ...
The transnational circulation of persistent racial types that are attached to Asian/American women have shaped Asian-focused narratives and roles on Broadway. The King and I (2015) and KPOP (2022) exemplify Asian/American women’s performative labor and the tensions embedded in and disruptive of the contested political arena of Broadway musical theatre.
... This abjection is central to the formation of "ethnicness" more generally and Asian Americanness in particular. Shimakawa, rereading Frank Chin's character Tam Lum's description of the Chinaman in The Chinacoop Chinaman as "made, not born…out of junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes, cigar smoke, Cosquilla Indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of amnesia" (Chin as quoted by Shimakawa 2002, 1) has argued that Asian Americanness emerges through "an attempt to circumscribe and radically differentiate something that, although deemed repulsively other is, paradoxically, at some fundamental level, an undifferentiable part of the whole" (2). Drawing from psychoanalytic researcher Julia Kristeva's definition of the abject as a "frontier," Shimakawa further argues, "read as abject, Asian Americanness thus occupies a role both necessary to and mutually constitutive of national subject formationbut it does not result in the formation of an Asian American subject or even an Asian American object" (3). ...
This article explores how the “gaps” that structure networks and communities enclose and preserve “racialized others,” whom they seem to expel: from Black residents in US biracial housing projects to Japanese and Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps. It also calls for an embrace of ambi-valent neighbors to render these undead spaces into vibrant, if in/different, modes of inhabitation.
In this essay, Marx argues that the pioneering writer Joseph Heco (Hamada Hikozō, 1837–97) deserves greater attention, particularly in the context of Asian-American studies. The essay examines his Narrative of a Japanese (1893–95) from two angles: first, as a conventional autobiography, considering its significance and shortcomings, and second, as an abject autobiography, with reference to the abjection theories of Julia Kristeva and her followers, which, it is argued, may enable readers to appreciate potentially transformative aspects of Heco's autobiographical abjection.
The AIDS crisis was a global phenomenon, but the ways individuals responded to the crisis reflected local histories and sociopolitical dynamics. This was particularly true for musical productions. Turkey’s first high-profile HIV patient Murtaza Elgin’s albums demonstrate how queer cultural producers and their allies used stigmatized popular music genres to intervene in the AIDS crisis. The albums show how such collaborative projects become a site for artists diagnosed with HIV to resist criminalization and abjection, build artistic, social, and economic solidarity, mobilize affect for sociopolitical change, and develop a broader critique of homophobia and transphobia.
The Alevi religious minority makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey, and their history of persecution dates back before the Republic of Turkey. The inception of the Republic of Turkey as a secular nation-state in 1923 was initially promising for the Alevis, but the regime remained implicitly Sunni Muslim. So, the community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging continued to be characterized by precarity as they occupied a category of national abjection.
Beginning in the 1960s, the waves of migration from rural areas to urban Turkey and Western Europe gradually transformed the experiences of the Alevi community and they became more visible. With migration, Alevi people’s everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination as well as their need for community-building and solidarity intensified. In Europe, the Alevi diaspora was too often categorized simply as Turkish or Muslim immigrants. Many of them wanted to differentiate themselves from the Sunni Muslim Turkish majority in the diaspora and gain recognition as a distinct group. They organized in their new homelands and established formal and informal networks of transnational solidarity. In the formation and sustenance of these networks and solidarity, theatre has played a crucial role.
The plays staged by Alevi community theatres and professional groups in Turkey and its diasporas have focused primarily on the histories of violence and persecution against Alevis. As such, theatre functions as a site for the constitution of public memory and the intergenerational transfer and transformation of trauma and serves the affective politics of community-building and solidarity among the transnational Alevi community. The political economy of these performances is a crucial element of the politics of solidarity, contributing to the sustenance of Alevi cultural producers and their communities.
This article examines notions of “sisterhood” by focusing on an all-women's lion dance company called Gund Kwok, based in Boston's Chinatown. Gund Kwok, which limits membership to those who identify as female and Asian American, provides a space for women to perform this traditional male-only dance style. Company members have created a community of “sisters” to address layers of gendered and racial oppression. Despite concerns that scholars have raised about how community formations, such as sisterhoods, can be overly idealistic and potentially harmful, this study highlights the role of sisterhood in Gund Kwok and the important functions it serves for the group. It argues that Gund Kwok is a diverse community that draws from the ideology of sisterhood as a way of articulating Asian American cultural identity outside the scope of Western cultural frameworks and the dance's patriarchal tradition.
Latin American Literature in Transition 1800-1870 uses affect as an analytical tool to uncover the countervailing forces that shaped Latin American literatures and cultures during the first six decades of the nineteenth century. Chapters provide perspectives on colonial violence and its representation, on the development of the national idea, on communities within and beyond the nation, and on the intersectional development of subjectivity during and after processes of cultural and political independence. This volume includes interdisciplinary approaches to nineteenth-century Latin American cultures that range from visual and art history to historiography to comparative literature and the study of literary and popular print culture. This book engages with the complex and sometimes counterintuitive relationship between felt ideas of community and the political changes that shaped these affective networks and communities.
How do queer intellectuals produce dramatic texts for utopian archival projects? How do (once) hidden theatre practices exist in a complicated relationship with the claims about covert or clandestine performances in the messy afterlives of such unorthodox archives? This essay explores such processes and how they unfolded in the context of Turkish opera by focusing on the work of Rıza Nur (1879-1942).
Rıza Nur was a queer Turkish politician who created an archive of resistance to propagate his ultra-nationalist and eugenicist utopian vision for Turkey’s future during the country’s formative years. In addition to his proposed programs for Turkey’s revivification and the establishment of an ultra-nationalist party, the archive also included Nur’s memoirs, essays, poetry, and two of his librettos. Nur trusted this archive to multiple European libraries on the condition that it would not be accessible until 1960. Nur’s desire was that once his archive would become public, it would transform Turkish people’s understanding of the past, make them recognize him as an unappreciated true leader, and adopt his utopian vision.
Rıza Nur’s librettos demonstrate how operatic writing can function as an undercover strategy of queer self-making. The librettos reveal how archives function not only as repositories but also as sites of production, and how dramatic texts can gain queer dimensions and political significance in relation to other texts. Archives can thus provide crucial insights into discrete theatre practices and create important opportunities to review and revise performance historiographies. Nevertheless, the limited scholarly attention Nur’s librettos have received suggests how disciplinary and methodological conventions may render dramatic texts invisible even when they are in plain sight. Finally, Nur’s ultra-nationalist and eugenicist utopian archive challenges the tendency to associate queer utopian performance with progressive politics.
New French extreme cinema combines existentialism with shock, hyper violence, and transgressions of women’s bodies. I contend such imagery is best understood as a representation of violence that enables enlightenment in and through the representation of women’s monstrosity and abjection. I examine this phenomenon through four films from New French Extremism’s inaugural cycle. El Nuevo Extremismo Francés combina el existencialismo con el shock, la hiperviolencia y las transgresiones de los cuerpos de las mujeres. En este artículo argumento que dicho imaginario se entiende mejor como una representación de la violencia que permite acceder al conocimiento mediante la representación de la monstruosidad y el abyecto de la mujer. Examino este fenómeno a través de cuatro películas de la primera ola de dicho movimiento.
White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski’s Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest “white-expat-fans” to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with K-pop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations.
The Smithsonian Institution’s public narrative often glosses over the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–1842), the historic endeavor led by Charles Wilkes that seized over 4000 specimens, artifacts, and human remains throughout Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the western coasts of the Americas, which later became the foundation of the Smithsonian’s collections. Today, the Smithsonian is revered for holding one of the world’s most expansive collections, a world-class resource for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Yet, the framework of the Smithsonian as a flagship for American exceptionalism is in growing tension with campaigns to highlight communities of color which are increasingly intersectional, fluid, and diasporic. The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center has met these challenges by introducing Culture Labs to instill emerging practices and community principles. This paper investigates the history and implications of museum programming and education practices that engage and transmute the imperial legacies of institutions.
Lion dances are an acrobatic form of ritual performance with roots in ancient China. Traditionally, men have performed lion dances to scare away evil spirits and protect themselves from harm. The members of Gund Kwok, an all-women’s dance group in Boston’s Chinatown, also perform the lion dance to resist nefarious energies and to neutralise unwanted aggression. In their case, however, the negative forces stem from the hypersexualised gaze to which they are subject as Asian American women. I argue that lion dance training creates a resistive, ‘impermeable’ bodily subjectivity. Using ethnographic research, I examine how lion dance training and performance promotes a sense of protection through embodied practice and by challenging and managing the public gaze. In doing so, this study builds on scholarship that investigates the impact of dance training practices on an individual’s sense of bodily identity. While much research has focused on more mainstream dance techniques and the specific ‘bodies’ that those forms create, this article focuses on a group of female artists who are re- envisioning a traditional performance practice, illustrating how a grass roots dance group can serve important purposes outside of formal dance training systems and the academy.
The new coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, has resurrected a number of historical and sociological problems associated with naming and blaming collectives for the origin or transmission of infectious disease. The default example of the false accusation in 2020 has been the case of the charge of well poisoning against the Jews of Western Europe causing the pandemic of the Black Death during the fourteenth century. Equally apparent is the wide-spread accusation that Asians are collectively responsible for the spread of the present pandemic. Yet querying group actions in times of pandemics is not solely one of rebutting false attributions. What happens when a collective is at fault, and how does the collective respond to the simultaneous burden of both false, stereotypical accusations and appropriate charges of culpability? The case studies here are of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Haredi) communities and the PRC during the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19.
This essay takes a postcolonial approach to trouble the celebratory notion that Crazy Rich Asians is unequivocal progress for Asian/American media representation. Using textual analysis, the essay reads Asian subjectivities portrayed in the movie in the context of race relations in the United States, in Singapore, and between the United States and Asia. The essay concludes by discussing how yellowface mockery and ambivalence center whiteness in different ways for Asia-Asians and Asian Americans, and it argues for the continued relevance of yellowface theorizations for unpacking representations of Asian/American subjectivities in filmic texts that are produced by, for, and with Asians.
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