Asian Pacific American Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication
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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: DISSEMBLING DIVERSITIES: ON “MIDDLED” ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN ACTIVISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF SOPHISTICATION Douglas S. Ishii, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Christina B. Hanhardt Department of American Studies Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program Professor Janelle Wong Department of American Studies Asian American Studies Program Dissembling Diversities: On Asian Pacific American Arts Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication interrogates how contemporary Asian Pacific American (APA) arts activism and representation has been shaped by the bureaucratic administration of “diversity” after 9/11/2001. Through close readings of texts, it specifically examines Asian American representation within scripted network television programming, graphic novels and comic strips, and indie rock as iterations of panethnic activism in media advocacy, graphical storytelling, and the independent media arts. It understands these cultural forms and diversity itself through the framework of middlebrow culture, which is constituted of texts disseminated through popular culture that normalize the accumulation of cultural capital – or non-financial embodiments of class status such as education and literacy – as cultural citizenship. Dissembling Diversities makes evident how the elevation of these texts through discourses of “Art” and “diversity” relies on the association of cultural capital with whiteness, particularly through the racial exclusivity of their representations and through how the forms’ history of class elevation expresses a white/anti-Black divide. Because of its dependence on cultural capital, the visibility for issues facing Asian American communities as expressed through the creation of art participates in the racialization of sophistication. In other words, deployments by APA artists and activists of traits associated with cultural sophistication – such as artistry, learnedness, worldliness, and status – can both illustrate Asian Americans’ contributions to a culture of diversity, while reinforcing other racial, sexual, and gender exclusions through class hierarchy and respectability. However, APA activisms that contest the exclusivity of cultural capital can challenge these white/anti- Black class schemes. As such, Dissembling Diversities not only critiques APA arts activism’s complicities with the racialization of sophistication, but also examines how it can turn sophistication against itself in imagining past “diversity.” DISSEMBLING DIVERSITIES: ON “MIDDLED” ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN ACTIVISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF SOPHISTICATION by Douglas Sadao Ishii Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Advisory Committee: Associate Professor Christina B. Hanhardt, Co-Chair Associate Professor Janelle Wong, Co-Chair Associate Professor Sheri L. Parks Professor Nancy L. Struna Professor Kandice Chuh Professor Sangeeta Ray © Copyright by Douglas Sadao Ishii 2014 For the artists, activists, organizers, scholars, and teachers who might create the blueprints for this world anew To Keiren, Koji, Keizo, Emiko, Megumi, and PJ, that my work may touch your Asian American lives ii iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank the Graduate School at the University of Maryland for the Mid-Career Summer Research Grant, the Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Grant, the Michael Pelczar Endowed Fellowship, and the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Completion Fellowship; College of the Arts & Humanities for the All-S.T.A.R. Fellowship, and the Honors Humanities Program for the Doctoral Teaching Fellowship; and the Department of American Studies and the Asian American Studies Program for travel funding. Each of these forms of institutional support has provided the financial means and emotional space to conduct and refine my research and teaching. The author would also like to thank Johneric Concordia, Traci Kato-Kiriyama, R. Scott Okamoto, Sean Miura, and the gang at the Tuesday Night Project. Without your generosity, this project would not have seen its intellectual and political completion. The author apologizes to the 13 University of Maryland students interviewed for an earlier iteration of this project. Though your stories have not been told here, trust that they have not gone to waste. This project that I really did not want to be about me ended up being based in who I am. I have often felt an outsider to APA panethnic life. Though I attended the University of California, Irvine, a campus often hailed as the Asian American success story given its minority-majority enrollment, my upbringing through rural farm life and punk rock fantasies when Asian Americans were supposed to be suburban model minorities left me alienated from APA peers. My diversity training as a student affairs paraprofessional led to my involvement in antiracist organizing, but “whitewashed” is a term I know too well because of my Japanese American family’s post-Internment lack of a connection to a homeland. I have sometimes felt isolated and jealous of Asian Americanists at peer institutions – the highest attendance at an event while I was involved with a campus APA graduate student organization (which remains without a name due to internal debates that never resolved) was around 8, and I have had two very different relationships with the Asian American Studies Program under two very different Program Directors. I approach this project as an outsider who is nonetheless interested and invested. Like this dissertation, these acknowledgements could maybe be half the length. Yet, like the aesthetic manipulations and capitalist abstractions critiqued throughout this study of APA arts activism, such resemblances of expertise and professional authority feel dissembling. In other words, though this dissertation is about capitalist structures, cultural hierarchy, and sophistication, these acknowledgements will be too long, too intimate, and just unclassy. Maybe these rambling outpourings of gratitude can disassemble the pretenses of lone geniuses ushering forth their brilliance in a vacuum that predominate discourses of the dissertating process. In part because of the racialization of sophistication, my encounter with the academy has been at times hostile and always uneven – but I have found incredible people and communities to push me though. I have been blessed with the greatest dissertation committee. Nancy Struna, American Studies will one day require its students to read articles iv about how the fierce commitment you have shown to faculty and graduate students has shaped the field. The popular myth is that I marched into Kandice Chuh’s office and declared that she will love me; the first part is not far from the truth, but the reality is that Kandice’s warmth and intellectual generosity immediately modeled for me what it would mean to be a colleague invested in critical solidarities. Though I am still working on appropriate execution, Sangeeta Ray taught me how to walk in a room, make your presence known, and be memorable for your charm, wit, and mind. Kandice and Sangeeta led me to minority discourse and theoretical reading practices, and forever changed my thinking. Sheri L. Parks has persistently demonstrated the necessary connection between scholarship and actual lives, and has shown me that critique can also emanate from how we conduct ourselves within the institution. Janelle Wong has been my toughest critic and most steadfast mentor; everything I know about balancing administration, teaching, research, and living, and doing it all well, comes from you. You have brought me back to Asian American Studies not once, but twice, and I hope I can repay the favor by making this return stick for good. This dissertation, like many of the windfalls and fortunes I have experienced since stumbling into falling snow in February 2008, is indebted to Christina B. Hanhardt. Ever since that recruitment, at which you coached me to think substantially and speak intelligently, I have never doubted that you have been watching out for me. It is my truest hope that, against the perfected illogic of capitalism, the investment of time and sheer affect you have made in me will pay off in all the intangible capital you deserve. I know I have not always been the best student, but I am pretty sure I have been the most entertaining. I know that I made the right choice six years ago by choosing the University of Maryland because of the exceptional faculty. Mary Corbin Sies advocated for me during difficult periods that threatened to end me, and I might not have reapplied if not for her e-mail many Novembers ago. Perla M. Guerrero and Jan M. Padios have been wonderful additions to our department community, and the two of you and Sharada Balachandran Orihuela have helped me so much – including showing me that becoming a faculty member does not mean giving up being a fierce person of color. Randy Ontiveros basically started this dissertation through his mentorship (zot zot) and the Minority Cultural Studies Group. Tita Chico, Bill Cohen, and Orrin Wang put up with me making noise in the Critical Theory Colloquium – each of you has challenged me and welcomed me into Tawes. Michelle V. Rowley has been a ghosted member of the committee, and her feedback and her laugh stay with me. Lisa Mar has been a benevolent spirit throughout. When I compiled these chapters into a single work, I was struck by this dissertation’s preoccupation with love in its manifold forms. Though the rush to love will neither rescue us from capital nor correct our political investments, love does provide the emotional and psychic reservoir that can make things happen. To quote a great scholar, the AMST 2008 cohort has been the best – ups to Gina Callahan for lunches and newsletters; Yujie Julie Chen, for sticking it out with me; and Portia Barker Hopkins, who coined “Doug Love.” Jessica Kenyatta Walker and Paul Nezaum Saiedi have been exceptional friends who have pushed my thinking and my capacity to care; so too are Darius Bost, always one step ahead of me; and Jennie Chaplin, who makes sure I’ve been fed.