Tales of the Unexpected

ABSTRACT

Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I have refuted this principle and made an attempt to show its inherent contradictoriness. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to grand historical narratives through the use of a research model which I call the ‘singularization of history’. In this article I show how the use of the traditional microhistorical methods blinded me in a research project. This blind spot in my research caused a major oversight in my findings – a shocking sequence of events was brought to my attention from an unexpected direction and revealed the weakness in my approach. The article deals with the need to rethink the whole concept of historical research and how the methods of microhistory can play a role there with the aid of what I call the ‘textual environment’.     

Disassembling the Model Minority: Asian Pacific Islander Identities and Their Schooling Experiences

When I was in kindergarten, I was always in trouble. During recess I either sat on the benches or stood up against the wall. I had few friends; I always seemed to get into arguments with my classmates no matter if they were Filipino American like me, or European American, or African American, or Latinos. I always caused problems for my teacher. Mrs. H. always tried to silence me when I would try and engage in a discussion as to why I was in trouble. Once I got punished for not doing my class work correctly. We were to watch a movie when we all finished coloring our pictures. I hurried to finish my picture so I could join my classmates on the round carpet. I was so proud of my work I ran up to show Mrs. H. I was halted in mid stride by Mrs. M., the aide, and told to return to my seat. Mrs. H. examined my picture and proceeded to show the class how wrong my picture was. My picture was not done correctly because I colored outside of the lines of the lion's mane. As punishment I had to sit in the corner and color another lion picture as the class got to watch the movie. Every so often I would lean back in my chair and get a glimpse of the movie. I would be redirected to my work when Mrs. H. would yell at me to return to my seat and remind me I wasn't part of the group. All I wanted to do was be with everyone else. Was I really wrong to color outside the lines or did I have fine motor issues that needed to be addressed?     

A critique of critical acculturation

This critique is divided into three sections. The first section is a review of my positions on three core issues regarding the nature of the human sciences (particularly cross-cultural and acculturation psychology) that have been raised throughout these articles. Knowledge of these positions is essential background to understanding my comments in the second section. In the second section are some comments on specific claims and assertions about my work that have been made in the articles. I believe that many of these assertions do not represent my views, nor my empirical research, on acculturation. Of necessity, I have had to select certain themes among all of these assertions. Although the special issue is a critique of acculturation theory and research in general, the majority of the comments are addressed to my work in the area. Hence, I have concentrated on criticisms directed at my own work, rather than attempting to address the field as a whole. However, my comments likely have more general import for the field of acculturation psychology as a whole. I invite readers to consider these very contrasting sets of views about how we are to understand individual human beings within the context of cultures, and of culture contact and change. A third section returns to some of the basic issues regarding the nature of the scientific enterprise. I advocate a dual approach, accepting both the natural sciences and cultural sciences ways of advancing our knowledge of human behaviour in context. I argue that dismissing the positivist traditions of the natural sciences, and replacing them with social constructionist concepts and methods is a regressive step in our search to improve our understanding of acculturation. Moreover, I have found little in these articles that advances our knowledge of acculturation, or our potential for making applications for the betterment of acculturating individuals and groups.     

Reflections of a Racial Queer

In this article, I reflect on my personal experiences of racial queerness. In an effort to speak my secrets, I explore my identity production as a Multiracial person by critically examining my positionality throughout various key stages in my life. I present Multiracial microaggressions –those accumulated moments that underscore my racial queerness and argue that these phenomena, while taxing, also confer agency. I propose a conceptual framework that incorporates both queer theory and borderlands theory as a potential framework from which to study how Multiracial individuals are positioned as racial queers. I argue that queerness, for the Multiracial individual, may denote both deviance (from the monoracial norm) and a unique individuality (stemming from one’s Multiracial background). By offering my testimonial as a racial queer and introducing the racial queer conceptual framework, I come a bit closer to naming my experience as a Multiracial individual and providing a space from which others can do the same.     

Reflections on Diversity—a Personal Journey

This is a reflection on my life experience as a woman of color. I teach Spanish courses as well as teacher preparation courses. I know what it was like to grow up in a nearly all Black community, then move to one which was almost exclusively White. As an adult looking back on my childhood, I believe that it is especially important that culturally and linguistically diverse teachers are present in schools. As a professor, I see few teachers of color in foreign language courses at the university level as well as the P–12 levels. P–16 institutions boast of being more receptive to culturally and linguistically diverse students. Role models are important for all children. However, there are few positive role models for culturally and linguistically diverse children. If the goal is to get culturally and linguistically diverse children to succeed academically, then positive and diverse role models are needed in U.S. classrooms.     

Pedagogy and Foreignness

Based on my reflections on “being a foreigner,” I explore the boundaries of citizenship education in this essay. I use my foreign identity to articulate how social justice education can perpetuate closed-mindedness in classrooms by moving too quickly to student activism. I situate my experiences and reflections on being a foreigner within previous conversations about notions of certainty and indoctrination in the field of education philosophy, and I make an argument to create a safe intellectual space for my students. Creating such space is not neglecting moral responsibility or perpetuating privilege but actually navigating through the binary between “us” and “them.”     

Straight Talk: Talking Across Race in Schools

As a first-year teacher, out of field, European-American, and female, I expected I would have some growing pains teaching a class of African American boys with emotional and behavior disorders. I was unprepared for exactly how much growing and pain would actually be involved. Instinctively, I reached out to the paraprofessional with whom I was working, Mrs. Watkins (pseudonym), and to my surprise I was cleverly deflected with enthusiastic assurances of how I was the teacher and it was my classroom. It was clearly logical to me that, since she was African-American, had worked with African-American boys with emotional and behavioral disorders in the past, and was partnered with me for the year, she would openly work with me to make the classroom the best it could be for all involved. It seemed reasonable to me that I would look to her for guidance. She declined.

After two months, I was barely making it through each day. It was obvious the classroom needed serious changes, but I did not know where to begin. Our interactions were polite, but brief. Our work was always done, but separately. After two months of attempting to solicit her input and begin a reflective conversation about the happenings of our classroom, the most I would get is a shaking of her head or “They're playing you.” When I would ask her to explain how they were “playing me,” she would just shake her head. One day I confronted her unwillingness to engage in a conversation with me. She simply stated, “You're the teacher.” We stopped speaking unless absolutely necessary. (Cicetti-Turro, Personal Correspondence, 2001)     

Entertainment and Stereotype: Representation of the Palestinian Arab Citizens of Israel in Reality Shows on Israeli Television

The present study aims to gain an understanding of the patterns of representation and appearances of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the genre of reality shows in Israel. This genre has become extremely dominant in the television-broadcasting schedule. The mere fact that Arab people are visually present in TV entertainment, and in reality shows more specifically, should not lead us to conclude that Israeli TV is witnessing a move toward pluralism. It is important to examine the precise mode of representation of the “others.” That is to say: we must look at the visibility of Arab participants in those reality shows in which they appear (research question 1); how Arabs are represented in such programs (research question 2), and at the types of interaction between Arabs and other, Jewish-majority, participants in the program (research question 3). Content analyses were conducted for all reality shows broadcast on Israel's commercial TV channels between 2003 and 2007 that included Arab participants. Results show the reality show genre is still firmly ruled by a Jewish hegemony that represents the Palestinian Arab as the “other” and that the overwhelming majority of spectators are Jewish.     

The Summer of Friendship by Fire: A Doctoral Student Reminisces about Lessons in Diversity

The journey toward becoming a multicultural person is not easy and is never finished. As an educational administrator in a tri-cultural state, I felt comfortable that I was proficient in dealing with diversity. Only when I began a doctoral program at a major Texas university was my naivety exposed. I quickly learned that experience in working with diverse populations and the ability to relate effectively to people of different ethnic backgrounds were vastly different. The two years I spent deeply immersed in a multiculturally rich cohort of doctoral students changed me. My eyes were opened to injustices that I had never before seen as I vicariously experienced life through the eyes of the “other.” Today, I am a professor at a regional university. My experiences, focused through the lens of theory, are the basis for the message to my students. I have traveled the road before and can now point the way toward a broader definition of acceptance and tolerance.     

Expecting penises in Chatroulette: Race,gender, and sexuality in anonymous online spaces

ABSTRACT

As a femme woman of color, I employ critical autoethnography based on my participant observation within Chatroulette for a qualitative study on how online impressions through web cameras with strangers are formed in quick bursts of time. Chatroulette’s anonymity adds interesting context for impression creation in an online environment that emphasizes ocularcentrism of the embodied self. This article adds to methodologies of self-care for the qualitative researcher by positioning the issue of self-care in the online field, where “regular” interactions based on race, gender, sexuality, and more may leave autoethnographers from marginalized communities especially vulnerable. This study complicates the conceptual boundaries of “audience,” “participation,” and “observation” for online autoethnographic research. This research contributes to impression formation theory by focusing on the importance of the body in immediate, one-time impression constructions with conversational partners online. Race, gender, and sexuality impact online communication, even when a word is not even said.     

Reading Chen Yingzhen: why and how

ABSTRACT

Since 2009, there has been a renewed trend in Taiwan's intellectual circles to explore Chen Yingzhen. In this lies a strong and unprecedented inclination to explore in Chen Yingzhen's literary works the enormous resources he provides as a thinker. As one of the researchers who has undertaken such an approach, I intend to address three issues in this article: first, his relation with people of my generation and the reason to re-read him at this moment; second, how I, as an amateur in terms of literary works or literary criticism, read literary texts. I address this issue in terms of methodology and theory, and propose a reading method consisting of a triple intersecting process among the text, the author and the history. Thirdly, and perhaps the most importantly, I address the issue of “why do we have to read Chen Yingzhen now” from three levels: history, thinking and literature in order to explore the particular situation his literary works have in contemporary literature, as well as its intellectual meaning in the contemporary world.     

Musical discovery,colonialism, and the possibilities of intercultural communication through music

ABSTRACT

Discourses of discovery have been important in a wide range of musical contexts, from early modern ideas about musical composition through to current forms of popular music production and consumption. Across these various contexts there are often inherent connections between discovery and colonialism, connections that become most apparent in non-Western socio-cultural and musical settings. In this article, I situate discourses of discovery within the “coloniality of power,” noting how colonial discovery can be more critically described as invention. From here, I turn to the genre of World Music as an example of how musical discovery is underpinned by inherently colonial perspectives, articulations of power, and relationships of dominance and subordination between Western and non-Western cultures. In contrast, I present the concept of interculturalism as a way of thinking about the possibilities of cultural in-between-ness beyond discovery, drawing on the practices of musicians who articulate intercorporeal and intercultural communication through performance.     

Participatory Deep Learning in a Diverse Class on Minority Literatures

This paper is a reflexive exploration of my teaching and evaluation techniques in a diverse class on minority literature. I explain my classroom evaluation and teaching techniques in offering an African literature course as a junior African professor trained outside the United States and teaching in a predominantly white institution. Using Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Greg Light, Roy Cox, and Susanna Calkins, I assess my effectiveness as a student-centered teacher, pointing out my shortcomings and suggesting ways in which I will overcome these obstacles in future courses.     

春

这些日子,为着观赏园子里的小落叶松,我每天早上都朝园子的方向散步。世上再也没有哪种颜色比现在落叶松的颜色更可爱了,它们简直让我眼前一亮,备感愉悦,沁入心底。但是这种美似乎转瞬即失。不经意间已有一抹翠绿转入夏目的清素无华。春去冬来,落叶松都有它无与伦比的关丽的瞬间,这已足以使人欣赏它了。     

Embodied inter-referencing: encounters with and among “Asian” students in the Australian classroom

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the pedagogical practice of referencing my experiences as a transnational Korean American woman in the classroom and considers how it opens up space for domestic and international students of East, Southeast, and South Asian backgrounds to reflect on their different identities, histories, and cultures. In particular, it focuses on how this practice enables Asian students to share their experiences of and insights about racial difference, racism, and whiteness in Australia and other parts of the world. Building on the concept of Asian “inter-referencing” from Chua Beng Huat (2015), I coin the term “embodied inter-referencing” to describe the strategic ways I use autobiographical narrative to create an inclusive, interactive, and mutually respectful learning space. I centre here on how some Asian students respond to this strategy by telling their own stories and in the process, create transnational, diasporic, and inter-Asian affective communities inside and outside the classroom.     

Cocco's musical intervention in the US base problems: traversing a realm of everyday cultural sensibilities in Okinawa

This essay intervenes in the political contradiction between the pro-base and anti-base positions in Okinawa while at the same time seeking to provide an alternative to the binary at the level of everyday cultural sensibilities. I will accomplish this task by exploring the activities of charismatic Okinawan musician-artist-activist Cocco. More specifically, locating Cocco's music within – and also outside – a long, complicated genealogy of Okinawan popular music, I will trace how she has grounded the formal political problems of the US military in Okinawa's everyday dilemmas concerning money, memory, and globalization. In my view, Cocco has done so in a way that prods us to move beyond the pro-base/anti-base binary and to navigate an uncharted realm of culture, power, and history. I will also pay attention to how the audience in Okinawa and beyond, as a co-producer of Cocco's music community, has participated in this process. In so doing, I will show how Cocco's music has brought to light possibilities of transforming the existing political inequalities from below, possibilities that may be destined to disappear as soon as they are materialized as an explicit political program. I will articulate these possibilities with reference to what French writer-critic-philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1908–2003) once called the ‘unavowable community’.     

Marx,and Marxism as method in Stuart Hall’s thinking

The task here is to consider what I would call Stuart Hall’s theoretical “legacy” in the field of social and cultural thoughts. As a materialist of articulation rather than of reductionism, Hall taught us how to profoundly understand and intensely describe the “concrete” in cultural and social fields. The “concrete,” according to Hall, is a result of “non-necessary correspondence” between various forces, relations and situations, that is, the contingent and articulated determination in history. In my view, he was after all a Marxist in this sense. In the earlier stage of his thinking, Hall was very much indulged in reading and learning from Marx. This is characteristic in his “Marx’s Notes on Method: A Reading of the 1857 ‘Introduction.’” His Marxism then showed a unique twist in later stage, which was explicitly expressed in his article “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debate.” Reading these two texts, I aim to comprehend the way Hall has read Marx and the way his thoughts resonated. His lesson helps us to tackle our ongoing agendas in this half-dead Capitalist world, such as the crisis of culture, subjectivity and politics.     

The Cold War and post-Cold War dynamics of Taiwan and East Asia in people's security perspective

This paper was originally written as a keynote speech for a specific occasion, an international forum that was held by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) in Taipei in February 2001, to discuss Taiwan's international status in the post-Cold War era. The PCT is known as a strong advocate of Taiwan independence and democratization, and I had this specific audience in mind in organizing this paper. My concern was that the independence advocacy that had aptly expressed people's aspirations in the democratization movement under the iron-fist rule of KMT was being subsumed, as Taiwan polity was Taiwanized and democratized, into a banal statist discourse. This discourse, I am afraid, has distanced itself from its original popular source and become the elite politicians' discourse, indifferent to the everyday life and security of the people in Taiwan. I approached this problematic from the perspective of 'people's security', which I discussed in my previous essay on the topic in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies , vol. 2, no. 1. As the mutual relationships between East Asian countries had to be shaped overwhelming by the US Cold War rhetoric and material influences, discussing Taiwan with regard to the transition to the post-Cold War era required me to go, albeit in outline, into the basics of these relationships as well as the modes of US hegemony in this region both in the Cold War and post-Cold War settings. I felt that characterization of these diverse elements, if sketchy, was indispensable to discussing the topic, Taiwan today. At my friends' suggestion, I tried to revise the original paper to fit into the concerns of the general readership, with the different aspects mentioned more fully explained. However, I have found this difficult as it would require me to write a completely new article, or maybe a whole book. So I present this paper almost as it was written for the original PCT audience.     

Editorial statement

Grounded in the interdisciplinary educational work of Cultural Studies, this paper examines the pedagogical potentials of narrative and performance for the teaching of writing as a mode of public discourse. Guided to address a wide readership, students engage in critical communication aimed at linking self inquiry and narrative discourse to the contextual analysis of the social. Drawing on research findings derived from the undergraduate teaching of cultural criticism as a genre of public writing at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, we look at how educational drama mediates the work of narrative and performative acts involving the young learner-writers and contributes to the shaping of a dialogic mode of address and communication, thus articulating the process and impact of writing to the public-oriented discourse in Cultural Studies education. In light of such acts in critical discourse and imagination targeted at the potential reader, we show how the young writers' own engagement with critical thinking and communication are opened up by drama-in-education adopted in the class, and argue how, in this sense, both writing and its learning process become effective stages in the making of the kind of cultural criticism we want to help students to learn.     

Using Photographs to Assess Equity Climate: A Taxonomy

Our challenge as teachers and as human beings is to begin the process of "changing our voices," facing who we are and what that means in a society based on power and oppression. We must learn to listen to others, so we can speak together with voices both united and unique. The journey described is personal, yet it is also generalizable. Changing one's voice may be the only real way in which a teacher can be a model of diversity and multiculturalism. If as a teacher I do nothing to change my own voice, I have accomplished little in terms of effective teaching. My attitudes, behaviors, words should reflect and embody humanity, not just those who "look" like me or are thought of as more capable learners. I must challenge my students' thinking in terms of diversity and multicultural issues and push them to think of the "other."