Celebration and Separation: A Troublesome Approach to Multicultural Education

Middle school classrooms can be fertile ground for positively impacting students' cultural and racial assumptions and understanding, given an effective multicultural curriculum and school structure. This article presents a narrative of the author's contrasting experiences teaching a text with racial themes. Applicable literature provides a framework for explaining the students' differing levels of receptivity towards the text. Three particular areas of study provide the framework for explaining student response: a school's approach to multicultural literature; school structure, in particular, tracking; and theories of racial identity development. In addition, the author challenges adults involved in the educational system to implement truly multicultural approaches to learning, despite the potential discomfort or unpopularity of such change.     

My Wild Lily: a self‐criticism from a participant in the March 1990 student movement 1

Abstract

The ‘Wild Lily’ student sit‐in in March 1990 was often praised in the later political transformation process as a crucial moment when the ‘pure and innocent’ students facilitated democratization in Taiwan. From the perspective of a participant in the protest, the author argues that the sit‐in was actually a failure of the ‘popular democratic’ wing of Taiwan's student movement in the 1980s, which championed a more radical vision of democracy. The idea of ‘popular democracy’ was an anti‐elitist ideology arising from critiques on the elite‐led political reform movement. However, due to its historical constraint, practices along this line were unable to alter the bourgeois democratic character of 1980s' democratization process in Taiwan.     

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.     

Challenging Colorblindness in Arizona: Latina/o Students’ Counter-Narratives of Race and Racism

This essay reviews Latina/o students' counter-narratives challenging colorblindness. The author highlights the experiences of students from Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies program. By examining student counter-narratives, the author also identifies race-related terms that are more suitable for dialogue among and with young Latinas/os of the post-civil rights generation.     

Bad feelings,feeling bad: the affects of Asian-Indigenous coalition

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes the affective forms that Asian-Indigenous alliances might take, using examples from contemporary Canadian film and literature as a cultural testing ground. Building on the efforts of scholars like Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Malissa Phung to trace a literary genealogy of Asian-Indigenous relations in Canada, the article first considers the structures of feeling which bolster efforts towards coalition-building between Asian settlers and First Nations. Rather than extending an optimistic or redemptive model, the article suggests that negative affect (or, what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”) ought to be taken seriously as both an unavoidable presence and a potential catalyst in and for active solidarity. The article then analyzes Sto:lo author Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” and Peter Blow’s documentary film A Village of Widows with an eye towards how bad feelings underpin the narrative calls to action in both texts. The article concludes by considering the role that bad feeling can and does play in terms of inter-referencing practices among cultural and historical scholars.     

Language choice and global learning networks: The pitfall of “lingua franca” approaches to classroom telecomputing 1

This article examines students' narrative responses to reading professional literacy histories. Demonstrating the importance of narrative as a way of learning, it shows how elementary education majors of diverse backgrounds explore their relation with language in a traditional grammar class. Cajun, Creole, and African American students recover their literacy histories and articulate the relation between the loss of language and the loss of culture and heritage. Drawing on the parallels between their discourse histories and the discourse histories of other cultures, these narratives also suggest that the students are now able to establish their linguistic identity and develop a greater sensitivity to the situations of their own students in the multicultural classrooms of southwest Louisiana.     

Emotional energy and sub-cultural politics: alternative bands in post-1997 Hong Kong

The paper attempts to work out the link between the structuring of the public domain and hegemonic masculinities in contemporary Kerala, South India. Using the debates around an incident of sexual harassment that happened in 1999, it argues for a conjunctural understanding of the contemporary where various events and moments in history are replayed through narrativization and popular memory. The paper goes on to analyse the debates around the incident that produce a ‘narrative public domain’, to foreground the various notions of masculinity that construct and structure it in relation to notions of female sexuality and changing structures of family. These notions of masculinity could be, the paper argues, a starting point for a historical inquiry into Kerala's modernity – an inquiry that would throw light on the past and the ways in which the contemporary is produced through its historical legacies.     

When feminism encounters New Documentary Movement: an uncompleted academic discussion

This article starts with the “encounter” between feminists in the “International Symposium on Chinese Women and Visual Representation” and Chinese documentary filmmaker Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest, and explores the viewpoints and standpoints of feminist actors. With the analysis of the similarities and differences between the independent documentary perspective and the feminist stance, the author elaborates more deeply on why Chinese female directors do not have the consciousness of “feminism.” China’s independent documentary shows how the issue of feminism in China is intertwined with China’s various complex socio-political issues. The way of Chinese documentary filmmaker as “living with the bottom rung” is a kind of practical behavior that seeks truth by integrating itself with it. This requires great courage and idealism, as well as social experience. The bottom layer is where the dark side of the society exists which is beyond the law and morality. The question raised is precisely how to promote the development of feminism and documentary together to work for an equal and just society itself. The more urgent task of Chinese feminism is how to rethink the relationship between the reality of China and feminism, and how to re-establish effective dialogue and cooperation with various critical forces in this society. In the historical perspective of the feminism development of China over one century, gender and women's issues have never existed in isolation, but have moved forward with various social and political movements. How to re-examine this historic heritage to face China's problems and crises today is an uncompleted answer that China's feminism must hand over.     

Asianism in Korea’s politics of identity

Abstract

This article examines Korea’s politics of identity in the form of Asianism in the modern period, especially since Korea’s incorporation into the modern world system in the late nineteenth century. Asianism, and regionalism generally, has become a salient policy strategy for the current South Korean government. However, Asianism has been a primary ideological current in modern Korea whose most recent incarnation should be understood in the larger historical context. This study traces the development of Asianism in four different periods: precolonial, colonial, Cold War, and post‐Cold War. Initially emerging as a bulwark against Western encroachment, the Asianism narrative became irrelevant upon Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 and only survived as a discourse about a glorified cultural past during colonial rule. Upon liberation, Asianism rescinded as the Japan‐centered regional order was replaced by a new Cold War alignment, capitalist (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) versus communist (China and North Korea). Although discussion about Asianism and a new East Asian regional order have recently resurfaced, the historical legacy of colonialism, war, and national division has added much complexity to the debate. Explicating how the Asianism narrative emerged and evolved through these various historical contexts sheds light on the complexities and difficulties inherent in the current attempt to forge an Asian regional order. By looking at Asianism from a historical perspective, we can also better appreciate the continuity and discontinuity in Korea’s politics of identity. While it is still uncertain what the foundation of a new Asianism will be, it is equally obvious that regional interactions will continue to be an important part of the global world order. This study concludes with policy implications of how a historically sensitive understanding of the development of an Asian regional identity can further interaction and integration of East Asian nations.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

Cross-dressing as whitewashing: the Kimono Wednesdays protests and the erasure of Asian/American bodies

ABSTRACT

During the summer of 2015, a series of events at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston called Kimono Wednesdays encouraged visitors to try on a replica of the kimono Claude Monet's wife wore in her husband's 1876 painting La Japonaise and then pose for photos in front of the painting. This seemingly benign act of appreciation sparked protests from those who considered the events as perpetuating an exoticizing imperialist gaze and orientalizing stereotypes. This paper contextualizes this controversy by examining the history of white women cross-dressing as Japanese, how it constitutes a form of naturalized whitewashing linked to the pleasure of consumption through its connections to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885), and how the same act for Asian American women at the turn into the twentieth century is fraught with the anxiety of racial identity suppression.     

Black History,Inc! Investigating the Production of Black History Through Walmart's Corporate Web Site

Social and public sites are becoming a popular medium for intellectual consumption of Black history. Given the educational climate in which many students’ exposure to Black history may come from outside of schools, the authors examine how Walmart's Black History Month Web site produced simplistic and safe narratives about African American history.     

Constructions of Race Among Religiously Conservative College Students

The “Whites as victims” motif in conversations about race has been well documented in recent decades. When discussing affirmative action hiring policies, a common belief expressed by Whites is that people of color have been permitted to progress unfairly at the expense of harder working Whites. Whites using this discourse see themselves as victims of a political process that ignores individual responsibility and caters to people of color who are not willing to work toward their own success. Using students’ Blackboard discussion forum postings, the author analyzes ideas about race expressed by students in education classes at a small denominational Christian college in the northeastern United States, and compares these students’ constructions of race to those analyzed in previous research using Whites as subjects in both religious and non-religious settings. The author argues that these students do not differ in their constructions of race and racism from other Whites in non-religious settings. Further, with more complete education and intentional conversation about the history of racism in the United States, these students are able to incorporate understandings of deeper structural causes of racial inequality.     

Facebook contact: The effect of an outgroup member’s language proficiency on desire for future intergroup contact

Guided by contact theory, we examined the effect of an international student’s English language proficiency on American students’ desire for future interaction with international students, online and in-person. We created a fictitious Facebook page of a female Chinese international student and experimentally manipulated her Facebook posts to represent low or high English proficiency. American students (N = 126) in the high proficiency condition reported more identification with the international student, which subsequently led to more desire for future interaction with the student both online and in person. These effects generalized to a desire for interaction with other Chinese students (again, both online and in person). The findings of the study have theoretical and practical implications for online intergroup communication.     

Remembering Nanking: historical reconstructions and literary memorializations of the Nanking Massacre

The Nanking Massacre is a historical event that invokes many contestations and tensions, as the recollection of what took place in Nanking during the six weeks from December 1937 to February 1938 is always under the influence of political circumstances and ideologies. This article explores the contemporary historical narratives and fictional representations of the Nanking Massacre to see how it has been remembered. The article mainly addresses North American academic debates over the Nanking massacre, and analyzes three novels by immigrant Chinese American authors, Qi Shouhua’s When the Purple Mountain Burns, Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem, and Yan Geling’s The Flowers of War.     

Reclaiming America: the quest for home in Shawn Wong’s Homebase

ABSTRACT

With its dynamic narrative, Shawn Wong's Homebase recounts the story of four generations of a Chinese family searching for a homebase on the land of the United States. Personal experiences, family chronicles, and Chinese American history are portrayed through various forms, including short stories, correspondences, student essays, memories, and dreams. A major theme of the novel is geographically and spiritually “reclaiming America,” or attempts by Chinese Americans to make the United States their “real” home. The protagonist's way to reclaim America involves revisiting landmarks and other places in the United States where his father and grandfather had traveled, through which he tries to discover the meaning of his own life in the United States and thereby to find his personal identity and home in this country. In drawing the topography of Chinese American history, Shawn Wong not only inscribed Chinese American presence on those places where the protagonist's forefathers had lived and worked, but also used legends to implant their heritage into those soils. Shawn Wong hopes that through his writing he can build for Chinese Americans a history, a cultural foundation with myths and legends of their own. Only when a people's myths spread over the land they inhabit can the land truly be considered theirs. The Chinese American identity shaped in Homebase is heroism, rooted in the ethnic identity of the male Chinese American in the American West, and this is the “home” that the protagonist as well as many other Chinese Americans ever quest for.     

When a social worker encounters cultural studies

Abstract

This is a personal narrative, which reflects upon my experiences of encountering cultural studies after attending the Teaching Cultural Studies Workshop. For me, the term ‘cultural studies’ represents something abstract, fancy, and thus difficult to understand, and which intimidates disciplines that emphasize application over theorization, such as social work. However, my fear of cultural studies was overcome in this workshop through the lived experiences of being respected for differences. This personal experience reflects the historical construction of social work within scientific hierarchy, so that the relevance of cultural studies and social work is not recognized by social workers. Despite the often difficult‐to‐understand style, cultural studies does provide important venues for social workers to obtain qualitative understanding of an individual's problems and crises within a social context, which is crucial to effect strategies of resistance among vulnerable populations.     

Yoko's Story and the battle of memory: fragmentation and suture of national memory and gender in the age of globalization

Abstract

Since its publication in 1986, Yoko Watkins’ So Far from the Bamboo Grove has been used as a textbook by some primary and middle schools in the US. The book is an autobiographical novel about the experiences of a Japanese girl named Yoko who returns to her home country with her mother and sister with an anti‐war and peace message. However, it became the center of attention and was referred to as the Yoko incident when, in January 2007, it became known to the Koreans that the book was being used as a textbook by American students and contained a story about Japanese women raped by Korean men at the end of Japanese colonial rule. It immediately incited outcries from the Korean media and online communities, complaining that any suggestion of the rape of Japanese women by Korean men at the end of Japanese colonial rule is a grave distortion of history and a reversal of the perpetrator and the victim. This paper analyzes how the memory structure of the Koreans regarding colonialism is based on a victim nationalism and how Korean feminism has intervened in the fragmentation and suture of national memory since the 1990s. Furthermore, the paper reveals how American multiculturalism turns a blind eye to, or even promotes, the clashing of collective identities in the age of globalization. The so called Yoko incident illustrates how the competition of East Asian countries for a historical position of ‘victim’ in a battle of memory in the US not only strengthens exclusive nationalism in the area but also connives in ‘Americanization of world justice’.