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On Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Rethinking America: The Practice and Politics of Multiculturalism in Higher Education,” (1993). According to Hu-DeHart, how do triumphalist scholars and teachers generally view American identity, culture, and history? [answer in roughly 2-4 sentences] - view American history only through all of the "triumphs" that have been completed. Instead of using multiple perspectives and actual facts, they'll view American history only through their so-called successful times. America's culture and identity is European-derived. - Ex: American history glorifies Columbus and Manifest Destiny, but in reality, the Europeans enslaved and killed millions of Native Americans. Does the author’s view of “rethinking America” through multiculturalism confirm or challenge triumphalism, and why? [answer in roughly 3-5 sentences] - Challenges triumphalism - Multiculturalism helps us understand how American history has always been taught through one perspective, and minorities have and continue to be marginalized in American society and history. - However, simply adding more diversity into the materials of history won't help challenge triumphalism. It can only be challenged once we recognize how history was taught in a "one-sided" manner, and understand the fight minorities had to go through just to even get ethnic courses in higher education. In regards to debates on multiculturalism in education, would Asian American Studies scholars tend to be in favor of or against greater diversity of knowledge learned in schools? Why? [paraphrase your answer in roughly 3-5 sentences] - Yes because we’ve had the same perspective shoved down our throats instead of exploring what minorities contributed. They want to stop the contradictions of America’s multiracial origins and the dominant self-image as white. Identify 2-3 specific examples in the article that highlight why some observers feel that the dominant version of American history is contradictory when applied to racial minorities. Explain how these examples are contradictory. - The dominant American history is mainly derived from western-immigrant civilization and not really the true Americas.

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By 1922, half of the population in California was non-European, so really, this "Euro-American" history/culture being taught is becoming the minority perspective. This dominant version states that "we the people"/"our national culture" shaped America's history, when in actuality minorities were being oppressed and whites dominated most of the power. "we” and “our" really just relate to the "default" people and triumphalists

On Julian Abagond, “The White Default” (2013) What does it mean to be the “white default?” [answer in roughly 1-2 sentences] -

The typical white person that American culture has installed as being "normal." Default people think that other cultures and ethnicities are not normal, and they have no culture since they see their lives as being the "default."

In regards to U.S. society, why does the author believe the white default is problematic? [answer in roughly 2-4 sentences] -

White default is problematic because it sets a negative label for someone who is not white and reduces opportunities for them/can heighten problems. It can make us want to be something we are not and lose our ethnic identity.

Identify two examples mentioned by Abagond where “the white default” (that is, when people tend to default to whiteness) commonly occurs in American society. -

It is where the word “white” disappears from phrases like “my white professor”, “the white press” and “white crime”.

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It is where East Asians have “slanted” eyes and blacks have “big” lips – but white people “look normal”.

Ying Diao, “Echoes of History: Chinese Poetry at the Angel Island Immigration Station,” (2017) + the short film Discovering Angel Island: The Story Behind the Poems Why were Chinese the targets of intense discrimination upon their early arrival to the United States? [answer in roughly 2-3 sentences]

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Americans in the West persisted in their stereotyping of the Chinese as degraded, exotic, dangerous, and competitors for jobs and wages. This later formed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Where is Angel Island? What was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act? Who were paper sons and paper daughters? Why were Chinese immigrants interrogated so intensely at Angel Island? [answer each question in roughly 1-2 sentences] - Located in the San Francisco Bay. - The first ever national legislation against immigration that was based off race/national origin. It banned the rights of Chinese laborers from being immigrated and prohibited the naturalization of those who were already in the US. - Chinese people born in China who illegally immigrated to the United States by purchasing fraudulent documentation which stated that they were blood relatives to Chinese Americans who had already received U.S. citizenship - They were interrogated intensely, so that the people conducting the interrogation could make the Chinese immigrants feel nervous. This made it easier to find reasons for them to be detained longer or even deported. How was poetry discovered at the immigration station on Angel Island, and how was the station saved from demolition? Where did detainees leave their poetry for others to read? Why is it misguided to refer to Angel Island as the “Ellis Island of the West?” [answer each question in roughly 1-2 sentences] - Before the demolition of the building site, a park ranger named Alexander Weiss stumbled across the poems that were carved on the barrack walls. His discovery passed to the news, thus Asian Americans (community, activists), descendants of Angel Island detainees, and volunteer professionals/students launched a campaign that helped preserve the walls. -

Detainees left their poetry on the walls of the station Angel Island had an overwhelming number of Asian immigrants, and they faced intenser, harder interrogations based on their ethnicity compared to the other immigrants/ethnicities that went through Ellis Island. The immigrants at Ellis Island were more so "welcomed" and only there for a few hours, whereas Asian Americans would spend days/weeks if not years at Angel Island.

On Amy Uyematsu, “Five Decades Later: Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned Poet”

For Uyematsu, how has “Asian America” changed from the time she was a young college student (late 1960s) to the present? [make a laundry list] -

difference between the potential voting strength of blacks and Asian Americans because of our being, at that time, a mere one half of one percent of the population.

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Now the asian american population is large and we do have the voting clout that can decide elections. The asian american vote is becoming more important.

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I recall nearby cities like San Marino and Arcadia being lily-white; now Chinese are the majority in those towns.

How does Uyematsu feel about (Anglo-conformity) assimilation? Why might she feel this way? [answer in roughly 2-4 sentences] In regards to Uyematsu’s influential student paper “The Emergence of Yellow Power In America,” what one thing, as discussed in the article, does she wish she could change in her essay, and why? [answer in roughly 2-3 sentences] -

She wished that she could've edited out where she wrote about the "silent, passive Oriental." She thinks it was a mistake, because like other ethnic groups that faced oppression, Asian Americans responded with courage, self respect, and resistance. She just wasn't aware of the fights that Asian Americans put up, because they weren't in any of her textbooks growing up in high school.

On Tram Nguyen’s “Cambodian That’s Me” AND Tiffany Min et al., “Khmer Girls In Action” What controversial incident led to tensions between Cambodian American female students and school administrators at Long Beach Poly High School? What is the connection between HOPE for Girls and Khmer Girls in Action (KGA)? [answer in roughly 3-4 sentences] - Tension arose from the incident where one of the government teachers, Mr. Sackett, confiscated a student's, Mary Im, photos that "showed members of her youth group demonstrating at a rally against Proposition 227," (p. 1). Mr. Sackett created a commotion over the ordeal and stated that her youth group was racially exclusive and promoted sex.

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The KGA started out as HOPE for Girls, "a Cambodian young women's reproductive health and empowerment project," (Min et al., p. 188). The KGA uses art as a pathway to express and expose underlying issues that impact Cambodian American's lives. In the short text by Mary Im entitled “To the Lady That Thinks She Knows,” why is the narrator of the text upset at the “lady” of the title? What does the lady do that annoys the narrator so much? [answer in roughly 2-3 sentences] -

The lady thinks that she understands her situation, when she really doesn’t. She does not know what she has been through, facing discrimination and the tough life. She has to live up to expectations and follow her tradition. She does not have the freedom she wants.

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Lady is unaware and ignorant of what she is going through; that she goes through problems too and that Asians don’t have a picture perfect life as some may assume as we are labeled as the model minority.

On Paul Spickard, “Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism” (PART I: pages 1-18). [I’ll post questions for pages 18-28 next week.] Know the following terms and what they mean: the immigrant assimilation model (a.k.a., the Ellis Island version of U.S. immigration) [what is it?; roughly 3-5 sentences] -

the task of minorities is to become Americanized, that is, to become facsimiles of English-descended Americans.” They must look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors”—they must, in short, assimilate to AngloAmerican norms. What is the melting pot myth? [roughly 2-3 sentences] - The idea is that people will come to the United States from all over the world. Each group will contribute a portion of its culture—food, language, religion, physical appearance. Out of the melting pot will come a proportional blend of all the peoples who make up America. What is Anglo-conformity (a.k.a., “assimilation” within a U.S. context)? [roughly 2-3 sentences]

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Basically americanization. that immigrants should learn English, adapt to numerous norms, values and institutions as a way of conformity to integral Anglo-American society

What is the escalator metaphor? [roughly 2-3 sentences] - Every new group starts at the bottom and makes its way inexorably up to the top over the course of three or four generations. It is mechanical, inevitable; it just happens that way. Along the way, in order to stay, each group must jettison the things that distinguish it from other Americans: language, religion, ways of thinking. At the top, people are all the same and cease to have ethnicity. They are simply Americans, and American democracy is triumphant.

the transnational diasporic model [what is it?; roughly 3-4 sentences] - People who have come to America typically have not, contrary to the assimilation model, cut off their ties to the places from which they came. there has been a going and a coming, a continuing connectedness with the homeland. - Ex: In the trans-Pacific Chinese family, adolescent boys for several generations left South China and went out to work in the United States, Hawai‘i, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Women and children stayed home What are the two key criticisms of the transnational diasporic model? [roughly 3-4 sentences] The diasporic model, says Wong, “is, at least in part, extrapolated from the wide range of options available to a particular socioeconomic class, yet the class element is typically rendered invisible - People can go and come because they have the money to do so and jobs and comfortable homes to return to - connections with ancestral homelands may jeopardize the well-being of immigrants in racialized states. - In the United States, it is true that there are woeful limitations on the life chances of immigrants, especially people of color. According to Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng, how did colonialism/imperialism influence the migration of laborers throughout the globe (including to the United States)? [roughly 3-4 sentences]

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economic forces link the sending places and the receiving places. Some other, simpler models talk about “push factors” such as war, disease, and rural impoverishment driving people out of their ancestral homelands. They talk about separate “pull factors” such as cheap land, good public education, and abundant job opportunities that pull people to a place like the United States. Cheng and Bonacich say that such factors may be linked, and the mechanism that links them is the global market economy

the panethnic formation model [roughly 3-4 sentences] - the lumping together of formerly separate ethnic groups, frequently in a new geographical or political setting. People came to this country as members of ethnic groups that were frequently defined by place of origin. In the United States, they became members of larger panethnic groups, which we sometimes call races. What is panethnicity? How is “Asian American” a panethnic term? [roughly 1-2 sentences] - Panethnicity is a phenomenon that refers to the formation of a new, large scale group that consists of smaller groups of different ethnic or national origins. Thus "Asian American" is a pan-ethnic term, because it is referring to a large scale group that has several smaller ethnic/national origins groups such as Filipino, Chinese, Japanese etc. According to Paul Spickard, what are some of the key shortcomings of the immigrant assimilation model when it is used to explain the immigration histories of people of color? [make a laundry list] - groups that are often called races have cultures, and that there are average physical differences that can be observed among the peoples who are called ethnic groups - It emphasizes that race is not a thing or a condition but a process. On Paul Spickard, “Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism” (PART II: pages 18-28). [See the week 3 study guide for questions referring to pages 1-18 of the Spickard article.] What does the term “normative whiteness” describe or refer to? [answer in roughly 2-3 sentences] - This is a way to describe the very common assumption that, unless we are informed to the contrary, the people under discussion are White. Normal people

are, by definition and without remark, White people. If one is White, then one is a person, but if one is not White, then one’s not-Whiteness needs to be explained On Jean Baker Miller, “Domination and Subordination” In regards to permanent inequality, who are dominants and who are subordinates? Is it possible for a person to be a member of both dominant and subordinate social groups? [answer all in roughly 3-4 sentences -- see also the “representation” lecture notes] - Dominant groups usually define one or more acceptable roles for the subordinate. Acceptable roles typically involve providing services that no dominant group

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wants to perform for itself (for example, cleaning up the dominant's waste products) Subordinates are usually said to be unable to perform the preferred roles. More importantly, subordinates themselves can come to find it difficult to believe in their own ability. They concentrate on basic survival Since the dominant and subordinate groups are based on different characteristics one might possess (nationality/gender/race/socioeconomic class), it is possible for a person to be a member of both dominant and subordinate social groups. Ex: physical attributes of being a white male are characteristics of the dominant group, but would be subordinate as well based on socioeconomic class being the working class.

According to Miller, subordinates are considered well-adjusted by dominants if the former possess what types of psychological characteristics? Dominants perceive ‘unusual’ or ‘abnormal’ subordinates as those subordinates possessing what types of characteristics? [answer all in roughly 2-3 sentences total] - The dominants consider the subordinates as well-adjusted if they possess these types of psychological characteristics: submissiveness, passivity, docility, dependency, lack of initiative, inability to act, to decide, to think, and the like," (Miller, p. 113). In this perspective, the subordinates adopt qualities that are closer related to children than adults. The dominants perceive "unusual" or "abnormal" as those who possess characteristics of intelligence, initiative, and assertiveness. Who are the “troublemakers?” How do they cause “trouble?” Would Asian American writers like Amy Uyematsu, Bao Phi, and the Khmer Girls in Action poets be considered “troublemakers” in this regard? Please explain. [answer all in roughly 4-7 sentences]

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The "troublemakers" are the subordinates. They cause "trouble" by bringing up the question of inequality and exposing its existence. This would go against the conditioning of what the dominants have created and cause conflict, thus the dominants will perceive their actions as a threat and be called "troublemakers." So yes, these writers would be considered “troublemakers” because they reveal the inequalities Asian Americans face What is the relationship between the hypersexualized / oversexualized media images of Asian women and the U.S. military presence in Asia during the last 100+ years? [answer in roughly 2-3 sentences] - Asian women are oversexualized in American media, and it stems from the relationships that U.S. military men had with Asian women. Many women were forced, or chose due to hardships, to go into prostitution, thus that image of them being over sexualized was brought back to America. This whole relationship was created by the US wars that took place in Asia, because recreation facilities that had these strippers and prostitutes were made available by US military and local authorities. What do you think the scholar Robin Kelley means when he observes that viewers of contemporary film see a “browning of faces, but a continuing whitening of character?” Why are some of the observers in the documentary critical of this “deracination” of non-white characters? [answer in roughly 3-5 sentences] - There are more non-white actors and actress appearing in film. However, they are playing roles of characters that have a white personality, and it is as if they have no Asian descent or characteristics. - They are critical of this, because it makes it seem like there is no difference between white people and Asian people when there are obvious cultural differences. The characters can strip an Asians identity and turn it into a white American identity. On Timothy P. Fong, Valerie Soe, and Allan Aquino, “Portrayals in Film and Television,” (2010). In roughly 1-3 sentences per item, know the following and be able to define these concepts in your own words: Yellow Peril: The idea that Asian people are gonna take all that is good about America, especially jobs

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refers to the perceived threat that Asian and/or Asian Americans will take over, invade, or otherwise negatively Asianize the US nation and its society and culture Yellowface: When any non-Asian (primarily white) plays the role of an Asian character Whitewashing: Asian having a white personality emasculated males: Asian American men are emasculated, sexless males who are clumsy rather than threatening in their attraction to white women. dragon lady: A female stereotype in Asian films that portray them as aggressive or opportunistic sexual beings, who are devious and deceiving lotus blossom: Asian women as passive, sexually compliant and easy to seduce, often as willing partners to European American men. vulnerable romantics who are in need of savi...