Global Asian American Popular Cultures

by Shilpa Dave (Editor), LeiLani Nishime (Editor), Tasha Oren (Editor)

Overview

A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media.

Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints—such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce—have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of “Asian” and “Asian American” are counterbalanced within global popular culture.

Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering new and critical analyses of popular cultures that account for emerging textual fields, global producers, technologies of distribution, and trans-medial circulation, this ground-breaking collectionexplores the mainstream and the margins of popular culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479837496
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	05/16/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Shilpa Davé is Assistant Professor of Media and American Studies and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.
LeiLani Nishime is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington.
Tasha Oren is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction Shilpa Davé Leilani Nishime Tasha Oren 1

Part I Stars and Celebrities

1 Trans-Pacific Flows: Globalization and Hybridity in Bruce Lees Hong Kong Films Daryl Joji Maeda 15

2 "I'm Thankful for Manny": Manny Pacquiao, Pugilistic Nationalism, and the Filipina/o Body Constancio Arnaldo 27

3 A History of Race and He(te)rosexuality in the Movies: James Shigeta's Asian American Male Stardom Celine Parreñas Shimizu 46

4 Model Maternity: Amy Chua and Asian American Motherhood Julia H. Lee 61

5 YouTube Made the TV Star: KevJumba's Star Appearance on The Amazing Race 17 Vincent Pham Kent A. Ono 74

6 David Choe's "KOREANS GONE BAD": The LA Riots, Comparative Racialization, and Branding a Politics of Deviance Wendy Sung 89

Part II Making Community

7 From the Mekong to the Merrimack and Back: The Transnational Terrains of Cambodian American Rap Cathy J. Schlund-Vials 107

8 "You'll Learn Much about Pakistanis from Listening to Radio": Pakistani Radio Programming in Houston, Texas Ahmed Afzal 124

9 Online Asian American Popular Culture, Digitization, and Museums Konrad Ng 139

10 Asian American Food Blogging as Racial Branding: Rewriting the Search for Authenticity Lori Kido Lopez 151

11 Picturing the Past: Drawing Together Vietnamese American Transnational History Timothy K. August 165

Part III Wading in the Mainstream

12 Paradise, Hawaiian Style: Tourist Films and the Mixed-Race Utopias of U.S. Empire Camilla Fojas 183

13 Post-9/11 Global Migration in Battlestar Galactica Leilani Nishime 197

14 "Did You Think When I Opened My Mouth?" Asian American Indie Rock and the Middling Noise of Racialization Douglas Ishii 214

15 Winning the Bee: South Asians, Spelling Bee Competitions, and American Racial Branding Shilpa Davé 228

16 The Blood Sport of Cooking: On Asian American Chefs and Television Tasha Oren 244

Part IV Migration and Transnational Popular Culture

17 Curry as Code: Food, Race, and Technology Madhavi Mallapragada 263

18 Bollywoods 9/11: Terrorism and Muslim Masculinities in Popular Hindi Cinema Deepti Misri 276

19 Hybrid Hallyu: The African American Music Tradition in K-Pop Crystal S. Anderson 290

20 Transnational Beauty Circuits: Asian American Women, Technology, and Circle Contact Lenses Linda Trinh Võ 304

21 Making Whales out of Peacocks: Virtual Fashion and Asian Female Factory Hands Christopher B. Patterson 321

22 Failed Returns: The Queer Balikbayan in R. Zamora Linmark's Leche and Gil Portes's Miguel/Michelle Robert Diaz 335

About the Contributors 351

Index 355

Editorial Reviews

"The delightfully diverse depictions of Asians, with pieces that coverEast Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian experiences, contain rich research that elegantly weaves descriptive narratives of subjects lived experiences."

International Journal of Communication

"A welcome and necessary book, Global Asian American Popular Cultures is nothing short of impressive. Working at the very cutting edge of contemporary Asian American cultural studies, the essays collected here are thoughtful and innovative and represent some of the most incisive voices in Asian American studies. An invaluable toolkit for a new generation of thinkers interested in how to do Asian American cultural critique."

Anita Mannur

"In a world of increased transnational flows of media, information, and bodies,Global Asian American Popular Culturesis a highly welcome addition to scholarship that is increasingly considering the ways in which Asian America participates in a globalized perspective of identity and culture....With the repeated erasure of Asian American experiences both domestically and globally, the essays in this collection do crucial work in teasing out the ways in which Asian Americans negotiate their position within racialized power structures through their own creative works, mainstream media representation, engagement with their communities, their own familial experiences, and the relatively new digital landscape....This volume opens up conversations about the ways in which Asian American identities cross national borders through transnational flows of culture, thereby infusing the field of Asian American studies with a breath of fresh air."

International Journal of Communication - Cynthia Wang

A welcome and necessary book, Global Asian American Popular Cultures is nothing short of impressive. Working at the very cutting edge of contemporary Asian American cultural studies, the essays collected here are thoughtful and innovative and represent some of the most incisive voices in Asian American studies. An invaluable toolkit for a new generation of thinkers interested in how to do Asian American cultural critique.”-Anita Mannur,co-editor of Eating Asian America

"In a world of increased transnational flows of media, information, and bodies, Global Asian American Popular Cultures is a highly welcome addition to scholarship that is increasingly considering the ways in which Asian America participates in a globalized perspective of identity and culture....With the repeated erasure of Asian American experiences both domestically and globally, the essays in this collection do crucial work in teasing out the ways in which Asian Americans negotiate their position within racialized power structures through their own creative works, mainstream media representation, engagement with their communities, their own familial experiences, and the relatively new digital landscape....This volume opens up conversations about the ways in which Asian American identities cross national borders through transnational flows of culture, thereby infusing the field of Asian American studies with a breath of fresh air. " -Cynthia Wang, California State University, Los Angeles ,International Journal of Communication

"The delightfully diverse depictions of Asians, with pieces that cover East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian experiences, contain rich research that elegantly weaves descriptive narratives of subjects lived experiences."-International Journal of Communication

From the Publisher