Presentation Notes -Toward a Geography of Art CH 7,8,9 Intro: In this books Kaufmann is describing Kubler’s writings and how he attempted to view art history in terms of analysis and inserts his beliefs about physical geography in relation to “materials, centers, and traditions” (222). This method of making art history a process of examining […]
Ethnicity vs Nationality
Takeyuki Tusda explores a very interesting question related to identity in “Homeland-less Abroad.” In general, there are two main categories that often are used to define one’s identity: ethnicity (defined by one’s background) and nationality (defined by one’s place of birth). Yet, in the case of the immigrant populations, these categories are not exactly useful, making most […]
Feeling “in-between”
In “Homeland-less Abroad,” Takeyuki Tusda discusses diasporic liminality as a form of disoriented life characterized by “social uprootedness and ungroundedness resulting in a loss of a firm sense of place” (122). In discussing the return migration of Japanese Brazilian factory workers, and the personal challenges these workers face in their “ethnic homeland,” Tsuda argues that […]
Asian American Theater
Karen Shimakawa explores an interesting strategy to deal with Asian diaspora issues in America. During the civil rights movement, a new theater company was created as a response to the struggle of Asian American performers in the theater industry. At the time, Asian American performers were frustrated because of the limited range of roles they […]
On Performance and the Body
A major theme in our course syllabus, and in particular Diana Taylor’s 2016 book Performance, is the question of memory, as well as memory as body. For Taylor, “performance is a practice and an epistemology, a creative doing, a methodological lens, a way of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world” […]
Linger on Purity
To indulge my ongoing interest in perfectible reproduction, this post focuses on the questions of blood, racial purity, and mestizaje—or the Portugese equivalent in Brazil. In the final chapter of Searching for Home, Daniel Linger suggests that Japanese Brazilians do not necessarily comprise a unitary “diaspora,” questioning the validity of “Japanese Brazilian” as a demographic […]
Why, yes they do
Daniel Linger’s thought provoking question in Searching for Home Abroad, “do Japanese Brazilians exist?”, is also a provocative one. His implied response, which I assume to be “no,” is informed by a number of factors. First, Linger recognizes that “ethnicities, races, and nations are conjured up through symbols and stories that enmesh people in webs of relatedness” (209). […]
Presentation on Jeffrey Lesser and Daniel Linger
In “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking” Jeffrey Lesser explores the Japanese diaspora in Brazil. He starts his chapter by explaining how the Japanese-Brazilian population (also known as Nikkei) originated. He mentions that in 1908, fifteen years after the Japanese diplomat Sho Nemoto went to Brazil in an attempt to […]
Yun, “An Afro-Chinese Author”
Lisa Yun, in her final chapter on the “Afro-Chinese author,” employs archival, textual, and visual methods to examine Antonio Chuffat’s biographical narrative. The narrative, which she describes as an “autobiography within a biography of the Chinese community,” presents a “critical narrative of liberalism” (Yun 187). Yun, who speaks from a Cuban context, corrects Lesser’s emblematically […]
Siu on Chinese Diasporic Performance
In the 2005 Memories of a Future Home, Lok Siu defines “diaspora,” a contested concept in postcolonial studies, Latin American studies, and ethnic studies, as “both a methodology and an epistemological framework in which to understand citizenship in a transnational context that accounts for geopolitical dynamics and people’s situated and simultaneous commitments to different cultural-political […]