Andrea Noble argues in her essay “Visual Culture and Latin American Studies” that modern visual cultural studies are characterized by a strong Euroamerican-centric perspective. Although the collective “visual turn” of various disciplines are valorized as a method of grappling with a context of globalized image production and circulation, in reality, visual culture remains, in her […]
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). […]
transnational movements and sovereignty
Both Lesser and Linger’s discussions bring attention to the way in which the transnational movement of people throughout different historical periods destabilize the clearcut boundaries of nation-states. With the mass migration of Japanese to Brazil and of Brazilians citizens of Japanese heritage to Japan, what arises is a complication of the sovereignty of a nation-state. […]
Photographs + Latour
The author reads Latour’s text as helping answer the question What were the rich heterogeneities of color and class, social realities, and cultural hybridities that contribute to this lacuna of “transition” from a slave society to free society? (184). In tackling this question, the author points out how Latour is answering it in a similarly […]
Texts speak?
Lisa Yun’s chapter “An Afro-Chinese Author” is just as much about acts of writing and narration as it is about the interlinked social histories of Chinese coolies and African slaves. Through the act of inscribing the coolie experience Chuffat creates a mode of speaking for peoples often excluded from official narratives. From the beginning of her […]