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In 2013, culture writer John Powers declared Korean American celebrity chef David Chang the king of the “Umami Era.” The phrase described the rising popularity of Asian/American chefs and ingredients in mainstream American popular culture in the 2000s—a phenomenon that disrupted the way the industry valorized certain “ethnic” foods and food makers. This dissertation takes the so-called “Umami Era” as a starting point from which to analyze the shifting place of Asian/American taste in the United States. I argue that umami is a floating signifier—an assemblage of constantly shifting discourses and relations that combine to form a gustatory flavor as well as a racialized category of distinction. The value that umami signifies—its cultural capital—is rooted in Asian racialization, global Asian soft power, Asian/American culinary production, and Asian/American community formation. Theoretically grounded in Asian American studies, I use the interdisciplinary methodologies and intersectional imperatives of feminist cultural studies to analyze food as a critical site of powerful ideological production. I analyze media texts (via textual analysis, political economy, and audience reception) from the 1950s to the 2020s to illustrate the ways that an American taste for Asian/American capital is scripted in gustatory terms. Throughout history, Asian/American culinary capital has looked differently, been consumed differently, and been legible and illegible based on structures of power and U.S. global relations. Asian/American subjects navigate these structures of power and gain access to capital through the discursive and material production of Asian/American food. However, my approach to understanding the increased valorization of umami as Asian/American cultural capital is not to simply celebrate the successes of Asian/American chefs, food experts, and food. My research is ultimately in the service of critiquing American neoliberal multiculturalism and the way that umami is mobilized within it.

This dissertation offers a comparative literary and cultural studies account of how the United States constructed and leveraged concepts of disease and disability in its military operations in Asia and at home to further its Cold War agenda. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of post-1945 transpacific cultural works and state-affiliated and community archives in South Korea and the United States, my project retrieves and critiques a distinctively Cold War disability narrative that postulated Asians and Asian Americans as at once ideologically contaminated, highly contagious, and selectively recuperable. I explore the racializing conflation of contagious ideology and infectious disease by asking how this conflation was deployed across Cold War Asia and Asian America. By delving into community archives, I examine how impacted Asians and Asian Americans reinflected concepts of disease and disability to resist this pathologization. Chapter One studies how and why Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patients in South Korea emerged as a Cold War ideological battleground. By investigating U.S. military and medical documents, Korean patients’ anthologies and oral testimonies, and the U.S. propaganda film Litany of Hope (1962), I argue that Cold War narratives of contagion used medical terms to conflate “infectious” ideologies with Hansen’s disease, which facilitated the characterization of Hansen’s disease patients as a race apart in Korea. Chapter Two investigates how the United States policed communism through its immigration policies, focusing on Chinatown as a site of ideological pollution during the McCarthy era. Through an analysis of Fae Myenne Ng’s novel Steer Toward Rock (2008), I demonstrate how the Chinese Confession Program (1956-1965) served to cast ethnic Chinese as dangerous carriers of communist ideology and how they navigated and resisted this racialized medical discourse. The final chapter examines how the U.S. and South Korean governments collaborated to normalize mixed-race children as multicultural Americans through transnational adoption. Analyzing Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010), I probe how the South Korean government and adoption agencies conflated the mixed-race orphan and the disabled Korean as abnormal, and how the desire to rescue children from the dangers of communism impelled transnational adoption from South Korea.

Started in 2019, Vigilant Love’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship (SAF) is a six-month long program for Japanese American and Muslim American young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who desire to build transformative relationships, receive political education, and participate in multi-disciplinary arts and creative expression workshops. Therefore, the SAF program is a unique opportunity for youth of color to engage in creative, healing justice frameworks to develop deeper understandings of personal and family histories, and to resist larger structures of Islamophobia and white supremacy. When the COVID-19 pandemic presented programming difficulties to hosting SAF retreats in-person in 2020, the Vigilant Love team adapted the SAF program to virtual and hybrid modalities, maintaining the program’s core missions while also creating a system of care for SAF participants who experienced heightened stress during the pandemic. In this case study, I draw on interviews with SAF alumni and the Vigilant Love leadership team to examine the ways that the SAF program not only pursued its goals for inter-spiritual and multi-ethnic community-building but also reveals needed alternative models for youth of color leadership development by grassroots community-based organizations.I argue that within the current landscape of non-profit and grassroots community work, Vigilant Love’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship offers a timely model of youth-centered organizing, inspired by themes of interracialism and “serving the people” from the Asian American Movement and the Third World Left. Promoting accessibility through hybrid, online retreats and ensuring community care through mindfulness and creative-expression activities were a few of the ways that the Vigilant Love facilitation team responded to recent moments of precarity and stress. This case study considers how a community-based organization has sought to build “solidarity” and “community” through an accessible youth-centered program revolving around queer and trans-affirming politics, sustainable mentorship pipelines, and deep political education for their constituents.

Technologies of the Cold War Human examines the scientific apparatus of the U.S. Cold War military-industrial complex as a racial-meaning making project that deploys race as the raw material of liberal capitalist securitization across Asia and the Pacific. As a global formation of interlocked material and ideological conflicts binding multiple geographies and histories, the Cold War, I contend, is an episteme that defines the “human” as an abstract universalism predicated on the entwined expendability and malleability of Asian and Pacific Islander life. Analyzing central case studies of the nuclear bomb, Agent Orange, and napalm, this dissertation argues that this dialectic of the Cold War human transforms Asian and Pacific Islander human and nonhuman bodies into malleable matter to be destroyed, and remade, in service of imperial expansion. Through literary, visual, and historical analysis, this project revises how we approach the archive of Cold War military science by situating it within longer genealogies of U.S. racial science. I approach an array of cultural texts—including works by Quan Barry, Mai Der Vang, Don Mee Choi, Octavia E. Butler, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Jane Chang Mi, Dinh Q. Le, and Ocean Vuong—as political critiques of war’s imbrication within circuits of knowledge that consolidate racial meaning. While racial science has long been associated with its epistemological work in defining racial hierarchies through biological inferiority, this dissertation argues that Cold War science trafficks in race’s utility in constructing both expendable and assimilable bodies in the consolidation of U.S. global capitalism. In a moment when fantasies of racial liberalism and decolonization across the United States, Asia, and the Pacific begin to take shape, I suggest that a reassessment of the conditions Cold War science reveals racial logics that inhere across human, ecological, and molecular scales of militarization. In doing so, this dissertation charts U.S. militarism not only through its empire of bases and battlegrounds, but through material and metaphorical laboratories of race- and war-making that proliferate across zones of occupation and war in Asia and the Pacific.

Objective: Asian Americans have the lowest mental health help-seeking rate of any racial-ethnic group. This study aimed to better understand the mental health needs, barriers, and experiences of the Asian American student community and explored the co-design of a digital platform.Methods: This study examined the mental health experiences of Asian American college/university students through a multi-phased approach. The study included a secondary analysis of a needs assessment survey and preliminary human-centered design interviews, which included both interview questions and a co-design process. Descriptive statistics are reported for survey data, which informed the development of the human-centered design interviews. Preliminary thematic analysis was conducted to assess the interview transcripts. Results: Seventy-five Asian American participants (n=75) between 18-27 years old (mean: 21.99; SD: 4.14) completed the survey. While only 13.33% (10/75) currently used professional services, both offered by their college/university and outside of it, the most commonly desired resource was mental health resources and services offered outside of their college/university (50.67%, 38/75) and by their college/university (49.33%, 37/75). Potential barriers included not knowing where to access professional services, perceptions of self and others if utilizing professional services, and lack of cultural or ethnic representation and tailoring. Four individuals who identify as Asian American (n=4) individually completed human-centered design interviews. These preliminary interviews begin to shed light on the importance of cultural considerations and the potential of a digital platform to curate relevant resources. Conclusion: This thesis suggests that students would like to utilize professional mental health services but often times they do not impart due to cultural influences. We recognized that ability to find culturally tailored resources is a barrier and there is a potential for a digital platform to curate culturally-appropriate resources for this community.

This thesis is a survey of four Vietnamese-American artists, whose queer identifications and disidentifications trouble easy categories of identity. The Vietnamese refugee and the queer figure have largely been overdetermined by minoritizing forces, which is to say that the refugee has been understood as a consequence of United States military intervention, and the queer figure has been understood as a corrupting, infectious monster. These identities themselves are not inherently challenging to the dominant mode of history, in which the heterosexual white male imposes his will on the world and contains these racial and sexual others in their categorical confines. However, it is in the mobilization of these identities in tandem that the works of Mimi Thi Nguyen, Hanh Thi Pham, Nguyen Tan Hoang, and Viet Le endeavor towards truth’s undoing. These artists and creators utilize convolutions of pop-cultural signs and signifiers, looking towards their respective stars, divas, and outlaws to embody an aesthetic of affect, rather than straightforward auto-ethnography. Mimi Thi Nguyen’s 1997 zine evolution of a race riot weaponizes Hanh Thi Pham’s unflinching self portrait, Misbegotten No More (1991-2) as the publication’s cover. This serves Nguyen not as an academic citation of queer Vietnamese women, but rather as a borrowing of Pham’s affective power recontextualized as a de-individualized punk feminist icon. This mobilized Pham’s rejection of gender and the state from the fine art sphere into the subcultural networks of D.I.Y. punk publication, where her iconography as a racial, gendered, and sexual outlaw was virally popular. Nguyen Tan Hoang’s auto-ethnographic documentary PIRATED (2000) on VHS tells the story of his departure from Vietnam at the age of 7, getting attacked by Thai Pirates, and ultimately saved by German Sailors. The film rips clips and music from the popular Vietnamese-American direct-to-video variety show Paris By Night, and intermingles it with pirated footage of The Crimson Pirate, Querelle, and his own self-made gay Asian pornography to make the trauma-porn of his narrative all the more erotic, and as a result, unbelievable. Finally, Viet Le’s photo series boy bang/gang band (2008) and his self-made music video loveBANG! (2008) explore the viral modes of popular media in the context of a post-Đổi Mới, or liberalized Vietnam. Boy bang specifically flirts with the repressed desire of the Vietnamese state and local audiences for metrosexual cosmopolitan Asian boy band masculinities. loveBANG! is a saccharine pop cultural spectacle through which its audience is invited to be distracted from traumatic Southeast Asian histories of Cold War conflict, interrupted development, and state censorship which nonetheless haunt the video’s backdrop. Though each of these artists are also active academics whose scholarly work otherwise builds histories of Southeast Asian, queer, and diaspora subjects, it is in their artistic work that queerness works beyond the gaps in the archive to produce pleasurable fantasies wherein history might be contested, rewritten, or forgotten.

This project examines contemporary expressions of two ideologies that permeate the Vietnamese American community in Little Saigon, Orange County by analyzing various forms of media prior to and after the 2020 Presidential Election. It offers an overview of the Vietnamese American tradition of planned community gatherings by looking at instances from the 1980s to the late 2000s where the community protested against perceived Communist and Chinese threats. By connecting these contemporary occurrences to those of the past, this project offers a possible avenue to explain why Donald Trump was an appealing political figure to the community.

Gaman is a value associated with the endurance of individuals of Japanese descent unjustly incarcerated by the U.S. War Relocation Authority during World War II; this sentiment rings familiar in the COVID-19 pandemic, throughout which the public has been urged to remain resilient despite social determinants of health-related issues disproportionately impacting cultural communities. This study focuses on the culturally tailored programs and services of three Little Tokyo-based organizations, with five “Critical Factors” that enabled effective organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic identified through interviews with twelve key staff members: Trust, Financial Capacity, Physical Space, Organizational Capacity, and Legacy Investment. These findings shed light on the strengths of and challenges faced by Little Tokyo community organizers, emphasize the unique role of community-centered organizations in addressing health needs, and inform a conceptual model for Community-Centered Health—a model that advocates for building systems of care rooted in trusting relationships and predicated upon gratitude.

Itinerant Belonging analyzes migration, race, and globalization in relation to the small but diverse community of Koreans in Mexico City: temporary workers brought to manufacturing enclaves fueled by growing South Korean investment; re-migrants from South America drawn northward; and the descendants of Korean contract laborers who came to work on Yucatán peninsula henequen haciendas in the early 20th century. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 60 semi-structured interviews, and archival research conducted in Mexico, South Korea, and the United States, I argue that migrant identity formation is mediated by transnational global fields that exceed the homeland-settlement country binary. While nearly invisible on the global stage, Koreans in Mexico must constantly respond to shifts in U.S. trade policy, changing economic relations between Mexico and China, and fluctuations in anti-Asian sentiment. To manage these risks and uncertainties, they build transnational social infrastructures that produce lived experiences of the global in their local contexts, transforming Mexico into a nodal point for transpacific and hemispheric Korean migratory networks and a switchboard location between the Global North and the Global South.

Racial discourse in the United States has arguably been defined by the prevailing racial binary of Black and white. As Claire Jean Kim insightfully argues in her 1999 article, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Asians in the United States occupy the in-between, cast as perpetual foreigners and excluded from the belonging offered by citizenship. Since its inception in 1968, one of the major political and pedagogical interventions in Asian American and Ethnic Studies is fighting for inclusion, citizenship, and belonging. In the subsequent decades after the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, Asian immigrants poured into the country. Importantly, the international 1967 Protocol protected the waves of Southeast Asian refugees entering the United States. The changing demographic complicated the racial identity of Asian Americans, a point made in Sau-Ling Wong’s 1995 article, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads.” Still, the difference that defines Asian American ethnic identity and cultural experiences in the post-1965 era has rarely been critically considered as holding potential for a radical ethnic coalition. My dissertation, Of Being In-Between: Reconfiguring the Asian American Body as Site/Sight of (In)Difference, considers the contradictions of Asian American racial identity by looking closely at art projects created by contemporary Asian American artists whose connection to a singular ethnic identity is nebulous at best. By investigating the works of established multi-disciplinary artists Allan deSouza, Binh Danh, Laurel Nakadate, Ali Wong, Hasan Minhaj, and Christine Sun Kim, this dissertation considers how they challenge stereotypes of their respective racially-marked bodies as sights/sites of resistance, subversion, and contestation. Yet, their works do not exhibit a crisis of belonging and citizenship. Instead, their bodies reconfigure identity politics by navigating the racial ideology that structures their lived experiences. Through the interdisciplinary lens of what cultural studies scholar Ien Ang calls “togetherness-in-difference,” I argue that the works of these artists offer a window into how the Asian American body, in its varying phenotypes, negotiate the politics of race and representation within the ideological spaces that their bodies occupy. The disidentification of Asian American bodies from a uniform Asian American identity reveal the mutability of their attendant stereotypes. The artists considered in this dissertation work toward the de-normalization of Asian Americanness, a disruption that paradoxically insists on an Asian American identity, but in difference.

How do racial microaggressions and stereotypes impact Asian American identity and behavior? While studies in political science have shown a link between discrimination, group attachment, and group behavior, less is known about more subtle exclusion (i.e. peer to peer) and its effects on identity and behavior. This dissertation examines how experiences with racial microaggressions, and stereotypes contribute to group identity. I argue that experiences with racial microaggressions are commonplace in the day to day lives of Asian Americans and influence identity attachment and behavior. This project investigates what types of experiences with racial microaggressions that Asian Americans have, and the degree to which these experiences contribute or do not contribute to Asian American politics. I contend that experiences of racial microaggressions—although related to discrimination—affect individual’s racial attachment different from that of experiences with discrimination. My results indicate that for Asian Americans, experiences with racial microaggressions and stereotypes along the model minority and forever foreigner are frequent and are a racializing event that increase the salience of their racial group identity. My findings indicate the need to consider other ways in which bias is perpetuated and experienced, especially in survey methodology.

War Material: Vietnam and Transpacific Imaginaries of Capital and Transition argues that the slaughtered Vietnamese body and Vietnam more generally – both as material substance and fantasy-driven imaginary – were conscripted to inflate, deflate, and consolidate the making of permanent war as global structure and the permanent war subject as its capture. I observe how Vietnamese slaughter as signifier, because of its idiosyncratic location within the auto-recuperative mythology of U.S. empire, has been used as the material and ideological infrastructures of U.S. asymmetrical warfare domestically and abroad from the Cold War to the present – what I refer to as war material. By thinking the Vietnamese body as war material, this dissertation also seeks to understand the machinations of permanent war as part and parcel of the crisis cycle of racial capitalism, where narratives of Vietnam, or Vietnamese subjects themselves, are deployed to enable the stagnating nation-state to revitalize itself through the invention of new necropolitical targets elsewhere. At the same time, I examine how Vietnam has been used as a global signifier to mobilize anti-imperial and anti-capitalist resistance by Internationalist actors at the geographic and social interstices of empire, despite the obfuscation of this work by anticommunism within the United States. I divide these concerns of Vietnam across two frames: the counterinsurgent and the insurgent. Based on photojournalistic images of massacre, refugee memoirs, and white ethnostate manifestos, I examine how the evocation of a slaughtered Vietnam was continually deployed for the counter-insurgent and racist exigencies of the capitalist-cum-permanent war state. On the other hand, I examine how those very same histories, images, and narratives of slaughter were used in radical Cuban film and race radical thought to amplify insurgency and radical visions of futurity within the belly of the beast. Altogether, I mark the urgency of revisiting the afterlives of U.S. warfare across Vietnam as a story of racial capitalism in the hopes of uncovering its ongoing reverberations of psychic and material violence in the present and re-enliven its otherwise vexed histories of anti-capitalist solidarities from the past. By turning to these histories, my hope is that a study of Vietnam in a way that centers a materialist genealogy of race will offer resources that can be salvaged to pry open more expanded conditions and imaginaries of collective thriving beyond the capitalist and permanent war state.

This dissertation examines the discursive construction and management of the honhyŏla (the “mixed-blood child”), or “mixed-race” Korean born during U.S. military occupation (1945-48), the transition to the First Republic of Korea (1948-60), the Korean War (1950-53), and the postwar decades that followed. Utilizing South Korea- and U.S.-based archives, I examine films, memoirs, and media accounts, as well as documents from government agencies and non-profit organizations from between the late 1940s and the 1980s. The disavowal resulting from the U.S. military empire’s expansion into the Asia Pacific and the South Korean nationalist project have shaped the material and discursive processes that render mixed-race Koreans and Korean-Americans into gendered and racialized subjects of the Cold War. I argue that the concept of “mixed-race” is a transnational regime of racialization produced out of the contradictions of U.S. narratives of benevolence as they intersect with Korean nationalist investments in racial purity. This work unpacks how honhyŏl or “mixed-blood” is a political construct that benefitted the development of South Korea as an ethnic nationalist state and the U.S. as a Cold War superpower. I foreground how assumptions of normative sexual relations and investments in heteropatriarchy are at once reinscribed and scrambled in the constitution of “mixed-race” as a discursive, bureaucratic, and ontological category. I emphasize how different modes of cultural production have generated knowledge about mixed-race Koreans, and narrate how the post-liberation era of USAMGIK (United States Army Military Government in Korea) and the ensuing Korean War produced political conditions of racial exclusion that denied mixed-race subjects citizenship and history. “Conditions of Containment” stresses the impact of ethnic nationalism, Cold War geopolitics, and cultural productions on the erasure and overrepresentation of the mixed-race figure and offers an alternative reading of subjecthood in Cold War South Korea and the United States.

This dissertation examines the ways in which Asian American writers situate infrastructure as the locus for narratives of cultural, political, and social conflict. In adopting an infrastructural framework, my dissertation shows how an attention to the built environment can bridge the conceptual and methodological schisms between Asian American studies and post-humanist strains of ecocriticism by exploring how material technologies, sociotechnical and legal processes, as well as the natural environment produce the real and imagined spaces of US empire through which Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants migrate. I argue that recurrent descriptions of environmental matter in literary works, archival documents, and multimedia texts render visible the ways in which Asian American subjugation, including contract labor and internment, is intimately linked to the reshaping of the US built environment through the development of critical infrastructures across the American West and the Pacific. Because infrastructure can facilitate the transformation of distant, foreign, or hostile environments for resource extraction or ruination, it has often served the project of US settler colonialism and imperialist expansion by privileging specific populations and places for (re)production. To this end, I organize my dissertation around entangled sites of environmental and social injustice that highlight the unequal provisioning and differentiated citizenship of Asian immigrants and their descendants: the incarceration of Japanese Americans at Manzanar War Relocation Center during WWII; the importation of Asian contract labor to Hawai‘i in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the enrollment of Asian care labor in emerging biotechnological industries predicated on the reproduction of flesh. In making legible the violence of infrastructure, my project gestures towards an alternative vision of and approach to infrastructure that includes the embodied beliefs and practices of ethnic, Indigenous, and non-Western communities.

Diasporic intimacies between Asian and Latinx communities have converged across the world for centuries; the mixing of these cultures and as a result, mixed individual is the effect of centuries of interactions with each other. In this thesis, I review the literature across Asian diaspora in Latin America, mixed race studies, and interethnic relations to understand how AsianLatinxs have continually been relegated to the subaltern despite their strong presence in the Americas. I argue it is necessitated to center AsianLatinxs experiences to understand the interconnectedness of global Asian and Latinx communities through what I call AsianLatinx Studies. A field such as AsianLatinx Studies disrupts previous monoracial frameworks of diaspora, mixed identity, and interethnic relations to (re)imagine a reality that situates the complexities of mixedness tangential to racialization processes, identity formation, and transnationalism.

After the 2016 Presidential election, students on a California university campus threatened and attempted to rip off a Muslim women's hijab. The persistence of anti-Muslim racism in U.S. society two decades following September 11, 2001, reveals deeper colonial roots of the racialization of religion. Muslim Americans worldwide and in the U.S. continue to experience overt violence in public places, including schools. Yet, studies on Muslim college students' experiences focus primarily on interpersonal racism from interactions with school officials and students. Few consider how the global War on Terror permeates higher education's bounds to institutionalize anti-Muslim racism. Further, studies of Muslim racialization primarily sample Arab and South Asian Muslims while focusing on the Muslims' collective religious identity, thus overlooking the racial heterogeneity of this community. This study advances an understanding of anti-Muslim racism as a fluid racial project that manifests through hyper(in)visibility - both the overt and covert racial mechanisms that institutionalize racial-religious inequality. My results rely on multivariate analyses of 2016 University of California Undergraduate Surveys (N=63,115), qualitative analysis of 85 in-depth interviews with Muslim students, and a case study of a participatory action research photovoice project. This study demonstrates how religion is racialized and experienced amid other salient targeted identities such as race, ethnicity, gender, refugee background, and imperial and colonial contexts. By examining in-depth case studies, and inter-religious, intra-racial comparisons, this study reveals the intersectional variations that lead to differential experiences with institutional racism, civic participation, and racial belonging.

The Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN) is perhaps most known for its impact on the lives of college-aged Filipinx American students across the United States and especially on the West Coast. However, most studies about the PCN have focused on larger universities where the critical mass of Filipinx Americans is quite high. This paper aims to build off the work of other scholars and take a closer look at the experiences of PCN through the lens of non-Filipinx American identifying students at a smaller, private, and Jesuit college campus. This work discovered how the PCN is a place for community building through the shared experiences of performing. Many respondents claimed that the PCN experience created deep almost familial like bonds that influenced the involvement level of many non-Filipinx American students. I utilize a concept deemed colloquially as “PCN magic” to highlight the unique experience of being a part of the PCN and what draws people into the PCN. The perspective of Filipinx American identifying students is also used to get a better sense of how the multiethnic PCN cast may impact the PCN experience for Filipinx American students. The various aspects of being a part of a performance such as the build-up of watching performers get better, wearing the costumes, and being on stage also influence non-Filipinx students to join the PCN and are often a large part of the experience itself. The work then veers into the realm of performance studies to look at the ways that the Asian American body is viewed when performing on stage when performing under the banner of the Pilipino Cultural Night both from the insider perspective and the outsider perspective.

The ʻAi Pono program was established in 2016 to promote food sovereignty in Mānoa Valley by restoring the ʻāina (land or that which feeds) to a loʻi kalo (wetland taro farm) and practicing traditional and organic mahiʻai (farmers or the act of farming) methods. This research engaged college students who work with Native Hawaiian farmers from the Kumuola Foundation. I interviewed farmers and college students to measure their knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and their willingness to participate in regenerative practices of farming. By conducting community-based participatory research, I focus on centering Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies to provide a holistic approach for addressing the impact of settler colonialism as well as reclaiming Native Hawaiian and spiritual relationships to ʻāina. Mānoa Valley can serve as a site of analysis regarding the ways in which aloha ‘āina (love for the land and people) may restore the reciprocal relationship between Hawaiians and ‘āina. Furthermore, honoring Indigenous worldviews and governance is necessary to address food sovereignty issues. The student volunteers and mahi ‘ai alike can creatively enrich communities to design their own strategies and solutions for a healthy lāhui (people, Hawaiian nation).

Political cultures of the contemporary U.S. left have become a target of shared conservative and liberal ire. Critics charge that a putative hyper-focus on identity-based claims has rendered a left bereft of concrete and coherent political platforms. Based on mischaracterization of the Black feminist concept of “identity politics” as one oriented towards purity and narrow essentialisms, these critiques compound with others levied against the putative impracticality of abolitionist political work. Abolitionist activists and scholars have been refuting liberal contestations of this sort for the better part of a century and a half. Yet the mainstreaming of calls to #AbolishICE in the midst of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign against immigrant rights, or to #DefundthePolice in the uprisings that followed George Floyd’s murder have intensified these claims and increasingly brought them into public view.Within these debates, Korean and other Asian Americans occupy a particularly vexed role. Korean Americans in particular and Asian American in general are among the fastest growing undocumented communities in the U.S. A shared sense of exclusion from Latinx-centered discourses about undocumented migration have created opportunities for undocumented Black and Asian Americans to engage in new forms of coalition-building. Given that Asian American model minoritization have been historically mobilized to delegitimize Black resistance and oppression however, the contentious nature of this coalition work is amplified in the context of shifting discourses about activism and racialized identity. Through five years of ethnographic research with undocumented Korean and other Asian Americans, this dissertation complicates popularized and polarized debates about the role of racialized identity and abolitionist orientations to activism in mediating shifting political cultures of the contemporary U.S. left. In examining how these activists articulate an abolitionist vision of immigrant justice and navigate coalition work with Black counterparts, I document more broadly the strategic and affective challenges of imagining a politics predicated upon the impossibility of resolution or legibility within the epistemological enclosure of “progress.” Building on the work of radical Black and women of color feminists, I show that uncertainty, impurity, and contradiction is a locus of possibility rather than a sign of demise in transformative immigrant and racial justice work.

This project investigates the carceral connections between two groups—Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps during World War II and Vietnamese refugees following the end of the Vietnam War. By looking at the wartime logic of these U.S. racialized wars in Asia that extended domestically to impact the Japanese American incarcerees and Vietnamese refugees, my research analyzes these camps as transitional spaces of racialization. The lens of food and foodways shows how camp food encoded the dehumanization of these racialized groups of people.Centering camp survivor stories helps elucidate the lasting impact of the carceral experience and the ways that memories of food can become tied to traumatic experiences. As counternarratives to linear progressive narratives of history, memories of food and foodways retain the potency of these alienating experiences and demonstrate how incarcerees and refugees asserted their agency through food inventiveness and protests to maintain their humanity.

This study investigates the practices that radical Asian American social workers undertake in response to the dilemmas that arise between their political beliefs and the social work profession. Based on interviews with ten activist social workers selected through snowball and criterion sampling, this project asks: How are radical Asian American social workers shaping their practice based on a reimagination of the field? This study responds to the paucity of social work literature on Asian American practitioners, especially as related to the social work profession’s heightened contradictions in the time of neoliberalism. It remains clear that there is much for social work to learn from Asian Americans who have more radical agendas for change. Heeding Robert Mullaly and Eric Keating’s (1991) call that “radical social workers work both inside and outside the welfare state” (p. 69), I argue that radical Asian American social work encompasses three modes of practice: infrapolitics and insurgency, healing work as political practice, and political and community organizing. Within the welfare state, interviewees engage in subversive practices, or infrapolitics and insurgency, to help protect and empower themselves and the people with whom they work. Interviewees also take part in healing work as political practice by invoking family history and radical imaginations in a typically ahistorical space. Their organizing work takes place outside traditional service organizations and involves organizing social work colleagues as well as addressing social and political forces that affect their communities’ lives. Ultimately, the work of radical Asian American social workers lead us to identify the ways white supremacy have shaped the contemporary field’s lens and refuse to comply with practices we know harm communities our own or otherwise. Instead, we will offer critiques of the current structures and begin building alternate modes of practice to empower and survive, pending revolution.

Colleges have consistently treated their Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students as a monolithic community. Disaggregated data and personal accounts reveal that students from minoritized AAPI subgroups do not feel well supported or represented on their college campuses; resources for AAPI students are not adequate. Pakistani-heritage students have been consistently overlooked in this research, rendering the challenges this population faces invisible to institutions of higher education. Despite their omission from research, studying Pakistani-heritage students in the US provides a lens to better understand how a unique AAPI community dealing with both anti-Asian racism and Islamophobia navigate the limited institutional resources available to them. Through thirteen interviews with Pakistani-heritage college students and recent graduates and campus cultural center staff members, I explore how these students are utilizing both institutional and student-led resources, while navigating the racial-religious hinge between their AAPI and Muslim identities. Findings suggest that, while Pakistani students will sometimes visit campus cultural centers or South Asian and Muslim student organizations, none of these resources are currently well situated to provide the support that Pakistani-heritage student populations need. Pakistanis, and AAPI subgroups more broadly, need more university sponsored spaces dedicated to their wellbeing as they contend with racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination on interpersonal and institutional levels.

My dissertation entitled “Waves of Revolution: Interrogations of Sikh Political and Spiritual Subjectivities in Punjab and the American West, 1900-1928” examines the development of anti-colonial thought and activity among Sikh laborers after their arrival to the American West from 1913-1928. Specifically, using interdisciplinary methods and methodologies in the humanities, I construct an intellectual and literary history of the Ghadar Party, a transnational Indian anticolonial organization that was established in Astoria, Oregon in 1913. The party’s primary objective was to organize a munity against the British colonial government and bring India to independence. With the Ghadar Party, immigrant Sikh laborers created a political organization that was so powerful it almost defeat the British empire. I interrogate the Ghadar Party’s success by critically analyzing the early twentieth century political poetry published by the Ghadar Press in California. Building on this literary foundation, I augment my analysis with approaches from history and anthropology to construct a literary, social, and political history of Sikh spiritual and political subjectivities in the early twentieth century. Prior historical studies on the Ghadar Party define the party as secular and consequently leave out the many ways in which Ghadar was influenced by the Sikh tradition, or Sikhi. Thus, I highlight not only the influences that Sikh knowledges have had on the Party’s ideologies, but also how Sikhi has been depoliticized through this process of secularization of the Sikh tradition’s political history. This transnational project is thematically structured to: (1) understand secular developments in Ghadar’s history and political activity in Punjab; (2) grapple with the ways in which immigration policy and law affected Punjabi-Sikh immigrants in the diasporic space of the American West in the early 1900s; (3) contend with the non-secular and its presence in the archives of Sikh laborers through their employment of Sikhi within their poetry. This dissertation project seeks to extend the work done by scholars within American Studies, History, Literature, Sikh Studies, and Critical Historical Anthropology to engage more deeply with the laborers of anticolonial movements. By borrowing methodologies from each of these disciplines, “Waves of Revolution” centers interdisciplinary research questions and hopes to advance each of these fields by uncovering new and collaborative ways to interrogate the archive, specifically through critical literary and historical analysis of non-secular knowledges in relation to race, religion, and empire. Through this project, I re-examine the archive and uncover the rich and deeply influential histories of non-secular knowledges in anti-colonial thought and the lived realities of Sikh peoples in the American West and Punjab in the early 20th century.

This dissertation examines the challenges academic writing programs in higher education have faced in serving students of color and low-income students. Although there is a growing recognition in the field of writing studies that the disciplinary frameworks and ideologies that structure academic writing classes have historically disenfranchised students of color, the field continues to struggle to find ways to address this problem effectively. Efforts to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have focused largely on curricular and pedagogical change, but these add-on approaches still rely on using disciplinary standards and frameworks that reproduce racial inequities. This study challenges the assumption that change in academic writing programs must begin with classroom pedagogy and argues that pedagogical change cannot be understood or implemented apart from critical analysis of the institutional and ideological contexts that structure both universities and academic writing programs. This study examines the specific institutional, ideological, and disciplinary contexts in which composition programs’ relationship with racial inequities must be understood. It specifically focuses on the roles that neoliberalism, the merit and “teaching excellence” review process, stratified labor structures, and the ongoing standardization of learning outcomes play in reproducing inequities in academic writing classes along racial and economic lines. Taking the University of California (UC) as a case study, this dissertation analyzes how the UC writing programs in particular have worked within these institutional, economic, disciplinary, and ideological constraints. The chapters in this dissertation demonstrate that while the field of writing studies has struggled to break free of these dominant frameworks, there is a long history of instructors and students who have directly challenged the racial power structures that shape university writing programs and the larger field of writing studies. Many of these histories, however, have been left out of or rewritten in the field’s dominant narratives. This dissertation recovers the forgotten history of the key role that ethnic studies programs have played in redefining and reenvisioning the work and politics of academic writing, with particular attention to the long fight in the UC Berkeley Asian American Studies program to build and teach its own writing classes. These stories of instructor and student resistance, both past and present, offer alternative models, pedagogies, and methodologies for academic writing instruction. By recovering these histories and instructors’ structural analysis of the disciplinary and institutional frameworks that reproduce racial inequities in academic writing classes, this dissertation reveals that the analytical tools, methodologies, and visions needed to bring new possibilities for the field into being have always existed.

Bringing together Global Asian Studies, Southeast Asian American Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and queer studies, my dissertation Revolutionary Others: Migratory Subjects and Vietnamese Radicalism in the United States During and After the Vietnam War reconsiders Vietnam War historiography, which overgeneralizes anticommunist politics amongst Vietnamese refugees, to highlight the undercurrent history of Vietnamese diasporic radicalism enacted by refugees, activists, and artists, who organize for their futures against the increasing violence of the U.S. empire. This project argues that America’s contested relationships to the vast range of Vietnamese political actors throughout the Vietnam War era have shaped the long 1960s’ leftist social movements, undergirded America’s turn to neoliberal conservatism post-1980, and continued to inform the current political polarizations around Trump’s America. The Vietnamese diasporic radical left formation can be traced back to the late 1960s—including antiwar activism by South Vietnamese exchange students in the U.S., the leftist formation amongst second-generation refugee descendants, and the queer/feminist critique and refugee speculative imaginaries by Vietnamese American artists and writers. This history demonstrates an alternative genealogy of Vietnamese revolutionary politics outside the communist victory, rooted in past and ongoing engagements with cross-racial solidarities, queer people of color critique, and transnational feminist world-making. Based on three years of original multi-sited archival research and oral history interviews with Vietnamese/American activists in Vietnam and the United States, analyses of visual arts by Vietnamese American refugee and refugee descendant artists, and my auto/ethnography as a bilingual, transnational Vietnamese queer scholar, this interdisciplinary and mixed-methods research captures a multifaceted movement that exists on the streets, online, in art and intellectual spaces. While critical scholarship on U.S. militarism and refugeehood has focused on displacement, trauma, and the impacts of war in people’s public and intimate life, Revolutionary Others reminds scholars to take seriously the agency and world-building politics and radical politics based on community engagement, grassroots organizing, and political education that refugees and their descendants envision and enact.

This dissertation examines the introduction of governmental technologies that have shaped the formation of three ethnic museums in downtown Los Angeles, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), La Plaza de Cultura y Artes (LAPCA), and the Chinese American Museum (CAM), to provide a critical genealogy that reconstructs the histories, political rationalities, and traces the implementation of new models of financialization that converged to form these institutions. Earlier studies of ethnic museums have stressed the ways the city’s ethnic museums have either constructed or contested the representation of ethnic Otherness. Instead, this dissertation examines how the formation of downtown’s ethnic museums were formed by networks of governmentalities that were mobilized in the last decades of the twentieth-century that accelerated the redevelopment of the ethnic neighborhoods that surrounded these ethnic specific institutions.This project uncovers how the disciplinary technologies of land use, zoning laws, immigration policy, and urban redevelopment, were utilized in the creation of the museums examined in this study. As I explore in this project, the creation of this trio of museums provides a crucial key to understanding the means through which these institutions have arrived at their present configurations in the city’s cultural economy. My project’s focus on the formation and impact of downtown’s Los Angeles’ ethnic museums uncovers the various roles these institutions have played in the creative destruction of downtown Los Angeles’ historic ethnic enclaves in the latter half of the twentieth century. My approach assumes that understanding the ‘how’ of museum-making is a crucial prerequisite to future discussions of policy alternatives and approaches to the institutional formation these museums and others like them may wish to explore to ensure their sustained economic survival and continued relevance to their audiences.

My dissertation, Embodied Nonalignment: Vietnamese Diasporic Aesthetics and Cold War Mediations, is a transnational study of how contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions mediate Cold War epistemologies through what I call an aesthetics of embodied nonalignment. Building on the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement, my dissertation argues that nonalignment can be understood beyond its past origins as a nationalist venture characterized by internationalist state policies, alliances, and politics. Rather, my dissertation re-articulates nonalignment as an embodied diasporic method, reading practice, and epistemological critique of empire that can continue to respond to past, contemporary, and transnational dynamics of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. As such, it draws on critical race, ethnic, and feminist studies methodologies to offer an eclectic archive of fine art by current Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic artists that use their art practice to unsettle the political terms, cartographies, and historiographies of empire in and in relation to Việt Nam. Borrowing from and pushing against certain dimensions of diplomatic history and art criticism, each chapter illuminates central analytics related to an aesthetics of embodied nonalignment by using a multi-sensorial and embodied hermeneutic that invokes the haptic, poetic, and sonic. Chapter One analyzes how independent filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi cinematically uses the sense of touch to unsettle the history and ongoing project of Việt settler colonialism that continues to threaten Chăm lives. Chapter Two demonstrates how the poetic imaginaries created between the mixed-race descendants of Senegalese colonial soldiers and Vietnamese civilian women reveal the contours of French white supremacy and métissage noir in an art installation by multi-media artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn. Lastly, Chapter Three explores how installation artist Hương Ngô repurposes inter-generational stories of post-war Vietnamese migration from Việt Nam to the French suburbs though Vietnamese sound and performance to reject Cold War logics of space. Taken together, Embodied Nonalignment argues that these Vietnamese artists offer queer enactments of nonalignment that fundamentally triangulate—as a means of offering an alternative—to the impossible binaries of colonial, Cold War, postcolonial nationalist, and conflicting diasporic nationalist paradigms that still impact how Vietnamese histories and Vietnamese diasporas are understood today.