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“Asian Americans in the Cipher” aims to challenge prevailing notions of Asian American rappers by presenting a polycultural portrait of their lives and cultural practices. Among cultural critics and race scholars, Asian American participation in Hip Hop has increasingly become a popular subject of socio-political inquiry. On one hand, critical Asian and African American voices have asserted the need to boldly confront instances when Asian American youth appropriate Black cultural styles for their subversiveness and profitability. Concurrently, a number of Asian American Studies scholars have exhumed case studies of Asian American rappers who engage Hip Hop expression to articulate racial identities that reject assimilation into whiteness. These accounts thus importantly distinguish forms of cultural interface that challenge relations of power from those that reinforce them. To varying ends, however, they also narrowly determine Asian Americans in Hip Hop as a particular racialized group that draws on the culture of others for “their own” agendas. More broadly speaking, they treat cultures as fixed and discrete, rather than as living entities that coincide and assume lives of their own. A fundamental reason for these limited perspectives, I argue, is that they have yet to adequately consider Asian Americans who are in community with Black and other Hip Hop heads of color. In this dissertation, I provide an alternative window onto Asian American rappers by emphasizing those whose cultural practices are informed by and produce further opportunities for interracial collaborations. Specifically, I center young men who grew up in majority non-white neighborhoods or otherwise locales that allow for routine Afro Asian encounters, in order to explore how their everyday racialized landscapes shape and are shaped by their relationships to Hip Hop, African Americans, and other people of color. Thus, utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates in-depth interviews, multi-sited ethnography, and music/performance analysis, I elaborate upon the polycultural relations indexed in their life histories, music-making practices, and scenes of performance. First, I trace how their identification with Hip Hop reflects the deeply-entrenched interraciality of their daily paths and the mundane cultural exchanges and social intimacies that constitute them. In turn, they understand Hip Hop as both a Black popular form and a vernacular culture. Furthermore, I analyze how their significations of race and Hip Hop cultural identity cohere in their musical compositions. While drawing attention to the ways the rappers critically mediate ideas of Asian Americanness, I also underscore how they invoke a distinct, Hip Hop lexicon of aesthetics and epistemic positions that conjoin them to other people of color as fellow Hip Hop heads. Based on my examination of these processes and ethnographic research, I further exhibit how they forge artistic networks and scenes of performance that more fully realize the Afro Asian notions of community they signify.By triangulating race, place, and Hip Hop in my study of Asian American rappers, my dissertation questions the racial scripts often used to interpret cultural exchanges between young people of color, and in particular, those that hinge on assumptions of Asian-Black distance. The Asian Americans rappers featured here do not necessarily move outside of themselves and their situated experiences, but rather, build upon their deep-seated polycultural lives. By the same token, they do not simply coincide with African Americans as racialized peoples, but also as a people based on resonant life histories, community ties, common Hip Hop subjectivity, and shared cultural politics. In their worlds, Asians, Blacks, and other people of color more than coexist. They also build, party, and even come to recognize each other as a group. My research thus presents emergent, yet definitely formed, polycultural solidarities that challenge the conflation of race, culture, and peoplehood

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that characterize Korean American speech, insofar as the demographic can be considered to have a unified accent, or ethnolect, as well as to connect ideologies drawn from Korean Americans' own metalinguistic commentary to the patterns that emerge.A portion of the data is drawn from a series of laboratory experiments which sampled and tested read speech in Korean and English by Korean Americans. The majority of the data comes from spontaneous bilingual speech collected in sociolinguistic interviews with forty Korean Americans residing in California. The acoustic data measured in the speech includes overall fundamental frequency (f0), formants of high back vowels, and voice onset time (VOT) of Korean consonants and affricates.Results indicate that, on many different levels, bilingual Korean Americans are a unique speech community unto themselves. Unlike their same-age monolingual counterparts in Korea (native Koreans), they are not participating in a sound change marked by a merger of VOT in lenis and aspirated consonants and increased contrast in f0. Like many bilingual speech communities, they maintain phonological and prosodic distance between their two languages: bilingual Korean Americans speak in Korean with a higher f0 than they do in English, and they maintain cross-linguistic contrast in the articulation of their back vowels, avoiding overlap. However, Korean Americans demonstrate a unique cultural connection to the Korean language. In their own words, Korean Americans stress the importance of knowing Korean and remaining connected to their heritage, while at the same time, traditional or previously-cited definitions of what it means to be a Korean immigrant or the descendent of Korean immigrants appear to be shifting. Furthermore, most Korean Americans are in agreement that a particular way of speaking -- the Korean American ethnolect -- certainly exists, though its exact parameters remain elusive.These studies fill in a gap in our understanding of how to situate bilingual and bicultural ethnic minorities in the United States within ongoing issues in the literature on sound change, heritage language acquisition and maintenance, and ethnolect formation. In addition, this is the broadest collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of Korean Americans in California to date. Yet in its breadth, it becomes clear that there are many stones left unturned; it is intended that the findings of this dissertation sow the seeds for many future studies of other heritage language and minority communities.Key words: bilingualism, heritage speaker, Korean, California English, California Vowel Shift, sound change, ethnolect, Korean American, sociophonetics, sociocultural linguistics, sociolinguistic interview

Taiwan, after ending 50 years of Japanese colonial rule, became drawn into the KMT-CCP Chinese Civil War and US-Soviet geopolitical rivalry during the Cold War. Due to a wartime promise in Cairo and implementation of a global anti-communist containment policy, the United States handed over Taiwan’s sovereignty to the Republic of China when the ROC and Japan signed a Peace Treaty in the early 1950s. Under the Chiang Kai-shek regime, the ROC pushed for modernization and development with the goal of making Taiwan a base for Chiang to retake and return to mainland China. Living under the KMT’s martial law and wartime national mobilization, people in Taiwan lost their agency and own identity, and they were seriously deprived of their liberty and their rights were violated. The Vietnam War altered the power relationships between the US and two Chinas. The US and PRC formally normalized their diplomatic relations in 1979. This geopolitical shift brought opportunities to the Taiwanese people to pursue democracy and freedom in their motherland.The dissertation discusses seven influential Taiwanese diasporic groups in diverse fields at the time—World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI), Taiwanese Associations (Taiwan tongxianghui), the Presbyterian church, Formosa Human Rights Association, Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA), North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association (NATPA), and Taiwanese United Fund (TUF), with an emphasis on how their transnational activism and bottom-up diplomacy before and after the Meilidao Incident of 1979 had an impact on international attention on and support for Taiwan’s democracy and human rights. Based on oral histories and memoirs of Taiwanese diasporic community leaders and organizers, US Congressional and diplomatic documents, and Taiwan’s presidential and foreign affairs records, I will showcase multidimensional actors in the struggle for power: the potency and failings of Taiwanese diasporic activism, US human rights diplomacy and its setbacks on Taiwan issues, the KMT’s reactions to and restrictions of the rising Taiwanese diasporic power, and the PRC’s new Taiwan policy inspired by the changing power dynamics. I argue that after people in Taiwan lost their freedom and identity for two decades when the island became drawn into the Chinese Civil War as well as US Cold War containment, Taiwanese diasporic groups as forerunners as well as powerhouses spread democratic ideas and advocated from overseas. They became a driving force for Taiwan’s transition from a quasi-Leninist, one-party dictatorship to a multi-party democracy. The process of reworking this Taiwanese diaspora story and renegotiating its agency at the crucial moments of Taiwan’s democratization is thus, I contend, also the process of finding the Taiwanese people’s own place in the history of the Cold War.

South Asian diaspora populations occupy a complicated position inside U.S. racial politics and within Asian American studies. On the one hand, their racialization in the U.S. subjects them to racist hate and discrimination that might motivate participation in social movements (Modi 2018; Prashad 2014). On the other hand, South Asian American communities include some of the richest populations in the country (SAALT 2019), a demographic that is much less likely to participate in social movements, especially left-leaning ones. In addition, precarious immigration categories or citizenship statuses in the United States may also discourage them from political action. Based on interviews and web surveys with 26 South Asian Americans, Joseph argues that South Asian Americans interested in social movements combat two controlling images: one of the politically apathetic South Asian American, and the other of the perfect standard activist. South Asian Americans attracted to activism circumvent these controlling images by forming a self-definition based both on their racial identifications and on their own definitions of activism. They also find community among people they perceive as fellow “weirdos.” This study contributes to the Asian American literature through its examinations of ally-ship, affiliation and accompaniment among aggrieved communities of color, demonstrating how the very category of activist is interpreted, enacted, and resisted differently because of the complexities of the structural positions that South Asians occupy in the United States.

My dissertation, “Textual Poch@s in the Transpacific Borderlands: Chicana/o/x Art beyond Aztlán,” is the first in-depth study of connections between Asians, Asian Americans, and U.S. Latinas/os/xs in the visual arts. Drawing from the fields of Chicana/o/x art, cultural studies, fandom studies, and literary criticism, I present readers with the concept of the textual poch@. A textual poch@ is, in essence, an individual whose varied cultural tastes may or may not correlate with the dominant narratives and ideals of the racial/ethnic group they belong to or identify with. Nevertheless, a textual poch@ makes sense of their identity by creating cultural productions that are influenced by, but not beholden to, their racial/ethnic group’s expectations.I use the textual poch@ framework to situate three different understudied artists who identity as Chicana/o/x, Japanese American, and Japanese —Rio Yañez (b. 1980), Shizu Saldamando (b. 1978), and Kazuya “Night tha Funksta” Naito (b. 1984)— to discuss how they each contribute to understandings of relational ethnic studies. Relational ethnic studies is a field concerned with how the presence and interaction with other communities of color affect the development of identity, history, and culture of non-white, ethnic and racial groups. This approach acknowledges that communities of color do not exist in separatist bubbles, nor is their identity formation only influenced by understandings of whiteness. Merging the textual poch@ framework with relational ethnic studies, this dissertation ultimately argues that the visual arts can help inform the re-envisioning of relational ethnic studies, Chicana/o/x art, and transnational understandings of Chicanas/os/xs in an effort to build new coalitional networks.

Focusing on intimacy, this study is situated at the intersection of Food Studies, Critical Refugee Studies and Gender Studies. Centering on cơm tháng (monthly rice), a meal delivery service that mimics the format of traditional Vietnamese family meals, this project interrogates Vietnamese American women’s agency and negotiation of gendered labor within the private realm (the home and the family unit) and the quest for home through food consumption. The analysis of this study is drawn from materials collected through oral interviews, English and non-English materials, including printed, online newspaper articles, blog posts and online forums. The gendered and patriarchal relations of a home are manifested in the mundane acts of cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping and even driving, all of which are integral to food preparation. Cơm tháng provides an entry point to the domain of intimacy; it sheds light on shifting family structures, gendered labor roles, Vietnamese women’s agency, and fissures within the Vietnamese diaspora. Cơm tháng illuminates the affective labor and the double shifts performed by women that are often invisibilized, shows that cơm tháng's providers participate in the patriarchal construction of the home while exerting their agency and helping other women fulfilling their second shifts. The consumption of cơm tháng also presents a form of forced queering of the heteronormative home.

The formation of a unique identity, the obstacles to retaining culture in a new country, and the American government’s role in these issues during and after the Vietnam War are topics that have been widely examined by scholars of Vietnamese American history. However, these works have often overlooked the early and essential concerns of the community upon their entrance into the United States, as well as taken the differences between the first and second waves of refugees for granted. This paper will seek to discuss the Vietnamese American experience in the 1970s and 1980s with a specific focus on a few concerns Vietnamese refugees had in these years. Specifically, I will be looking at Vietnamese American periodicals published in this time period in order to show these concerns through their coverage in printed material. I will also use several oral history interviews with Vietnamese refugees of the second wave to help corroborate their prevalence. I argue that Vietnamese Americans were primarily interested in three points, adaptation, immigration, and politics, during their initial settlement in the United States, and that these concerns were more apparent with the second wave of immigrants that arrived from 1978 to 1980 than their previous counterparts. In conclusion, this paper, by examining select periodicals published by the Vietnamese American community and oral histories, highlights the often undervalued aspects of early Vietnamese American history that were crucial to the diaspora’s survival and assimilation into American society.

Many of these poems are concerned with counting. Most take place between California and China. The collection takes on counting as an action that can prolong or clarify, reduce or obfuscate—it doesn’t have an apparent end. For the speaker, it may become a way of living through, with, and without. The poems also document a process of investigating the tensions between romantic love and filial love, motion and stasis. They have allowed the poet to gather evidence, to begin again and again, attempting to construct new knowledge out of old feelings and thoughts. In the temporality and logic of these poems, nothing passes, but is only gathered. Nothing is lost that cannot be retrieved.

Karaoke is a relatively new phenomenon that emerged in several Asian countries in the 1970s, and was introduced to the United States in the 1980s. With the rise of Asian immigrant communities in Southern California came the rise of karaoke businesses all around the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) and Orange County (OC). I examine karaoke establishments in Asian American communities within the SGV and OC regions of California. My study will explore the karaoke experience and how it reflects social, racial, and class aspects in these ethnic enclaves. My research demonstrates that karaoke is a shared practice in the Asian American experience that functions as an alternative performance space for the creation of identity and community.

Since the first group of refugees who fled Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 arrived in the United States, Vietnamese migrants have become significantly involved in the expansion of the ethnic business of professional nail care. As the numbers of new migrants from Vietnam who find employment in the nail industry continue to grow, this study seeks to understand the experiences of first-generation immigrant Vietnamese who went through a training program to become professional manicurists. This research draws on data collected from interviews with 22 manicurists-in-training and six months of ethnographic fieldwork at a major beauty college in Southern California. I argue that the manicurists-in-training understood their future work in the nail industry as a form of independent entrepreneurial labor rather than contracted labor, which allowed them to move freely within the ethnic business network of nail care around the United States for their entrepreneurial work as manicurists. As these manicurists-in-training went through the program, they carved out new forms of entrepreneurial selves, which were discussed in terms of liberation from exploitation and compliance with the law. These two understandings of the self work in tandem within the state’s neoliberal project, which seeks to produce subjects capable of self-government and self-realization (Rose, 1999, p.142). The training program was designed to produce compliant entrepreneurial subjects while also promising freedom in the form of autonomy (Rose, 1999). The program’s training practices were not about beauty but about “rendering moral” (Leshkowich, 2012), or producing good, disciplined and compliant entrepreneurial migrants. The training site showed tension between the state’s neoliberal entrepreneurial project, (which aimed to produce self-sufficient and liberated individuals who also comply with the law) and the Vietnamese migrants’ cultural sensibilities (which are linked to socialist-oriented collectivist understandings of the self). Students mitigated this tension by realigning the neoliberal logics of individual self with the collectivist understandings of the self exemplified in Vietnamese moral parenthood. This research offers an understanding of the stakes for migrants in engaging in an “ethnic business” such as the nail care profession.

This dissertation proposes an alternative reading and grouping of Korean American cultural production as diasporic ethnopoetics, and focuses on how vernacular works unfold aesthetic space for the mediation of transpacific histories and local memories. This approach does not yield to conventional limits by which Asian American works are contained and constrained as engagements with (im)positions of loss, but rather, draws out the (com)positional wordplay that is often limned by racial melancholia. Each chapter explores the work of a Korean American artist who draws out discursive space by means of modes of production that are available in each social milieu. By reading out diasporic ethnopoetics in the avant-garde cinematic poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the verbal arts of Denizen Kane (né Dennis Kim), Justin Chon’s filmic text Gook, and the popular (sub)cultural stylings of Dumbfoundead (né Jonathan Park), this dissertation inquires into how each of the four artists negotiate and navigate discursive terrain through re-orienting play with language. The discursive terrain is significantly informed by transpacific histories, and it is by way of diaspora that each artist echolocates a Korean American identification through cultural media. Diaspora thus provides a different way of imagining relations and identifications in the present, as a present absence of relations. This dissertation also focuses on representation and language with the aim of listening to the sound play in the ethnopoetics. In this way, each chapter proposes a reading that is also a writing attuned to the work of the Korean American technicians and the space of sound that may cohere as Korean American. Put differently, this dissertation proposes a reading of select and disparate Korean American cultural production as diasporic ethnopoetics in order to listen to noises and voices channeled through representation and language. In this impossible challenge to realize the other in relation, the Korean concept of Han is an invaluable analytic for listening through the cuts of racial melancholia where language and representation may fail. Through close-reading and close-listening, this dissertation explores how each artist leads audiences to listen to channels of capacious cultural bricolage that may break with conventional understandings of language and representation. With a noticeable shift in focus from Cha’s work in the early 1980s to three Korean American male voices in the post-1992 context of the new millennium, this dissertation aims to listen to different locations in a Korean American constellation of transpacific histories for critical sound play in the colloquial Korean shorthand for the Republic of Korea: “Han-Gook.”

As the devastating effects of the Anthropocene become ever more acute, contemporary artists are increasingly concerning themselves with ecology: the study of relations between organisms and their environments. In this thesis I examine several projects that address these critical issues. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba and Jae Rhim Lee are two artists who focus on the excremental body by which I mean the vulnerable, mortality of the body through its excretions in life and after death. In their works they confront various dimensions of death and transmute the excremental body in order to expose neo-liberal necropolitics and remediate disembodiment. Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s film Memorial Project Waterfield: The Story of the Stars (2006-2014) and Lee’s Infinity Burial Project (2008-Present) both utilize substances that are considered taboo, such as urine and corpses, in order to transgress boundaries of purity and danger. Through a transdisciplinary analysis, I will examine how each artist approaches US necropolitics affecting Vietnamese and American bodies through ecological, psychological, and cultural lenses.

Refugee trauma profoundly shapes Vietnamese American collective identity, as is evident in the largest Vietnamese diasporic community located in Orange County, Southern California. Trauma resulting from the violence of the Vietnam War and the process of refugee resettlement led Vietnamese Americans to uphold certain gendered ideologies as traditional. Doing so centered a particular type of family as the basis for community restoration. This refugee family project placed pressure on daughters to be obedient and responsible for the continuation of the family line. This way of thinking prevented women from pursuing personal endeavors to attain individual empowerment. Instead, they were to focus on taking care of the family and home. However, as the experiences of three Vietnamese 1.5 generation women, Mai-Phuong Nguyen, Nicole Nguyen, and Tu-Uyen Nguyen, demonstrated, this was not the only way of being. Through their involvement with Project Ngoc, a humanitarian student organization at the University of California, Irvine, these women transformed traditional Vietnamese gendered ideologies that prioritized community empowerment to also include individual empowerment. They created a new form of political leadership for the 1.5 generation that focused on the community and the individual. In doing so, they created an alternative understanding of kinship and community responsibility. They practiced a political form of generational and community transition, one that empowered youth, particularly young women, to pursue individual growth and community development.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESISTao Po: Finding Filipinx-/American Twitter by Manuel Demetrio De LeonMaster of Arts in Asian American Studies University of California, Irvine 2020Professor Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, ChairThis project utilizes the online platform of Twitter to investigate the diasporic identity formation of 1.5 and 2nd generation Filipinx-/Americans. The socially constructed phenomena of “Filipino Twitter” serves as an abstracted stage where Filipinxs collaborate, (re)negotiate, and contest the varying interpretations of “Filipinxness.” Select tweets by and interviews with active contributors on Twitter reveal a collective conversation on the complexities of the Filipinx identity. Navigating through the overlapping uncertainties and anxieties around authenticity and belonging, these dialogues indicate a burgeoning consciousness distinct to this generation.

The hierarchical racial structure in the United States are products of continuous power struggles among ethnoracial groups and have reinforced continuing white racial dominance throughout history, disproportionately limiting socioeconomic mobility and cultural legitimacy of minorities. In such contexts, Asian Americans—the fastest growing immigrant-origin group, one that is characterized by upward social mobility—occupy an ambiguous racial position as a group. Yet, in discussions of Asian Americans’ ethnoracial group positioning, scholars have seldom attended to the increasing ethnic heterogeneity, which have situated Asian Americans in various social structural location, resulting in intra-group tensions and inequalities that further perpetuate the hierarchical racial and ethnic relations in the larger U.S. society. This dissertation project remedies this gap through rigorous statistical analyses of a nationally representative sample of Asian Americans from eight distinctive ethnic backgrounds. Using intermarriage as an indicator for ethnoracial group relations, this project investigates the effects of individual-level group processes on Asian Americans’ ethnically heterogeneous group boundaries and their implications for the larger U.S. race relations. I provide a critical test of claims that correspond to a specific sociological theory and/or concept in each of the three empirical chapters using data from the 2016 National Asian American Survey and the 2008-2016 American Community Survey (pooled 1-year Micro Public Use Data). The first chapter explores how Asian Americans distinguish each ethnic group using cultural sociological concepts of symbolic and social boundaries, and where these boundaries are crossed the most in marriage. Then, I revisit existing theoretical framework of segmented assimilation to investigate how intermarriage outcomes may vary by ethnic membership and provide distinctive paths of marital integration into the larger society. In the last empirical chapter, I explore gendered implications of ethnically heterogeneous intermarriage patterns for Asian American ethnoracial boundaries by merging theories from minority incorporation and marital racial-status exchange literature. Together, this project reveals that Asian Americans’ incorporation is an on-going social process and that the “mainstream” American society that Asian Americans reach may not always be that of the dominant White racial group. In so doing, I highlight the importance of ethnically disaggregated investigations of pan-ethnic groups to adequately capture and analyze the effect of heterogeneity on their social processes. Ultimately, Asian Americans are not simply subscribing to the existing American racial order, but rather actively participating in nuanced and subtle power struggles both among themselves and with other ethnoracial groups, perpetuating the existing systems of inequality.

This dissertation study used an intersectionality framework to examine the experience of Japanese American women in their educational and vocational trajectories before, during, and after internment. The study explores how the vocational education program and employment opportunities in internment camps changed the educational and vocational trajectories of Japanese American women. Prior to the war, Japanese American women had limited educational and vocational options due to the Jap Crow infrastructure on the West Coast. During internment, Japanese American women accessed vocational education and employment experience in the camps. A move away from the Jap Crow and a wartime labor shortage enabled them to access employment that had been unavailable to them, including professional and semiprofessional jobs. After internment, as Japanese Americans moved back to the West Coast and into professional and semiprofessional employment, there were indications of the breakdown of Jap Crow.

This thesis explores the ways in which eisā, practiced and performed by the Ryūkyūkoku Matsuri Daiko - Los Angeles Branch (RMD-LA) is significant for the community building and cultural perpetuation of the Okinawan American youth community in Southern California. While a global art form, eisā in Southern California has been greatly overlooked because of Japanese American community hegemony, rooted in longer legacies of colonialism, militarism, and imperialism. I trace the history and transformation of eisā as it traveled from Okinawa to the United States while simultaneously attempting to fill a gap in the literature of both eisā and the Okinawan American community in Southern California. I draw upon interviews with six prominent leaders and members of RMD-LA to examine major themes that encourage community building and cultural perpetuation within the community. Lastly, I put into conversation how a gap in the literature and the dedication of eisā practitioners manifest on Southern California stages in a choreographic analysis of RMD-LA’s 25th anniversary show entitled “Gajumaru.” Through this performance, an alternative way of history-making and history-learning is enacted as Okinawan history is remembered, reproduced, and transmitted.

This research examines the formation of a Taiwanese American identity from a transnational perspective, filling a scholarly gap in the understanding of intraethnic diversity. Before the surge of Taiwanese immigration to the United States since the 1970s, Taiwanese Americans and Chinese Americans were often perceived as a single ethnonational group, and the two identities conflated. As they have established themselves as a distinct community, Taiwanese Americans, the children of Taiwanese immigrants in particular, have proactively constructed a distinct identity separate from Chinese Americans. The lifting of martial law in 1987 and democratization in Taiwan in the 1990s allowed Taiwanese and the Taiwanese diaspora to publicly and vocally oppose the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist party and its one-party rule in Taiwan, giving rise to increasing public support for Taiwanese nationalism and Taiwanization efforts, encouraging Taiwanese Americans to fully embrace the Taiwanese independence movement, create and reinforce a Taiwanese American identity, and call for recognition of Taiwan in international organizations. I argue that the Taiwanese American identity is formed through the disidentification from Chinese American community, construction of socioeconomic support networks, engagement with transnational political activism, and appropriation of Taiwanese Indigenous symbols.

This thesis seeks to understand how community-researcher partnerships negotiate ownership and control of data within community-based public health research projects conducted in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. 10 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 participants, 6 researchers and 5 community members. While the literature generally centers the academic perspective, this project, rooted in Asian American Studies, strays away from the literature and centers the community’s voice. The interviews reveal that community members define data ownership as possessing access to and control over data. In the various models of data ownership, these partnerships reveal data’s ability to empower the community to (re)claim narratives and legitimize the community’s voice. Additionally, this project concludes that community-researcher partnerships must build trust and recognize the community’s value through proper compensation. Ultimately, the community must “be selfish” in order to work towards an equitable community-researcher partnership and an equitable model of data ownership.

This thesis examines the relocation of Japanese Americans to the University of Idaho and Washington State College during World War II. Before the war, Japanese Americans faced limitations in the form of nativist policies that relegated them to second-class citizens. Nevertheless, Japanese Americans embraced Americanism as they worked to become equal citizens. After Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 threatened the lives of thousands of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, including those enrolled in college. Hundreds of Japanese American students faced incarceration but were able to relocate inland thanks to the help of sympathetic faculty and citizens. In the early months of the war, two neighboring colleges, the University of Idaho and Washington State College, became potential locations where these students might resettle and find sanctuary. As Japanese American students arrived at these colleges, the towns became the setting for debates regarding relocation. As struggles between administrators, townspeople, and students took place, they reveal an ongoing discussion about American identity, citizenship, and race. The story of student relocation also illustrates the complex relationships between Japanese Americans and white Americans as the line between exclusion and tolerance was blurred. While anti-Japanese sentiment rose during the war, it was countered by Japanese American students and their allies who challenged nativist prejudice. The Japanese American response to prejudice and their embrace of American identity demonstrate a desire to change the United States into a more equal nation.

This thesis explores the dynamics of urban development in Los Angeles (LA) Chinatown since the 1970s until present day. The historical narrative is driven by broad demographic shifts across LA County, alongside municipal and community politics that shape the material and cultural demands behind neighborhood change. Through this narrative, I challenge the traditional framings of resident versus business interests in Chinatowns, and instead highlight the complicated and often competing visions of progress throughout the community. I argue that “the youths” and “the elders” serve as key figures in this history: first, as dynamic actors and activists directly engaged in the process of development, and second, as subjects of discourse that actors mobilize towards different goals of development. Finally, I illuminate tensions between organizing as a representative of a community and organizing in solidarity towards the tangible needs of a community.

Informed by the current trend in Asian American studies to question Asian Americans’ and Asian Americanist scholars’ attachments to ‘America,’ this thesis considers how Vietnamese American literature currently contributes to the negotiation and imagination of Vietnamese American citizenship, and the possibilities for this literature to contribute to utopian political projects that imagine a world beyond the U.S. nation-state. In the Introduction, the thesis examines dominant narratives about the Vietnam war to understand Vietnamese American positionality, then analyzes Vietnamese American literature, theorizing that dominant narrative forms (most notably, the ocean-crossing chronotope) have emerged within V.A. literature and problematizing their dominance. The bulk of the thesis is a collection of three original short stories, which are foregrounded with sociopolitical context. The stories explore model minority subject formation and patriarchy, the climate crisis and displacement (and the generic possibility of speculative fiction for Vietnamese American literature), and intergenerational trauma and relationships.

This dissertation analyzes the frameworks and praxes of Palestinian resistance and revolution alongside the Lebanese civil war to offer a new lens through which to understand these two respective and seemingly disconnected markers of Arab history. Through examining the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) as co-constitutive arbiters of revolutionary struggle, this dissertation offers a new analytical lens through which to examine and reframe Palestinian resistance and the Lebanese civil war as common discursive framings of the 1970s in Lebanon. It demonstrates the possibilities of new and different readings and analyses of historical and contemporary moments and social movements by considering alliance, which offers a new narrative that shifts and subverts popular articulations and discourses.This dissertation analyzes nation-building through a transnational, stateless subjectivity birthed as a result of Zionist settler colonialism while also framing the sets of relations imposed upon formerly colonized states visa vi national elites and western imperialist powers. I develop analyses around the tensions between internalized orientalist tropes and the growth of Arabness as oppositional cultural identities. Further, I analyze the different modes and tactics of resistance mobilized by the PLO and LNM to defeat Zionist settler colonialism and western imperialism and liberate land and people. It looks at three aspects of ‘revolution’ according to the PLO-LNM alliance: formation building and sustenance, armed struggle, and popular, sector-based labor. It also considers the relationship of revolution to time and place, postulating whether or not revolution can be temporally and spatially confined.I dissect and analyze the tools and praxis of ‘revolution’ and highlight how formation and alliance building are enacted as part of this praxis. I highlight the contradictions that arise based on proximities to and dynamics of power, particularly where material and fiscal resources and decision-making are concerned. I look at the assumption of armed struggle as a tactic and gendered labor as a dynamic internally to offer critiques about the relationship between colonial power and hegemonic understandings of violence and to debate different conversations around women and gender in the movement, their role and their labor. In striving for broader applicability, I look at this moment to ask: how has the context of the Palestinian and Lebanese revolutions to overthrow the colonial, imperialist, economic elite government systems advanced our understanding of the question of revolution and revolutionary praxis? What ideological, material and other tools were mobilized in the name of revolution and what internal (and external) dynamics were at play that hindered the actualization of the revolutionary goals?

Since the 2016 presidential election, there has been a growing amount of racial discrimination across the country and especially within schools. Students from various racial and ethnic backgrounds have been disproportionately negatively affected by these acts of violence and hatred. Asian American high school students occupy a particular role in this struggle as, while they experience discrimination and are faced with growing mental health challenges as they enter college, their struggles are often discounted and marginalized due to erroneous stereotypes and biases, such as the “Model Minority” Myth that purports that they achieve well and experience low social problems. In an effort to highlight Asian American students’ experiences with discrimination from a cultural strengths-based perspective, the current study aimed to understand the associations between perceived discrimination from teachers and peers, self-esteem, motivation for school, and achievement, using school social support from peers and teacher and students’ ethnic identity development as potential buffers or protective factors. A moderated mediation analysis was conducted to understand these associations. Results showed that self-esteem fully mediated the association between perceived discrimination from peers and academic motivation. There was a negative association between perceived peer discrimination and self-esteem, a positive association between self-esteem and motivation, and a positive association between motivation and achievement. Self-esteem did not mediate the association between perceived discrimination from teachers and motivation and was also not significantly associated with perceived teacher discrimination. Perceived discrimination from teachers was directly and negatively associated with motivation, self-esteem was positively associated with motivation, and motivation was positively associated with achievement. Neither school social support nor ethnic identity development were significant moderators. The findings provide support for the important influence of peers and teachers on the self-esteem and academic outcomes of Asian American youth and also have practical implications for interventions related to reducing racism and discrimination in school systems. Implications for understanding the role of culture as a strength and supporting schools in building positive relationships among all members of the community are also discussed.

This dissertation concerns four well known South Asian American musicians based in New YorkCity and the San Francisco Bay Area: Vijay Iyer, Sunny Jain, Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), andRupa Marya. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2016-2017, supported by aMargery Lowens Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for American Music and a grant fromthe Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley. My work, which included conductinginterviews, archival research, and attending numerous concerts, rallies, and protests, investigateshow the four central artists use their work in music as a means to further aims of achieving racialequity. Ultimately, I argue that contemporary racialization of brown people, particularly in thepost-9/11 and Trump Era United States, has led to increased involvement in racial justiceadvocacy work among South Asian American musicians.In the first chapter of my dissertation, I use Howard Becker’s theory on art worlds and BenedictAnderson’s idea of imagined communities as starting points to show how political solidarities, asdefined by Sally Scholz, create and constitute activist networks among these musicians. Each ofthe central chapters concerns one of the artists, highlighting how their musical practice advancesracial justice causes. My chapter on Iyer shows how he uses his privileged status to re-orient hisprimarily White audiences’ attention toward structural racism in public concerts, interviews, andlectures. My chapter on Sunny Jain highlights how his seemingly utopic musical and politicalideals emanate from the religious Jain concept of anekantavada (“pluralism”). In the thirdchapter, on Malhotra (DJ Rekha), I show how Basement Bhangra, a party she organized monthlyfrom 1997-2017, served as a space to fundraise and organize for progressive political causes.Finally, I look at Rupa Marya’s simultaneous careers as a physician and musician as extensionsof her work as a healer and anti-capitalist. Throughout the chapters, I examine how these artists’left-leaning music networks overlap, maintaining that these connections have as much to do withtheir politics as their shared cultural heritage.

This dissertation examines how ethno-religious communities are affected by and respond to white supremacist hate violence on their bodies and buildings in the contemporary moment. I illustrate how the violent construction of white nationhood in and outside the U.S. through the latter’s statecraft of Islamophobia translates to precarity for Muslims and “Muslim-looking” bodies and buildings, particularly Sikhs and ​gurdwaras​.I critique education and awareness programs that Sikh advocacy organizations in the U.S. have created as their means to combat the hate violence that results from white supremacy. My analysis of these programs reveals that their insistence on the Sikh community as a “model minority” is not only anti-Black and anti-Indigenous, but that such a narrative also evades the harsh realities of significant portions of Sikhs in the U.S. who are working class, undocumented, and far from the elitist narrative of “Sikhs in America” that these programs articulate. Since many of these education and awareness programs proliferated in the growing global Islamophobia after 9/11, I argue that their focus on who Sikhs are has the pernicious implication of who Sikhs are not: Muslims. Through these critiques, my dissertation brings to light the inherent Islamophobia that structures Sikh advocacy in the U.S.Through a mixed methodology of interviews, data and media analysis, photographs, and site visits, I also look at various memorial activities and institutions created by Sikh communities across the globe. I focus specifically on ones that contextualize Sikhs’ struggles with state and hate violence with those faced by other racialized communities. I argue that, in order for true alignment with Sikh ethos, and for reasons of long-term efficacy, the current structure of Sikh advocacy in the U.S. must be revised such that it is staunchly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. My dissertation serves as a rubric through which to imagine this revision.

For Japanese incarcerated during World War II, returning “home” to Los Angeles was daunting. Often, though, Nisei deliberately kept experiences from this time period to themselves, choosing to start at a moment when they felt they attained success. Reticence to talk openly about the early resettlement period has shaped the way that we have understood (or misunderstood) the long-term consequences of the incarceration and the postwar experience of Japanese Americans. For the majority who struggled to reclaim their property, livelihood, family life, and dignity, this period was characterized by discrimination and economic hardship. Seventy years later, with the majority of the Nisei in their final years, a more nuanced investigation into the reestablishment of the Japanese American community in postwar Los Angeles will fill a notable historical gap.“Making Home Again: Japanese Americans Resettlement in Post-WWII Los Angeles” interrogates ideas of what race, place, and citizenship meant for Japanese Americans as they reestablished themselves in postwar Los Angeles. Additionally, it troubles the pervasive narrative of “success,” which was a representation that Japanese Americans upheld and the WRA promulgated. Ultimately, this created a monolithic image of the community, which was misleading. Examining this community during this period of suspension underscores the experiences of those who did not easily fit into the category of those who could easily “return to normal living,” a phrase used by former detainees with an optimistic outlook on the future. Instead, resettlement was characterized by a continuation of a long history of state violence. This can be seen through examination of the process of early resettlement in areas outside the West Coast, the social climate that Japanese Americans returned to, challenges to obtain housing, and the navigation of public assistance programs. Unfolding a more nuanced social history of resettlement and juxtaposing this with the ways in which public memory of Japanese Americans has been crafted is important to see beyond the image of success that has perpetuated the model minority myth. This project intends to navigate the layers of memory, contend with the erasure, and translate the silences that have shaped former incarcerees’ return to Los Angeles.

Nearly twenty years have passed since the possibility of identifying as more than one race was made possible on the 2000 U.S. census. Much of the national discourse around the “browning of America”--the idea that the United States was rapidly becoming a minority-majority nation--has been celebratory; the mixed race subject, it seems, has left tragedy behind to become a new sign of national inclusion. Scholars of mixed race studies, however, have raised concerns over how such celebratory treatment eclipses a long and often troubling history of mixed race in the United States: tolerated under slavery and colonialism but elsewhere legally and socially proscribed. Through an analysis of representations of mixed race in Asian American literature, this project considers how centering on mixed race uniquely illuminates the contours of suppressed white monoracial identification that underwrites dominant American culture. Focusing specifically on representations of Asian American mixed race allows for a more nuanced discussion of the historical, cultural, and political nuances of mixed race that emerge when examined in light of a particular minority group. The first chapter considers how Diana Chang’s novel The Frontiers of Love deploys the emerging subjectivities of her central mixed race characters to expose classic psychoanalysis’ assumption of a monoracial family. Focusing on Aimee Liu’s Face, the second chapter discusses the ambivalence with which monoracial groups view mixed race subject, whose allegiance is understood as suspect. The third chapter examines how Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker offers a complex critique of mixed race as a form of biological assimilation. Grappling with the frontier myth as it relates to mixed race subjectivity, the fourth chapter contemplates the role that American expansionist narratives have played in the construction of mixed race identity as revealed in John Yau’s “Hawaiian Cowboy” and Nina Revoyr’s Wingshooters.

The United States nation-state’s approach to refugee resettlement created a situation of social service dependency for Chinese-Vietnamese migrants. This study focuses on the children of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees who acted as intermediaries between the state and their supposedly less linguistically and socially fluent elders. Through the narratives of my interviewees it is clear that the ubiquity of social services led to their early parentification in a social welfare system that did not provide linguistically and culturally responsive services. This meant that at times multiple families depended on my interviewees to secure housing, food, healthcare, and even citizenship statuses. Despite efforts to narrate themselves at upwardly mobile model minority figures, my interviewees’ efforts to redefine success are driven by the precarity that they experienced as children.

My project focuses on the Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC), a community-based and volunteer-run 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by an intergenerational group of LGBTQ and allied Vietnamese Americans. Through an ethnographic approach (semi-structured interviews and participant-observation), I explore how VROC members reconfigure and reimagine the concept of a Vietnamese family as the basis for their community organizing efforts to create an equitable Vietnamese diaspora. How might we view this familial mode of organizing as a potential protective health factor for these traditionally abject bodies? My work aims to examine how VROC as an organization fosters a culture of health through members’ queering of family and kinship. Furthermore, I look at how participation in VROC impacts LGBTQ and allied Vietnamese Americans’ sức khỏe (translated as health).

This dissertation traces flattened affects in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asian American and Chinese literature, original ethnographic fieldwork, and film that imagine circuits of migration and capital between China and the U.S. following China’s entry into the global economy. This project builds on interest in Third World and Afro-Asian legacies in Asian American Studies and on considerations of the transpacific as a transnational field shaped by but also exceeding nation-based formations. I do so to propose a postsocialist framework that considers emergent possibilities for transnational affiliations and forms of agency following economic reform in China, when it was once a communist world revolutionary touchstone. This postsocialist framework seeks to make visible forms of agency that take shape through non-revolutionary affects, such as ambivalence and detachment, that do not seek to clearly overthrow a situation. Instead, they enable living on within dominant nation-based projects tied to capital without full affective commitment to them. Specifically, the narratives this project examines center sites of gendered affective care labor within and outside the family as arenas through which to apprehend and learn to navigate these still-changing and emergent postsocialist conditions. Rather than affects commonly demanded of caretaking relations, such as complete emotional regard, availability, and investment, these narratives elaborate on valences of flatness as a way of traversing and living on within China-U.S. circuits through caring for the self and others. Flatness enables the figures of these narratives to do so without fully acquiescing to either Chinese imperatives to cultivate the self and family for the nation’s economic prosperity or U.S. imaginations of Asians as economic resource and threat. My first chapter examines Ha Jin’s The Crazed (2002) and Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude (2014) to consider how flattened affects are differentially available in different gendered subject positions in the wake of China’s accelerated economic growth and increasing ties between China and the U.S. from 1989 onward. Chapter Two elaborates on original ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, China (2017) to consider how my primarily female interview subjects who have lived through the Maoist era and China’s reform formulate flatness as healthful and desirable mode of caring for themselves and others to navigate and live with the unassimilable aspects of these vast changes. Chapter Three considers Chinese investigative journalist Chai Jing’s air pollution documentary Under the Dome (2015) and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) to elucidate how gendered affective care is a racialized technology that extends into a speculative, technologized future. The project ends with a coda on Boots Riley’s feature film Sorry to Bother You (2018) to further mine how transnational forms of gendered care work underwrite contemporary imaginations of the evolving global economy and possibilities for contesting its structures.