Visually Dual: The Conflicted Image of Asian American Representations

Year 2008, Issue: 28, 15 - 28, 01.10.2008

Meaghan Kozar

Abstract

In Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America 2001 , Henry Yu observes the contradictory position Asian Americans occupy within western popular imagination understood as both a “racial ‘problem’ and as a racial ‘solution’” 7 . This dual role, embodied in the constructed images of the “enemy alien” and the “model minority,” has had significant historical consequences. The former manifested itself, for example, in the forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II to American concentration camps, while the latter has had serious repercussions in the interactions among other racial minorities within the United States, who in comparison to the assumed success of Asian Americans are viewed as inferior.1 The constructed identities as both “enemy alien” and “model minority” are only two of the multiple racialized images that have served to prevent Asian Americans from full participation within American society.

References

• Astudillo, Rene. “Michelle Kwan Headline Controversy Continues to Haunt Us.” Bambook Girl Zine. 28 February 2002. 31 March 2008 .
• Censer, Jane Turner. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2003.
• Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.
• Hobson, Barbara Meil. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.
• Moon, Krystyn R. Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005.
• Okihiro, Gary. Margins in Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1994.
• Ramirez, Anthony. “Neighborhood Report: New York On Line: One Site, 14 Ethnic Groups.” New York Times on the Web 12 April 1998. 2 April 2008 .
• Roediger, David. Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1999.
• Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
• “Shaq Says Mock Accent Was Used Jokingly.” Associated Press. ESPN NBA. 10 January 2003. 2 April 2008 .
• Simpson, Caroline Chung. An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
• Takaki, Ronald. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
• Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.