>CFP: Anthology on Asian American Popular Cultures
>
>We are seeking additional papers for an edited anthology on Asian American
>popular cultures. Popular culture, when discussed at all in Asian American
>studies, is often construed as an inherently adversarial space, a medium
>used solely to sustain racial domination or misrepresentation. Of the few
>studies that have been produced, most have focused on how Asians and Asian
>Americans have been represented in U.S. popular culture and media that is,
>from the Dragon Lady and Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan and the Japanese whiz
>kid, how Asians and Asian Americans have been mythologized, demonized, and
>eroticized. These studies, primarily interested in exposing racist
>stereotypes and the lamentable lack of "positive images," fail to address
>Asian Americans' engagement with popular culture in crucial, complex, and
>contradictory ways how they might consume, reuse, reimagine or present
>alternatives to its practices and images.
>
>Long overdue, this anthology seeks to fill a gap by presenting the first
>collection of critical essays on Asian American popular culture. This
>project is primarily concerned with understanding how Asian Americans
>produce, circulate, and consume different available meanings in popular
>culture and in their own cultural work and creative expression. As such,
>it will not focus on the ideological function of dominant representations,
>but instead explore how Asian Americans use highly visible and accessible
>forms and practices to produce their own representations. It seeks to
>understand popular culture as a new type of public sphere which allows
>Asian Americans to participate in discussions and debates, locate
>themselves within or against larger communities, produce new sites of
>contest for meaning, and affect change in a broad cultural realm.
>
>This anthology is divided into four principal sections.
>
>Migration of Culture
>
>This section examines Asian cultural forms as they travel across a litany
>of borders--geographic, intellectual, and artistic--in their migration to
>the Americas. Recent changes in U.S. immigration policies (most notably
>the 1965 Immigration Acts), the deregulation of markets, and developments
>in information and communication technologies have sponsored the
>increasing circulation of Asian bodies, ideas, practices, and knowledges
>into American life. How can we forge critical approaches to understanding
>the consumption, commodification, and diffusion of Asian cultures by
>reconfiguring theories of Orientalism for our globalizing times? How do we
>differently value the currency of popular cultural productions from
>diasporic or national locations?
>
>Geographies of Popular Culture
>
>Because expressive cultures always reflect the environments in which they
>are produced, the essays in this section examine the various sites and
>spaces--from the basketball courts to the dance clubs--where Asian
>American cultural practices are born. How do we reflect upon the influence
>of an "urban aesthetic" or "urban identity" on the formation, display and
>performance of Asian American popular culture? How are Asian American
>subjects and cultures produced in rural or suburban spaces? What are the
>continuities and discontinuities in cultural and subject production
>between these locations and environments?
>
>Gender and Sexuality in the Production of Popular Culture
>
>The production and consumption of popular culture is necessarily
>implicated in contests of gender; and if, as Hortense Spillers suggests,
>the binarisms of gender and sexuality are splintered by racial categories,
>material practices and historical circumstances, then Asian American
>popular culture is no exception. How have relations and representations of
>gendered bodies, sexual practices and their accompanying forms of
>knowledge shaped the contours of popular cultures and subcultures? How do
>particular cultural forms and practices become understood as feminized or
>masculinized pleasures? How do they attempt to "manage" or "liberate"
>sexual identifications or knowledges? How do Asian American popular
>cultures and subcultures contest or collaborate with other patriarchal
>forms and/or heteronormative discourses? How does this affect access to
>modes of cultural production and citizenship within (sub)cultural communities?
>
>Emergent Cultures
>
> From the taxi dance halls of postwar LA to the beauty pageants in New
> York City's Chinatown, commercialized leisure activities have always
> offered Asian immigrants gathering places to connect with one another, to
> share information, form social networks, and build viable communities. Ho
> do contemporary Asian American subcultures--organized around diverse
> interests ranging from singing and zine-making, to tattooingparticipate
> or clash with larger efforts in community building and identity formation?
>
>We encourage submissions reflecting a broad range of historical locations,
>areas of study and theoretical positions. Send a one-page abstract along
>with your double-spaced manuscript (between 25 and 30 pages) in hard copy,
>as well as in a 3.5" floppy disk in either Mac or PC format, a brief
>biographical statement or c.v., and a stamped self-addressed envelope to
>the address below:
>
>Asian American Popular Cultures
>c/o Mimi Nguyen
>POB 11906
>Berkeley, CA 94712-2906
>
>The due date for submissions is May 15, 2002. You may also contact the
>editors with inquiries only (no submissions) by e-mail:
>
>Mimi Nguyen, slander13@mindspring.com
>Thuy Linh Tu, tnt4204@nyu.edu
===============================================
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