• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.53-92
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• 2018

This essay aims to examine chick lit written within the Asian American context. For the most part, the chick lit genre has been typically regarded as a site to study contemporary white women's experiences and to debate the genres' credentials as feminist literature. Though some may disagree, there is general consensus that chick lit has fallen out of vogue after reaching its peak in the first decade of the new millenium.; nevertheless, it is being revisited by readers and critics alike as it has recently re-emerged as a location upon which to examine how race and gender inform notions of national belonging and female subject formation in the twenty-first century. To this end, this essay reads Kim Wong Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things (2004). Keltner's protagonist Lindsey Owyang is yet another twentysomething "chick" looking for love, self, independence, and success in the huge megalopolis of San Francisco. What sets Lindsey apart from the chick prototype is that she is a third-generation ABC (American-born Chinese) and issues relevant to Asian America frequently make their way into Lindsey's narrative. Though it is generally considered as standing a "few notches above the standard chick-lit fare" (Stover n. pag), I would argue that meaningful reflections on many of the major pillars of Asian American literature, history, and cultural politics are glossed over in favor of cursory musings about the daily vicissitudes of Lindsey's life. This essay thus takes to task Ferriss's claim that a "serious" consideration of chick lit "brings into focus many of the issues facing contemporary women and contemporary culture - issues of identity, of race and class, of femininity and feminism, of consumerism and self-image" (2). I contend that a close examination of Keltner's The Dim Sum of All Things discloses that the chick lit format undermines a "serious consideration" of Asian American issues by presenting in particular a highly problematic representation of race and of Asian American femininity.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.65-92
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• 2018

According to Wenying Xu, Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references (8); subsequently, a growing number of critics have begun to recognize that food "feeds into the literary rendering of Asian American subjectivity [and] provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination" (Mannur 13). Ann Mah's Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself (2010) is yet another text within which to investigate how food "operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people's identities" (Xu 2). Even as Kitchen Chinese insists on underscoring that Chinese food, as much as the voyage to her "motherland" China, is critical to protagonist Isabelle's quest to gain a better understanding of herself, we are able to observe how Isabelle exploits Chinese culture and its foodways as "food pornography" in order to align herself with mainstream America. Needless to say, the novels' relegation of Chinese food as "food porn" is problematic in that it encourages readers to participate in the exoticization of Asia and its culture, and the reduction of its people as the other. Ultimately, this essay aims to consider how the consumption and rejection of food becomes a critical means by which the Asian American subject fashions her identity.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.46-61
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• 2011

This paper considers how Koreans found their positions in the complex, overlapping, disjunctive, and interconnected "Oriental" repertoires in the early Cold War years. When we use the term, Oriental, it should require careful translation from context to context because it may be subject to very different sets of contextual circumstances. Klein views Cold War Orientalism in the complex of various regions including East Asian and Southeast Asian countries; however, when Koreans are contextualized at the center of the discussion the Orientalism produces another discursive meaning. Even though many great researches have been done on Korean immigrations, Korean American literatures, and US-Korea economic, political, and foreign relations, not many discussions about Korean American popular cultures have been discussed in the basis of the Oriental discourse in the United States.For this argument, this paper investigates the performative trajectory of a girl group "Kim Sisters" who began to sing at the US military show stages in South Korea in 1952 during the Korean War. They moved to Las Vegas show stages in 1959 and later appeared in Ed Sullivan Show more than thirty times during the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, they not only returned to South Korea often times to perform at the stages for Korean audiences in South Korea but also played at the shows for Korean immigrants in the United States. Korean American immigration to the United States has followed a different route from the majority of Asian American population such as Chinese or Japanese Americans, which means that efforts to compare this particular group to the others may be unnecessary. Rather doing comparative studies, this paper, therefore, focuses on the formation of the intersecting and multiple identities of Korean female entertainers who were forced or forced themselves to be incorporated into the American popular "Oriental" imagination, which I would call "embedded" identities. This embeddedness has been continuously maintained in the configuration of Korean characters in the United States. This will help not only to observe the discursive aspect of Asian American identity politics but also to claim a space for comparatively invisible Korean characters in the United States which has been often times neglected and not brought into a major Asian American or Oriental historical discourse. This paper starts with American scenes at the beginning of the twentieth century to trace Americans Oriental imagination which was observable in the various American cultural landscape and popular music soundscape. It will help us more clearly understand the production and consumption of the Korean "Oriental" performances during the early Cold War period and especially the Korean performance in the American venue, silently overshadowed into the political, social, and cultural framework.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.141-167
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• 2014

The macro structural perspective of how race was formed nationally, politically, and socially has greatly contributed in revealing the ills of racialism until now, likewise, the dichotomous form of Asian-American literature corresponding to such perspective has made great contribution in awakening people's awareness of race. While acknowledging the contribution of such macro perspectives, we must take note that today's racialism is becoming materialized in different aspects. The tendency of present racial formation is that the recognition of race is spread out lightly but widely in everyday lives and is revealed through the perception of our body. While publicly stating that society is color-blind and inequality significantly resolved, racialism emerges in the personal and everyday aspects. Not erased but diluted and spread out more widely, and the more diluted, harder to erase, racialism has penetrated into the perception of our lives. Racialism works not as a conspicuous discrimination but as a common sense that is 'naturally' absorbed into our perception and perspective. Chang Rae Lee's Aloft shows the process of such racial formation in our age of hybridization. This study tries to clarify why present racial formation must be analyzed in the macro perceptual perspective and show how the racial perception in the narrative of the white dominant narrator, Jerry, becomes the field where he lives and how it is spread through his perception. Through the theories of Judith Butler and Linda M. Alcoff, this study analyzes how people are got to self-identification with the racialization through reiteration and what the relationship is between racial formation and the subject's performativity in Aloft. The study concludes that revealing such current processes of racial formation perceptively is not thinking it 'natural' and inevitable but the process of bringing about a change in it.