CSUBB – ANTH 365 (prof. Hareen Khan)
Midterm questions
1. what gave rise to Asian American Studies? What spurred the anger and the spirit of the
resistance?
Third world movement protest is the first event that has a large impact on Asian American
Studies. However, the exclusion of Chinese in America in which people in Chinatown had been
lived in poverty and terrible condition spurred the anger and the spirit resistance. Thus, the first
Asian American Studies was developed in 1969 at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State College.
The anger and the spirit of the resistance might come from different perspectives.
§ The need of navigating Asian American identify => Asian students don’t have high attention
on AAA while focus more on career and social status => assimilated into White and economic
mobility effect
§ Democratic right for Asian American => model minority => Asian American are
disadvantage in the admission process, such as cultural and language barriers, and stereotypes of
quiet and high-scored demand
Example: Grain of Sand album
2. What does it mean for Asian American Studies to be institutionalized?
3. In what way is Asian American Studies a politicized discipline?
Emerged out of Civil Rights movement: protest of black challenging the structure of power,
demand a better environment of fair and right for men, especially people of color
Structure of power ó identity
ð Challenging
ð Emerged the need of students and faculty mobility, to benefit everybody
ð Bring together the gap between the real world and economic perspectives
4. What is the relationship between Ethnic Studies and Cultural Anthropology?
Ethnic studies have various groups: black studies, Asian American studies, latino studies, native
studies…
5. What is the paradoxical positioning of Asian Americans?
§ Exclusion and inclusion
§ Belonging and not belonging
§ Reading: okihiro and ‘the sanitized sensorium’
§ In ‘when and where I enter’ by okihiro, the appearance of Asian through historical
consciousness is before the Chinese -immigrants event in the nineteen-century. Alexander
Great, one of the most influences in human history, had defined the Greeks as ‘free people’
and the Asians as ‘a nation of slave’. The ideas supporting the Greeks superiority over Asians
kept continuously repeating through the background of the West’s civilization such as
Aristotle viewed Asians as “cannibal and barbarian, and always in a state of subjection
and slavery”; Edward W. Said and Marry B. Campbell defined Asians by the European
conception as “the Other” and “stands in opposition to the world we know and the laws
that govern it”, etc. Those ideas came along with the expansion of colonism, orientalism,
slavery, invasions among countries in which the West or European has been always the
dominance.
6. Indo Chic
ó
racial politics of ‘cool’
ó
Sunaina ‘Henna and Hip Hop’
7. Model minority?
8. How is the affirmative action debate tied to race/racial formation?
