Stanford University Press Blog

The Invisible Minority: Korean-Americans and Race Relations

Nadia Kim, author of Imperial Citizens Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA, was interviewed recently by New America Media. The book Imperial Citizens examines the origins, nature, and extent of racial ideas about Koreans in relation to White and Black Americans, investigating how immigrants engage these ideas before they depart for the United States, as well as after they arrive. It shows how Korean history has shaped  race relations, from interactions with white soldiers in Korea to interactions with Americans in the US.

In her interview with New American Media, Kim addresses the fact that when Koreans enter the US they become part of our distinct way of life. She first addresses the fact that when Koreans enter the United States they are grouped into one large distinction: "Asians." This term is in fact offensive because it lumps all Asian minorities into the same group, some of which have long and complicated histories with each other. The fact that Koreans are indistinguishable from the Japanese is a disturbing fact because of the love/hate relationship between the two cultures as a result of historical colonization.

Koreans became an even less prominent group in the US because their communities were so tightly knit. Because Koreans do not have as extensive a history in the United States as other Asian groups, they can seem a little harder to reach. However, Kim makes it clear that Koreans did not fade into the American background so easily. She talks about what she refers to as "the unrest" or the 1992 riotsand the tensions afterwords. These riots were the point when Koreans became intertwined in the long history of white/black tension in the US. The riots were sensationalized in the US as a battle between Koreans and blacks and popularized as the "black riots" in South Korea. The media flashed pictures of Koreans on their roofs with guns and stores being looted. Though it was a time of great tension, the Unrest actually fostered an alliance between Korean and black churches. Cultural exchanges took place: scholarships were organized, and black pastors were invited on trips to South Korea.

What Kim calls the Unrest shows how the Koreans were thrust into the racial tensions already existing in the United States, and how Koreans are still severely misunderstood here. Kim's book and interview are gateways to understanding Korean racial history, because, as she puts it, Koreans remain an "invisible and foreign minority here."

Shanghai's History opens up to the West

Marie-Claire Bergere’s book Shanghai, China’s Gateway to Modernity, is scheduled to be released in December of this year but is already generating discussion in academic circles.

In a recent  post in The China Beat, Jeffrey Wasserstrom commends Bergere on the first English language book of this topic.

Shanghai, China's Gateway to Modernity is the fist comprehensive history of Shanghai in any Western language. Bergere’s tale takes readers back to when Shanghai first opened up to the world as a trading hub. She narrates the city’s beginnings as a treaty port in the mid 1800’s, the capitalist boom after the 1911 revolution, the fifteen years of economic decline after Japanese invasion in 1937, and the city’s years under communism. Her account shows that Shanghai is in a sort of evolutionary process that was set into motion a century and a half ago.

Eclipsed for three decades by socialism, Bergere’s account vividly shows how Shanghai  is once again  a symbol of China’s quest for modernity. Her book describes the city’s long and fascinating cultural history. 

Look out for reviews and more news related to this book as we moved closer to publication.

Pioneering Collection of Asian American Art

Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970  is a groundbreaking volume that not only presents these artists’ important contributions to and influences on American art and culture, but also details the political and social conditions that have delayed the recognition of these achievements.  It spans the period from the Gold Rush to the late 1960s, when a heightened civil rights and cultural consciousness began to emerge along with the emergence of Asian American Studies as a subject of academic study.

The volume is connected with a current exhibition at the de Young Museum, Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970, which continues through Jan. 18, 2009 in San Francisco. The art showcased in the volume and the exhibit presents familiar places, people and experiences in unfamiliar ways, allowing us to see America with “new eyes.” Chiura Obata’s Setting Sun: Sacramento Valley and Chang Dai-chien’s vision of Yosemite, Autumn Mountains in Twilight, offer fresh perspectives on the American landscape.

On seeing the exhibit, I was particularly struck by--Yun Gee's Where is My Mother, an early, poignant work where the artist expresses his sorrow at leaving his mother behind in China in color prisms of yellow, ochre, and green. An Untitled (Winter Internment Scene), by George Matsusaburo Hibi, painted in 1943 when the artist was confined with thousands of other Japanese Americans at the internment camp in Topaz, Utah. This stark and spare painting is at once gripping with isolated and dark figures moving through thick snow past gray barracks. The cascading destruction depicted in Eitaro Ishigaki's Disaster by Atomic Bomb is striking. And, the Bauhaus inspired modernism of Ruth Asawa's hanging wire sculptures disassembles any stereoptypical ideas one might have about the "asianness" of American art.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the volume's editors, Mark Johnson remarks, "I think the range and sophistication of expression and the complexity of references are going to take you aback," this show "expands our understanding of American cultural history. It isn't often that one gets to be a part of rewriting such an important chapter in our national cultural heritage."

The Stanford Asian American Art project, whose work resulted in this volume, found "over 1,000 professional artists working in California alone," said Gordon Chang (in an interview with the Stanford Report), adding that these were not Sunday afternoon artists but "professionals, who lived by their art."  Over the years these artists' names disappeared from art history, said Chang (watch a video clip of the interview), leaving the project's researchers to "excavate knowledge, because the knowledge wasn't there." It was "an undercover, hidden history—a history hidden before my eyes. Most names were "erased," he said, as people who live on the margins of society often are. Hence, the researchers combed old newspapers, art school rosters and museum catalogs from a bygone era. They hunted down families and looked for artwork in "attics, basements, garages."

The volume covers several of the most important centers of Asian American creative activity—from New York to the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and exhumes the careers of more than two hundred artists—most of whom are seen here for the first time in many decades, some in more than a century. Profiled artists include painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers, textile artists, and ceramicists who were active for a decade or more in the United States.

Also see a longer video of a panel discussion at the exhibit's opening at the de Young.

Lynch on China and the Olympics

With the 2008 Summer Olympics now underway in Beijing, the spotlight is on China to see if their role as host will cast a new image on the communist nation which has recently been under attack by civil rights groups for its stance in Tibet and Sudan.

Daniel C. Lynch, author of Rising China and Asian Democratization: Socialization to "Global Culture" in the Political Transformations of Thailand, China, and Taiwan, recently wrote an article for Far Eastern Economic Review entitled "Will the Olympics Change China?"

Lynch notes that the Olympics is a prime example of China's integration into global affairs which along with their rapid economic development and Internet usage are proving how Chinese society is changing.

Lynch notes that despite the fact that these developments are often moves toward democratization, there are several reasons why democracy will be more difficult to apply in China. For example, the popularity of patriotic notions that democracy is a ploy by Japan and the West to impede China's progress contributes to the nation's resistance to political change.

Read Lynch's full article here.

The Social Ramifications of Retail

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics fast approaching, international eyes will be on China and its burgeoning economy more than ever. Some estimate the number of foreign visitors to China at over a million this July, which will most likely generate handsome tourism dollars from lodging, food, and retail shopping. According to an article by Josh Adams in Asia Times, Olympic preparation has seen "Chinese consumers acquiring a taste for Western-style superstores and exclusive, big-name brands" as developers construct more large malls to accommodate the influx of foreign shoppers expected this summer. But China’s economic boom is intensifying more than just retail space. Class differences and income disparities could also be on the rise.

Adams says, "While Prada boutiques and Tissot displays are seemingly de rigueur for many Chinese malls looking to display their stylish credentials, focusing on the wealthy elite may have effectively alienated them from the country's massed ranks of aspiring middle-income families."
   
Social difference in the retail world is an issue that Amy Hanser tackles in her book Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (2008). Hanser, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, utilizes her personal experience working as a salesclerk in various retail stores in the city of Harbin to support this unique exploration of inequality in China.
   
With the goal of understanding how economic and social transformations reshape social relations in urban China, Hanser studies how different retail sites (among them a state-owned department store with working-class clientele, a high-end private department store, and a low-end clothing bazaar) represent various social strands within Harbin society. Hanser details how interactions between salesclerks and shoppers in these retail environments play out ideas of social difference, inequality, and entitlement.
   
Will Beijing's growth in luxury stores (and there are more on the way) exacerbate unequal relations between salesclerks and customers? According to Adams' article, these new mega malls may not survive long enough to make that impact. "10% or 20% of China's malls will realize their true profit potential…these places are just too big and too pricey…As the market becomes increasingly saturated the underperformers will naturally find themselves squeezed out."

Ailing Suharto Draws Attention to Indonesia

With former Indonesian President Suharto in unstable condition after suffering multiple organ failure earlier this month, many wonder if he will pass away without penalization for the war atrocities and financial corruption that ran rampant during his rule of Indonesia from 1967-1998. Some speculate that foreign nations—particularly the U.S.—are hesitant to bring him to justice to avoid tense international relations.

The origins of that hesitation may be found in Bradley R. Simpson’s Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968  (forthcoming March 2008), the first comprehensive history of Indonesia-U.S. relations. Simpson examines how and why the U.S. supported the military regime of General Suharto, a crucial juncture in modern Indonesian history that shaped the country's trajectory and is now reflected in the nation's current tenuous transition into democracy.

Other Stanford University Press titles dig further into modern Indonesian history. Edward Aspinall's Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia (2005) chronicles the struggles and success of everyday citizens fighting authoritarianism while M. C. Ricklefs's A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200, Third Edition (2002) looks at the nation's history with a broader perspective.

The fight to control the internet in China

Yahoo agreed yesterday to settle the lawsuit brought against it by a Chinese dissident, Shi Tao, for giving the Chinese government about him that led directly to his imprisonment and torture.  The lawsuit has become a media nightmare for Yahoo, from congressional hearings to a corporate apology to congress to being berated by Congressman Lantos for conducting “inexcusably negligent behavior at best, and deliberately deceptive behavior at worst.”

 

Technological Empowerment by Yongnian Zheng, a new book from Stanford University Press, examines the ways in which the internet has both facilitated and repressed political dissidence in China. Zheng sees the internet as providing not a medium to bring about a rapid revolution, but a forum that is already encouraging gradual progress toward a more open society, as a facilitator both of communication and of international commerce. While these changes gradually develop, however, individuals like Shi Tao will continue to be jailed for sending emails, and the Chinese government will continue to ask American corporations to help it police its citizens.

From 1984 to 2008

A year before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China’s preparations are already well underway. Earlier this month, a celebration marked the one-year countdown to the Games, and already Beijing has undertaken massive reconstruction efforts, tested the environmental effects of decreasing car traffic within the city, and banned spitting.

While these efforts, and the economic boom accompanying them, will produce comforts and amenities for Olympic athletes and visitors, Stanford University Press author Ross Terrill argues in an August 22, 2007 New York Times Op-Ed that all of this spring cleaning has a sinister side as well: “banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other “troublemakers” who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.”

Terrill compares the Beijing being build for the Olympics to the impossible promises Mao made, such as “mak[ing] the sun and moon change places,” promises he explored in Mao, A Biography. He urges us not to become too complacent about accepting the façade being built, less we forget the “Orwellian impulse to remake the truth” that lies behind it.

Japan vs. Iraq: What we did differently?

Going into the war in Iraq, President Bush invoked the American occupation of Japan after World War II, an occupation that transformed a feudal society into a democratic nation:

America has done this kind of work before. Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments. We committed years and resources to this cause. And that effort has been repaid many times over in three generations of friendship and peace. America today accepts the challenge of helping Iraq in the same spirit -- for their sake, and our own. (September 7, 2003)

Now, historian Takeshi Matsuda presents a vivid description of the American occupation of Japan in Soft Power and its Perils (2007). He explains why the Japanese consented to the changes the American occupation brought, while we have seen the Iraqis become increasingly hostile to an American presence in their country.

One of the primary differences, in his view, is that the United States approached Japan with a genuine interest to understand Japanese culture and to create mutual understanding between the two nations. Matsuda argues that, while the American occupation was certainly geared toward a certain level of cultural imperialism, the US also prepared huge reserve of knowledge about how Japanese and American cultures would interact well before the occupation began:

“In contrast to the current situation in Iraq, the U.S occupation of Japan was a democratic experiment supported by American soft power, as well as hard power…U.S. preparation for the occupation of Japan began immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—that is, four years before the actual occupation of the country.” In addition, “intergovernmental agencies in Washington also spent a great deal of effort defining the general objectives of the occupation of Japan and formulating programs need to meet the specific objectives of the United States.”

Matsuda argues for the importance of academics in shaping the perceptions of both countries of one another. Following World War II, there was an explosion of Japanese Studies in the US and American Studies in Japan, the latter often heavily subsidized by the US. According to Matsuda, this facilitated understanding between the two cultures, such that “U.S.-Japan cultural relations flourished and became full blown in later years in ways that few people would have ever dreamed.”