Amid the ongoing controversy over Affirmative Action in the admissions policies of elite colleges in the US, the term “model minority,” and its implicit racial link with the Asian American...Show moreAmid the ongoing controversy over Affirmative Action in the admissions policies of elite colleges in the US, the term “model minority,” and its implicit racial link with the Asian American community, has once again resurfaced in American national discourse. As such there is an increasing need to understand the Model Minority Myth in a wider, historical perspective. Drawing on Claire-Jean Kim’s racial triangulation theory, this thesis examines how Japanese American newspapers in California during the 1930s engaged in discursive self-essentialization, and dissociation from other non-white minorities as a means of survival in American society, and by doing so inadvertently contributed to the further perpetuation of a white-dominated racial hierarchy in the United States and a further solidification of the reputation of Asian Americans as an alleged Model Minority. It then critically analyzes the work of two contemporary Asian American authors known for their embrace of the Model Minority Identity, Amy Chua and Yukong Zhao, and demonstrates how the tactics they deploy in their works reiterate discursive strategies used by their Japanese American predecessors during the Depression Era. Rather than viewing model minority discourse as a strictly American phenomenon or a product of white American agency, this thesis argues for a wider, transnational lens with which we view patterns of discrimination across borders and time, taking into account conflict and compliance, action and reaction. In this way the thesis aims to contribute to an improved understanding of systems of discrimination and oppression and, more importantly, how to dismantle them.Show less
Literature on wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese American describes the opposition and resistance to the governmental policies mostly in terms of deficiency. This interpretative bias is...Show moreLiterature on wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese American describes the opposition and resistance to the governmental policies mostly in terms of deficiency. This interpretative bias is characterized by privileging the governmental account of the removal and incarceration over the Japanese American accounts while disregarding any incident short of civil disobedience as unimportant. Moreover, Japanese Americans' cooperation is seen as contributing greatly to the success of the procedures that ultimately deprived them of their liberty. This view, though widely held, does not provide an accurate description of Japanese American attitudes and actions during the fateful months after the Pearl Harbor attack. I will argue that the number of strikes, the extent of community organization, and the scope of individual and group protest inside the relocation camps testify that Japanese Americans' reaction to their wartime removal and incarceration was anything but passive. Japanese Americans protested against the injustice of their evacuation and incarceration, but they were systematically silenced, intimidated, and punished by the government. Moreover, the relocation program officials and generations of relocation scholars contributed to the marginalization of Japanese American resistance by uncritically accepting the governmental account of mass removal and incarceration which refused to recognize evacuee resistance as legitimate protest.Show less
