Week 8_Kelly Wang_ASA 114

K. Scott Wong in "Diasporas, Displacements, and the Construction of Transnational Identities" discusses transnationalism in America. Wong sites Bourne's theory of "resisting the notion that immigrants were required to cast their lot into the American "melting pot" and to leave behind their cultures of origin" (p. 41). This reminds me of how in class we were discussing the difference between assimilation and acculturation, and how assimilation compares to a melting pot and acculturation compares to a salad bowl. Bourne was also "advocating that notions of 'citizenship' were not necessarily bound by the nation-state but could also be conceived of in a larger international perspective" (p. 41) which I saw could be tied back to the different types of citizenships we learned in lecture. How there is the citizenship that is recognized by the nation-state, and there is citizenship recognized by the people or local population. Wong also ties in globalization when mentioning how "the networks of independence that have come with modernity, and that the complexities of the transnational movement of people, capital, labor, and ideas demand all of us to view these factors as interactive forces in the shaping of world politics and the diasporic identities of those touched by these movements and their long-lasting and far-reaching effects" (p. 51). In "When Minorities Migrate: The Racialization of the Japanese Brazilians in Brazil and Japan", Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda unpacks the different racial ideologies and their effects on transmigrant ethnic identities as well as second and third-generation Japanese Brazilians migrating back to Japan as unskilled foreign workers. What stood out to me the most in this chapter was Tsuda's experience in Brazil with the derogatory term for the Japanese, "japonês". Tsuda questions whether this could be considered ethnic prejudice and compares it to Frantz Fanon's experience as a black man in Martinique where he is addressed as a "Negro". Bernard Scott Lucious, in "In the Black Pacific: Testimonies of Vietnamese Afro-Amerasian Displacements", introduces "Black Pacific" as a "neologism, which discursively names an emergent site of critical inquiry and cultural space at the interstices of three diasporas" (p. 122). The first diaspora being the experiences of African American men who served in the US military within the Asia-Pacific. The second diaspora being experiences of "military brides", or Asian women involved in affairs with American military men. The third diaspora being the experiences of the Afro-Amerasian children within the Asia-Pacific.