At my company, management recently decided to name a large project after a Star Wars character and distributed out lightsaber glowsticks to hundreds of team members. The connection with Star Wars in a metaphorical or other sense is pret-ty slim. Everyone is acting as though this is all very cheerful and fun times and it makes my teeth grind.
Not exactly what you’re talking about, though.
Yeah, I think this might be part of my squeemishness about it. Like they erase Hindu/Indian culture from it so effectively that it has become a white people thing in America. And yeah, as T has talked about, the mono-ing of that culture itself is also a white people thing, so it’s like dual layers of white people rolling over the culture or something? I dunno. I’m not gonna like protest a yoga studio or whatever, but I do find it strange.
I still associate Dhalsim with yoga first, but that might actually be a worse thing.
Maybe it’s not fair to expect a large studio to hold a shared appreciation of anything but our legacy pop culture, but,
I’m not reassured that the journeymen of our culture have aggressively middlebrow tastes or worse
Haven’t read the new posts in here yet but I’m gonna move this thread to Input to save it from deletion.
i dig dhalsim except i hate his fighting style, but that’s more of a personal problem. lol
this is a cool article about dhalsim’s char design. it doesn’t track his evolution over time, but it’s an interesting angle
Something else I’ve been thinking about based on a couple of face-to-face conversations I’ve had is how the format of social media and the scope/crowdedness of the internet in general might be having an effect on how topics on power dynamics (i.e., gradations of privilege) are spoken about. That is, I wonder if the competing nature of Content on the Internet makes it so that people feel compelled to be more absolutist about a subject than they otherwise might be; i.e., given the possibility of a “15 minutes of fame” situation, authors take a relatively extreme position ("[X] is ABSOLUTELY NOT OKAY, and if you don’t agree You Are A Horrible Human Being") to increase the effect of their message. I think this is a possibility especially worth considering when it seems like the majority of these discussions may be happening over the internet as opposed to happening between people physically.
It’s not that a majority, or even anyone, is necessarily thinking about this on a conscious level, but that, again, due to the internet’s ephemeral and highly competitive qualities, there is an undercurrent of anxiety that if one doesn’t mark the boldest line in the sand when given the chance an opportunity has been missed.
To be honest, I think this mentality is kind of short-sighted. One of the things that is a constant struggle for visible minorities is the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype. In the US (and presumably the UK, too) there are people of Asian descent (etc) whose families have been in their home country for generations, and yet they are constantly treated as outsiders and foreigners–whether its questioning your ability to speak English, constantly badgering you to find out where you are ‘really from,’ or using your neighborhood/community as a scapegoat for things you have no control over going on in your ancestral point of emigration. I mean even saying something like “dash-Americans who also speak English” is pretty patronizing.
Expecting Asian Americans (-etc.) to have the same views and values as 0-generation immigrants or people still living in Asia, or even worse, discounting their views because there aren’t as many of them as there are “real” Asians just seems like another symptom of this. So, I think you’re right in that people shouldn’t assume that the views of some people represent those of “the entire culture,” but–Well, first of all, no individual’s views represent that of “the entire culture,” because a “culture” can not have an opinion about anything. But beyond that, I think presuming that activists like this are even attempting to speak for the entire culture is also a trap, since, again, one of the things that is consistently irritating about the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype is the erasure of Asian American identities in favor of the incessant promotion of an extremely stereotyped version of their ‘native culture,’ which is precisely why the clumsiness of the kimono exhibit struck a nerve with many Asian Americans in a way that it did not with other Japanese people.
By the way, this is also why arguments along the lines of “Well X-country’s people have their own problems with stereotyping foreigners and racism” are so infuriating. a) Again, x-nationals in x-country are a very different population than descendants of immigrants from x-country to y-country, it is ludicrously unfair to blame them for things going on halfway around the world. and b) more often than not, x-country is not nearly as pluralistic or diverse as y-country. Nations in which immigration from all over the world has been the norm for centuries should be held to a different standard from those in which it is a more recent and less significant issue. I’m not saying those things shouldn’t also be discussed and figured out, but they are not at all comparable.
[tl;dr] Anyway, my main point is that the idea that some group of people should be ignored because there aren’t very many of them is silly, doubly silly when your reason is that they are different from some other bigger group of people halfway around the world, and triply silly when one of the things you are ignoring them say is that they are sick of only being represented as projections of a monolithic exoticist fantasy
I don’t disagree with any of that, but I feel that my exact wording (which I chose carefully), read narrowly, still holds up. I said we should not be “solely listening to a small number of immigrants or visitors claiming to represent the whole foreign culture”. I strongly agree with you we should not ignore them, I was saying the converse: we shouldn’t ignore the viewpoint of people who cannot claim this identity.
There really exist such people that are “claiming to represent the whole foreign culture”, rather than doing the good work of trying to nuance and complexify it. It particularly happens in highly politicized contexts where some people will try to sell Americans a bill of goods on what is best for Cuba, what is best for Iraq, that Turks never committed a genocide, that China is one unified nation and language, and so on. Such people can get mad when you disagree and claim that since you have no origins in their country, you have no right to a different opinion.
So, we should listen to people hailing from the country, for sure. We should mainly listen to them when possible, and the vast majority of the time, we should take their opinion at face value. But we should also listen to the opinion of people from other origins when they are informed and impartial, and case-by-case use our best judgement about who is making the best argument. What I’m saying is that there’s such a thing as an “ethnic appeal to authority” fallacy that there’s a risk of falling into, and we should be careful is all.
There’s also a key nuance I should mention here, that I think might help us arrive to a consensus: unless the immigrant group is truly minuscule, there will likely be some sub-minority within it advocating all the differing views that deserve airing, I am certainly not claiming that white people are somehow more rational and more capable of arriving at the correct conclusion about the country than people from there. One way of looking at my argument is that these tiny subgroups are also deserving of a megaphone and may be getting swamped by who is dominant in the overall minority. We should offer these minority-within-minorities a megaphone as well, even if that means speaking on their behalf. Not by coincidence, every example I raised where I think the dominant immigrant-presented view may be wrong, is a case where there is a heated internal conflict between different groups within the foreign country.
Finally, I’ll note that I think our disagreement boils down to the fact that our primary area of worry is about somewhat different domains. You’re particularly concerned with respect for Asian-American identity and the bullshit that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. I’m particularly concerned here with maintaining a healthy arena for debate on politically charged topics, and with making sure that we respect the identity and political views of political and ethnic subminorities. I think we are both, at root, opposed to the very same juggernaut of “national” stereotypes obliterating all nuances within it, but we’re just looking at different portions of that problem.
Hey, sorry I haven’t responded to this, busy week. All I have time to say right now is this seems reasonable enough and I think I may have still just been reading your post above too closely in the context of the original topic to get your actual point. I might write more once things calm down but maybe not. Crazy times…
so I think my main issue with this is: while I totally understand what you’re trying to do and I agree that this kind of thing is a problem in arenas of discourse that require nuance (basically all of them), it’s a criticism very often levied at people representing minority viewpoints actively trying to make conversations more nuanced and complex
it might be the way I read about this stuff, but I very rarely see anyone claim to represent the entire culture of anything, and I treat it as a big warning sign whenever that claim is stated, even implicitly
but one of the most common statements I see in any kind of discourse in which identities or intersectionality play a part is: a person trying to contribute through a minority perspective is being disingenuous because their own personal perspective as a minority doesn’t represent the “reality” of what actually happens. in short, the accusation of representing an entire culture, in most cases that I’ve seen, comes from the majority party as opposed to the minority. it’s kind of two steps away from the whole “but my best friend is a minority” thing
this has special significance to me as an asian-american because the dynamics around asian-american identities are so mixed up with the “model minority” idea. it’s really difficult for asian-americans to create this nuance in arenas of discourse because trying to break away from “representing the entire culture” often means assuming the identity of another minority (eddie huang appropriating hip hop culture as a defense against being “too asian”) or just removing the “dash American” from our identity, turning us into simply Asians with all the baggage that orientalism has given us
I mean, I don’t really have a solution to any of this except “put a lot of effort into building mental frameworks capable of dealing with identity-fluidity”. and it’s only my perspective anyway; I might be completely missing a ton of disingenuous culture representation. but from what I’ve noticed, it doesn’t happen that often, it’s called out when it does, and it’s actually used AGAINST foreign/minority culture advocates more often than not
Point taken. We’re speaking at the level of abstract generalities so who of us is right on this depends on context, but I’ll keep that in mind.
It’s fairly distant from the original Asian-American context, but a representative example of the kind of claim I’m thinking about is when Iranian president Ahmadinejad said “there are no homosexuals in Iran”.
I definitely associate tae kwon do with little white kids, sry
this, and more or less the rest of your post, is close to what i would have attempted to write if i had time for a more thoughtful response, grateful you did it better so now i don’t have to 
What responses that you’ve read re: the exhibit led you to think this? Is it a hypothesis? I just saw a lot of “Bad imperialists! Bad!” finger-wagging, and a good amount of it wasn’t coming from Asian Americans.
I’m mostly suspicious because of your use of “precisely.”
From the website of the protest organizers:
[quote]Our concern with the MFA’s event has to do with the specific issues AAPI face in U.S. culture. AAPI have historically been either under- and misrepresented in American media and culture. AAPI are rarely portrayed in films or television, and when they are, it’s often as a sidekick, Fu Manchu, exoticized sex worker, or a near-sighted buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi (i.e. Breakfast at Tiffany’s). This, therefore, becomes an issue about racism in this country, when replicated on this soil without critical discourse by institutions like the MFA.
Having the uchikake made in and tour around Japan does not validate the cultural appropriation specific to American history. We are not saying Japan cannot curate its own events. An event that is welcomed in another country can have a completely different meaning in the U.S. within the context of this country. Japanese people in Japan do not face the same under- and misrepresentation that Japanese-Americans and other AAPI do here. Therefore, the MFA did not do its due diligence in curating the programming.[/quote]
Wait, I’m having trouble unpacking the argument in that quote. In fact I can’t find it – the issue is that there exists other appropriation?
