1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910480690203321

Autore

Kim Ju Yon

Titolo

The Racial Mundane : Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday / / Ju Yon Kim

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : New York University Press, , [2015]

©2015

ISBN

1-4798-3751-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (481 p.)

Disciplina

305.895073

Soggetti

Asian Americans - Cultural assimilation - United States

Asian Americans - History

Asian Americans - Social conditions

Asian Americans - Societies, etc

Ethnic neighborhoods - United States - History

Electronic books.

United States Race relations

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Trying on The Yellow Jacket at the Limits of Our Town -- 2. Everyday Rituals and the Performance of Community -- 3. Making Change -- 4. Homework Becomes You -- Afterword -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association Across the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked "idian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. In The Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and



impossible Americans. The body’s uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim’s study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, The Racial Mundane invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.