Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

[Kip] Fulbeck’s book accomplishes its goal of bringing awareness about Hapas to themselves and to the larger society. It creates a recognizable space for a particular group of mixed-race people that asserts itself against the traditional racial paradigm dominated by a logic of monoraciality, expands race beyond a black/white racial line, and sutures personal narrative back onto the visual images of mixed-race bodies. Although some elements of the book may work against the very multiplicity it seeks to convey, its most powerful impact is its promotion of a self-identification process through storytelling and narrative, which cannot be accomplished through the current racial language of identity, nor through bodily identification. By permitting the subjects not only to see themselves in the visual images of Hapaness but, more importantly, to speak for themselves and formulate their own sense of identity (whatever that may be), Fulbeck’s project resists simply (re)figuring Hapaness as a stabilized identity or giving into the community-forming demands of horizontal comradeship and hapagenization.

Nicole Miyoshi Rabin, “Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, (Volume 29, Issue 5, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2012.691610.

“The Face Is the Road Map”: Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and Popular Culture, 1980–1988

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2011-02-28 21:34Z by Steven

“The Face Is the Road Map”: Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and Popular Culture, 1980–1988

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 1 (February 2011)
pages 33-68
E-ISSN: 1096-8598; Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Jana K. Lipman, Assistant Professor of History
Tulane University

During the 1980s, U.S. politicians and the media presented Vietnamese Amerasians as quintessential Americans who could be brought home rather than as foreigners or as immigrants. However, Amerasians were non-white immigrants and their rights to enter the United States intertwined with debates over immigration restriction and the ongoing search for American Prisoners of War. The popular emphasis on Amerasians’ American “look” resulted in a discourse which valued whiteness, and sometimes blackness, at the expense of Vietnamese mothers and Asian identities. This article argues how Amerasian immigration policies re-inscribed hierarchies of race and sexuality grounded in the history of Asian exclusion.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: Jana K. Lipman, Jana Lipman, Journal of Asian American Studies, Vietnam

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Mixed Race Studies

“The Face Is the Road Map”: Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and Popular Culture, 1980–1988

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