Excursus on “Hapa”; or the Fate of Identity

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-05-02 03:25Z by Steven

Excursus on “Hapa”; or the Fate of Identity

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature
11 pages

Nicole Myoshi Rabin
University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

When I was growing up the license plate on my mom’s Dodge minivan read: R3HAPAS. My mom explained to my sister, brother, and me that a Hapa was someone like us—part Asian. And, when I was a kid it made me feel special, gave me a sense of pride-in-difference, to be named in that way because in the predominately Jewish part of Los Angeles where I grew up, we were the only three Hapas I knew. In that community, it also offered me a shelter, something “identifiable” and nameable, to combat the questions about my identity. More than twenty years later, from the vantage point of a self-conscious multiracial individual and student of literature and cultural studies at the University of Hawai’i, I have come to separate myself from that license plate. Thinking back to the text of the plate, I see now that the letters—the possessive “R”—were more about my parents than they were about my siblings or me. For my parents, an interracial couple whose own parents refused to attend their wedding, Hapa was a term of empowerment, pride, creation—it embodied their (our) family. For my mother, it also symbolized a link to her memories of summers in Hawai’i. And while my brother and sister still identify as Hapa, and my family and friends identify me that way, I see that hunk of metal on my mother’s car not as my own, but as naming an identity I took on in the past, as her identity for me.

This story of the license plate summarizes some of the contradictions and tensions of the term Hapa. For many people, including my family members and me when I was younger, Hapa is, as Wei Ming Dariotis claims, “a word of power.” It gives individuals a term for a mixed race identity and access to a community of others who claim the same. But Hapa is also a term fraught with contradictions. It is a term that in some ways depends on and produces the very notions it hopes to subvert. It is this space of contradiction that I want to explore through this article. This examination of the term Hapa is crucial at this particular moment in Asian American Literature because there has been a recent rise in the number of conferences, panels, autobiographies, theoretical texts, and various other projects dealing with mixed heritage Asian Americans. May-lee Chai’s Hapa Girl: A Memoir (2007), Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian 100% Hapa (2006), Theresa Williams-Leon and Cynthia L. Nakashima’s The Sum of Our Parts (2001), and Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.’s Dissertation Mexipino: A History of Multiethnic Identity and the Formations of the Mexican and Filipino Communities of San Diego, 1900-1965 (2007) [now a published book] are just a few examples of the literary/cultural productions concentrated on mixed heritage Asian Americans. There have been panels focused on mixed heritage Asian Americans at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Asian American Association, and American Studies Association over the past few years. And, in Spring 2012 the Transnational Mixed Asians in Between Spaces (TMABS) hosted a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley. These examples demonstrate the growing interest in the Asian American community with issues of mixed heritage. As this concern continues to manifest within our culture, especially within our literature, examinations of terms like Hapa that are used to identify mixed heritage Asian Americans becomes increasingly important…

…Not only is the (self-) recognition of Hapa, as an identity, a means of reproducing the hegemony of monoraces through language; but it also works to reproduce racial hierarchy and stabilize and limit notions of racial identity. In her discussion on the legalization of gay marriage, Judith Butler makes an interesting point about recognition. She concludes that in the matter of recognition, there exists a sort of dilemma. On the one hand, to be outside the realm of recognition is to be disenfranchised in various ways. On the other hand, to become recognized can “lead to new and invidious forms of social hierarchy,” foreclosures, and support for the extension of state power (115). Although Butler is making her point about the foreclosure of the sexual field, the definition of the family and kinship, etc., her notion of the dilemma of recognition holds lessons for multiracial activists, scholars, and other individuals in a similar pursuit. In many ways, Hapa offers recognition (perhaps not state sanctioned) that works against a sense of disenfranchisement as a marginal racial identity in a society where racial identity has come to be one of the major ways in which we are identified and participate in public life. But some scholars, like Rainier Spencer in Reproducing Race, argue that some multiracial individuals, like Hapas, in their move for (self-) recognition are moving towards a position of “honorary whiteness” (108), leading to a “new form” of social hierarchy. In this argument (a version of hybrid vigor), the identification as Hapa works to separate the multiracial individual from his/her constituent “parts” and elevate him/her to a place above the lower-caste monoracial group. Although Spencer’s term, “honorary whiteness” suggests the presumption that Hapa refers to individuals of a white-Asian racial mixture who “elevate” above the monoracial category of Asian, his argument can be extended to non-white/Asian mixes as well. Spencer suggests that taking on a multiracial identity in some ways allows an individual to separate/elevate himself/herself from the racial group that he/she considers of lower privilege—whether that is Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American—as he/she moves toward whiteness, which remains positioned at the top. In this way, the term “honorary whiteness” in relation to Hapas can encompass other variations of mixedness beyond the Asian/white dialectic. And, although Spencer argues that the racial hierarchy is firmly rooted with African Americans on the bottom, I would add that the hierarchy might actually shift in specific contexts for particular individuals. In any case, whether or not “racial” elevation is the intention of the Hapa-identifying-individual, it is a concern that should be recognized and understood so that the multiracial individual can avoid becoming complicit in a racial hierarchy that continues to privilege whiteness…

…Finally, Hapa can work to uphold notions of race and racial essentialism. Multiracial scholars, as well as other race theorists, have long argued about the social construction of race and racial identity. In many Mixed Race Studies contexts, multiracial individuals are said to depict the instability of race and racial categories because of their inability, or determination not, to fit into the monoracial categories. By creating Hapaness as an oppositional category/identity, demanding to be recognized as such, or claiming membership to such a group, Hapas are in some ways (re)stabilizing racial identity in an alternate form. Spencer argues against “the [multiracial] movement’s loud proclamations inveighing against biological race while simultaneously and quite explicitly advocating for federal recognition of a new biological racial identity” (102). He goes on to argue that the construction of a multiracial community/identity “creates new racial subjects while conforming to the preexisting U.S. racial order” (239). While not all Hapa, or other multiracial, groups are advocating for state recognition, Spencer makes an interesting point about the reliance on a biological definition of race and the dependence upon the current racial schema. Even as we consciously recognize race as a socio-historic construction, the definition of Hapa as someone of part Asian descent implies its reliance upon a certain form of biological race, or ethnicity, and its adherence to the current racial order (in this case its dependence on the racial category of Asian/Pacific Islander)…

Read the entire article here.

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Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2012-10-12 02:38Z by Steven

Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Table of Contents

Read the entire issue here.

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Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2012-08-25 04:55Z by Steven

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)
pages 387-402
DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.691610

Nicole Miyoshi Rabin
University of Hawaii, Manoa

In response to perceived invisibility within a black/white racial paradigm governed by hypodescent, various multiracial people have begun to speak out against a lack of recognition of their multiplicitous identities. Along with state recognition (i.e., the 2000 census), many of these multiracial identity activists desire a sense of community built around racial multiplicity. In an attempt to develop a community, various methods have been employed, and this article focuses on one such implementation of community building. Using a semiotic approach combined with the literary method of close reading, this article will explore and analyze the photographic book project, Part Asian, 100% Hapa, by Kip Fulbeck. The article will examine how an “imagined community” of Hapas is created through the project and photographs themselves, but also how the photos work to homogenize the very multiplicity they seek to represent. I will look at the use of photographs as a means of subverting the common usage of the body as a racial signifier and thereby show the limitations of racial language. Finally, I will explore the linguistic elements of representation: how do the Hapa subjects’ self-descriptions work against or with the photograph and the project as a whole? Thinking about how those photographed in the book respond to the book’s central focus of a stabilized Hapa identity is a critical approach that has the benefit of disrupting the limitations of our racial language, our need for stabilized racial identities, and any homogenization that occurs through the aesthetic project itself. I hope to question the photographic project so that multiracial people can avoid becoming complicit in a new form of racial domination and/or racialization, while also respecting the work that this project has done for Hapas’ visibility.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Nicole Myoshi Rabin to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Posted in Audio, Interviews, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2012-04-25 22:00Z by Steven

Nicole Myoshi Rabin to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: Nicole Myoshi Rabin
When: Wednesday, 2012-04-25, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

Rabin is the author of the articles “True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race” in Journal of Dracula Studies (2010) and “Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love” in Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies (2010).

Listen to the podcast here. Download the podcast here.

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True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-04-17 02:32Z by Steven

True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology

Journal of Dracula Studies
Number 12 (2010)
19 pages

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In the Western consciousness there has been a long tradition of the associations between race and evil.  According to Celia R. Daileader, in her Introduction to Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, “Before black men were lynched for alleged sex with white women, white women were burned alive for alleged sex with a devil described as black”.  Daileader calls attention to the historical relationship between blackness, sex, and evil that predates the literal transmission of this discourse into “race relations.” Over time this relationship has found its way into many racist fantasies, particularly those manifested within the stories of the horror genre—including vampire tales.  Although race has only begun to be theorized in relation to Dracula, one of the most well known vampire novels published in 1897, there has been some important recent work theorizing the Count within Homi Bhabha’s category of the “not quite/not white” (Daileader 97).  As John Allen Stevenson notes, “the novel [Dracula] insistently—indeed, obsessively—defines the vampire not as a monstrous father but as a foreigner, as someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an outsider” (139).  Dracula, the Romanian Count, is seen in opposition to the rest of the British characters—including the main object of his desire, Mina.  The predatory sexual threat of Dracula is a common racist fantasy where racialized men exude “predatory sexual desire” that “endangers white womanhood and consequently threatens the racial purity of white [American] society” (Hamako).  In most instances, this threat to racial purity manifests itself in the fear of clear racial miscegenation and a necessary drive to eradicate the one attempting to perform this racial contamination—the vampire.

Over the past two years there has been a resurgence of vampire stories in U.S. popular culture. These new vampire stories conveyed on-screen —True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight—promote specific ideologies about race, class, and gender that are specific to our cultural moment. In “Color Blindness: An Obstacle to Racial Justice?” Charles A. Gallagher states that: “since the mid-1990s there has been a change in the way race, race relations, and racial hierarchy have been depicted in the mass media…the media now provides Americans with an almost endless supply of overt and coded depictions of a multiracial, multicultural society that has finally transcended the problem of race” (109).  As examples of contemporary media, these new vampire shows also promote a society “beyond” race; so, with the historical tradition between race and vampires, what happens when the victims of vampires—in these new vampire tales—are no longer racially homogenous?  Can the vampire still be read as racially other?  I argue that the vampire of these contemporary stories actually becomes a symbol of multiracial identity as it is seen within the multicultural discourse that pervades American popular consciousness.  For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing specifically on issues of race and sexuality (only as they are concerned with racial purity) in the first season of HBO’s series True Blood—encapsulated within the first two episodes, “Strange Love” and “The First Taste.”  While the series deals with a greater range of issues—gay rights, American slavery, terrorism, war, religion, etc.—these issues remain outside the scope of this particular paper.  I hope that these issues will be theorized in subsequent work on the series, but for this paper I will have to limit my consideration to the ways in which these beginning episodes of True Blood portrays a multicultural society on screen that undercuts the reality of still pervasive racist currents in our own society; how the show creates a multiracial identity that is at once feared and championed within the American society; and, how the show while depicting multiculturalism actually works to subtly critique this ideology…

Read the entire article here. (Rich Text Format)

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Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, United States on 2010-09-03 16:51Z by Steven

Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 1 (2010)
pages 61-69

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In an interview for the journal MELUS, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata suggests her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love does not directly take “any specific ethnicity as its central concern,” nor deal explicitly with the “identity issue” (165, 179).  Despite these assertions by the author, In the Heart of the Valley of Love is mainly taught at the university level in Asian American Literature courses.  While Kadohata’s novel has been established within this specific canon of Asian American Literature, her novel deals with issues that resonate among all racial groups. This paper considers the ways in which Kadohata creates an imagined future not wholly detached from issues of race and identity, but where the conceptualization of race-based identity is conceived by means of self-fashioning and self-signifying. In the novel’s “futuristic” American society, concerns of class and the divides of wealth between the white “richtowns” and the multiracial majority may seem to be the central themes, but issues of race and issues of class become conflated in the novel, and Kadohata uses more subtle ways to discuss issues of racial difference.  What Kadohata suggests through her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is not that racialized bodies cease to be of importance in American society, but that race as a critical factor in identity formation and categorization must be reframed by self-signification and social interactions.

…Kadohata’s indictment of current racial understanding goes further as Francie, the mixed race narrator, is marginalized by our current monoracial understanding of race as the determinant factor of identity. She says, “I enjoyed the feeling of the heat making my loose shorts billow around my yellow-brown legs—the yellow from my Japanese mother, the brown from my Chinese-black father” (22). Viet Thanh Nguyen suggests in Race and Resistance that Francie embodies “the novel’s conception of nonwhite identity as being a mélange of different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (150). While the narrator does occupy the space of the raced majority within the novel, her value as a mixed race character does not end at being the embodiment of the “novel’s conception” of a “nonwhite identity.” Francie as a mixed-race subject maintains her position as marginalized in our current understanding of racial categorization. Keeping with the notion of the body, Kadohata locates Francie’s indeterminacy in her yellow-brown skin, which is not easily identified as one race or another, until Francie herself declares where she “belongs.” Knowing what races and ethnicities Francie belongs to serves a purpose beyond making her a mixture of incongruent elements of race and therefore some sort of representative of everything “nonwhite” as Nguyen suggests; her “parts” are named, and so while she may embody the majority within the text, she is still marginalized by our current understanding of race along monoracial lines. By making the protagonist a “mélange,” Kadohata renders this multiracial character incapable of being assigned identity by physical racial markers and forces Francie to seek a different means by which she must forge an identity…

Read the entire article here.

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