The Race CardPub Date : 2019-11-19DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0004
Tara Fickle
{"title":"Against the Odds","authors":"Tara Fickle","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as a risk-taking opportunity. Gambling served an ideational narrative function that is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions of the model minority. The model minority myth was, from that perspective, essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.","PeriodicalId":111779,"journal":{"name":"The Race Card","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128439220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Race CardPub Date : 2019-11-19DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0003
Tara Fickle
{"title":"Just Deserts","authors":"Tara Fickle","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that the lay understanding of games as fair and unbiased allowed World War II military officials to invoke game theory to resolve the thorny contradictions of imprisoning American citizens on racial grounds. A branch of applied mathematics which would eventually form the backbone of U.S. Cold War foreign policy as a “scientific” means of predicting enemy behavior, game theory has often been considered a defining discourse of Cold War America. Juxtaposing internment-era novels and military correspondence alongside game theory textbooks and popular media accounts, this chapter reveals, however, that a decade before it was applied to the “red menace,” a prefiguration of game theory amplified and then neutralized the threat posed by the “inscrutable intentions” of one hundred thousand Japanese Americans by reframing their fervent claims of U.S. loyalty as little more than a bluff.","PeriodicalId":111779,"journal":{"name":"The Race Card","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123341087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Race CardPub Date : 2019-11-19DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0007
Tara Fickle
{"title":"Game Over?","authors":"Tara Fickle","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines recent controversies over internet addiction and Chinese gold farmers, players of World of Warcraft who make a living acquiring in-game virtual currency and selling it for real money to (mostly Western) players looking to accelerate the tedious “grind” of the leveling-up process. The chapter shows how “cheap play” has been revived as a tool for condemning Chinese “cheap labor,” powerfully informing how internet game addiction is itself culturally and spatially represented in popular and psychiatric discourse. Using Cory Doctorow’s story “Anda’s Game” as a case study, it considers how twenty-first-century American anxieties about ludic immersion, compounded by the nation’s own destabilized position in the global economy, have led American game developers as well as medical professionals to pathologize gold farming as exclusionists had Chinese gambling: as symptomatic of an “Asian” psychosis that fails to respect normative boundaries between play and work, virtual and real world.","PeriodicalId":111779,"journal":{"name":"The Race Card","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133482238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}