{"title":"When We Say Smart Asian Girl We Don't Mean Smart (White) Girl: The Figure of the Asian Automaton and the Adolescent Artist in the Künstlerroman Genre","authors":"Jessica Yu","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0169","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article focuses on two figures, the Smart White Girl and the Asian Automaton in the filmic Künstlerromane, (500) Days of Summer, Lady Bird, and Juno. I argue that these films center around the artistic and moral development of their white, intelligent, and radical female protagonists (Smart White Girls) for which the figure of the model minority Asian family and/or female Asian nerd (Smart Asian Girls) act as foils. These taste-making rebels, lippy savants, and unruly girls are trying to free themselves from societal constraints in order to come of age. However, they must first overcome, deride, and reject what I call the figure of the Asian Automaton: censorious female Asian nerds or their conservative, silent, staring Asian families. My methodology—which fuses critique with a more personal approach to academic writing—allows me to discuss the problem of recognition and self-recognition for the Asian subject when watching these films.","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"169 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42843447","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}
{"title":"Sacrifices, Sidekicks, and Scapegoats: Black Characters and White Stories in Nora Roberts's Romances","authors":"Kecia Ali","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0149","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In several of the scores of romance novels she published between the 1980s and the early 2000s, bestselling American author Nora Roberts limns whiteness by deploying black characters as sacrifices or sidekicks. In her recent novels (2016–19), villainous white characters who express racist sentiments become scapegoats, obscuring racism's broader structural and cultural dimensions. At a time when discrimination within romance publishing and award-giving has gained attention, it is vital to explore how the genre continues to center white readers and white identities, even while explicitly condemning racism.","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"149 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47085219","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}
{"title":"The Woke White Queen: Constance Hall and Mummy Blogging as a Case Study in Antiracialism","authors":"L. Vonk","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0129","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:It is well-established that \"mothering\" and the figure of the \"good mother\" are tools in the oppression of women, particularly women of color. In this article, I use social media personality Constance Hall as a case study to explicate how the online \"mummy celebrity\" text perpetuates such oppression, despite attempts at cultivating a socially aware (\"woke\") image. David Theo Goldberg's notion of antiracialism is used to conceptualize Hall's specific brand of activism, which relies on the fusion of liberal notions of equality, a rhetoric of \"no judgment,\" and charity work. I argue that the parenting practices put on display by Hall often reflect those endorsed by white, bourgeois institutions and that the normalization of surveillance that occurs as they are put on display may in fact be actively harmful to women of color. I find evidence of a continuation of the logic of \"transnational intimacy\" as laid out by Raka Shome, where the image of virtuous white mothers is used to further imperialist expansion. Ultimately, I conclude that being \"woke\" may draw the online \"mummy personality\" an audience but, in the case of Hall at least, truly challenging and confronting racism through actively dismantling systems that are psychologically and financially advantageous to the white mother remains unfulfilled.","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"129 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46612138","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}
{"title":"Godless Savages and Lockstep Legions: Examining Military Orientalism in Game of Thrones","authors":"M. Hardy","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0192","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This essay explores the depiction of Eastern warrior races and channels of violence in Game of Throne from the perspective of military Orientalism: the Western fascination with Eastern warfare. Such a division of Eastern and Western martial practice serves not only as a source of horror but as a means of \"othering\" and defining what the West is not. Game of Thrones (GoT) follows this pattern, presenting a partly shocking, partly romanticized version of the military history of real-world races and cultures as a means of framing the more Western values of Daenerys and the superiority of her proto-European \"civilization.\" Other forms of violence that take place on the continent of Essos are also part of this othering, such as gladiatorial combat, use of mercenaries, assassination cults, and insurgencies. Despite characterizations that present GoT as groundbreaking in its fantasy, it offers its audience little new in its depictions of different cultures, falling into line with hundreds of years of military Orientalism and a long history of normative whiteness in the fantasy genre.","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"192 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47182922","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}
{"title":"Domesticating Settler Colonization at the Art Gallery of South Australia","authors":"Yusuf Hayat","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0233","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"233 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48331993","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}
{"title":"Cameron Crowe's Aloha (2015): Hollywood and American Militourism in the Pacific","authors":"R. Voeltz","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0213","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:When Aloha was released in 2015 critics attacked the film for having a muddled plot involving the Hawaiian independence movement, traditional Hawaiian culture and religion, ethnicity, and the greed of the American military industrial complex. Partially using the evidence from the 2014 email hack of Sony Studios, I will examine Hollywood's and Sony's cinematic representations of Hawai'i that have been so fashioned by U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and tourism leading to the phenomenon of militourism. All of this produces in Aloha a conflicted, utopian, faux-ecological, white tourist/military version of Hawai'i that ignores the realities of the massive presence of the American military industrial complex throughout the Pacific area.","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"213 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48516709","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}
{"title":"Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain","authors":"M. Azarmandi","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0251","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46220950","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}
{"title":"All in My Family","authors":"D. Bruining","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.2.0245","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42061720","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}
{"title":"Mediations of Xinjiang: For an Aesthetic Politics","authors":"S. Cubitt","doi":"10.5325/JASIAPACIPOPCULT.4.1.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/JASIAPACIPOPCULT.4.1.0005","url":null,"abstract":"abstract :Zhang Qian's second-century b.c.e. reports on his travels through what is now the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang begin two millennia of mediations of this large and fraught region. This article's consideration of mediations on landscape begins with Tsui Hark's film Seven Swords, looking back to drawing and photography, and forward to geographic information systems and financial software, each giving their own, often complex, accounts of the land. This history, and the multiplicity of contemporary practices, raises the question of subjectivity: of who or what expresses and who or what observes or understands these layers of mediation, representation, and communication, in the past or today. The author argues that, for ecocritique in the age of terracide, aesthetics is not merely symptomatic or ideological, it is the one sure ground for a new politics.","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"25 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46939209","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}
{"title":"Letter from the Guest Editor","authors":"S. Popescu","doi":"10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.4.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The assumption underlying this special issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture is that technology is able to, or can be used to, reflect on technology, to establish an interpretive or interpolative loop. Such a loop is even present in this special issue, as many of these papers were developed out of a conference held at the 2019 Sydney Underground Film Festival entitled “Inhuman Screens,” which examined diverse themes related to technology and perception. The “inhuman” was used loosely to mean “not human in nature or quality,” as defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English, and as such to broadly encompass concerns related to posthumanism as well as the inorganic and the machine. However, there is also a moral implication to the term inhuman that suggests the absence of emotion, especially empathy and a concern for one’s environs. It is fitting, therefore, that this issue commences with an article by Sean Cubitt that captures the importance of how we mediate the environment and how it remains incapable of being mediated. I have chosen to begin with Lyotard’s contentious quote to remind us also that the inhuman has a philosophical, specifically ontological, connotation, one related to processing, reading, re-cognizing, or simply viewing the human through the prism of the machine or at least from a perspective beyond how we may often like to think of ourselves—the human stripped of humanist comforts. However, the term inhuman has other philosophical definitions as well, often linked with the former dictionary definitions. For example, in her book The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti contrasts Letter from the Guest Editor Stefan Octavian POPeScu | Sydney univerSity","PeriodicalId":40211,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture","volume":"4 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47652356","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}