Displacing and Disrupting: A Dialogue on Hmong Studies and Asian American Studies

This article summarizes a roundtable discussion of scholars that took place at the Association for Asian American Studies Conference in San Francisco, 2014. Hailing from various academic disciplines, the participants explored the relationship between the emerging field of Hmong/Hmong American Studies and Asian American Studies. Questions of interest included: In what ways has Asian American Studies informed Hmong/Hmong American Studies, or failed to do so? In what ways does Hmong/Hmong American Studies enrich/challenge Asian American Studies? What are the tensions between these two fields and other related fields? How do/should the new programs in Hmong/Hmong American Studies relate to the existing Asian American Studies programs regarding curriculum, activism and/or resource allocation

Between Big City and Authentic Village: Branding the Small Chinese City

While recent academic research has already produced an impressive corpus on big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, the small Chinese city has been mostly ignored. In this article, I suggest that consideration of the small city can bring a new perspective on the wider urban fabric of which it is an element. Although small city governments have embraced urban entrepreneurialism with the same enthusiasm as China’s big cities, different configurations of space, branding and the everyday have nevertheless resulted. My case study of Kaili in Guizhou province indicates that the small city exists in a complex relationship with the big city and the village; it is pulled towards large-scale urbanization while simultaneously attempting to construct a unique city image based upon the evocation of rural cultural practices. The perspective from the small city thus suggests the need to consider the rural-urban divide – long a dominant geographical imagination of China – alongside other geographies, including a triad of the small city, the village and the big city

Cultural Contestation in China: Ethnicity, Identity and the State

This chapter explores how the political-administrative design of the Chinese state, characterized as “multi-level governance”, might be the cause of more subtle forms of resistance. By looking at the formulation of heritage policies of Lancang County, Christina Maags illustrates how the administrative fragmentation resulted in both administrative contestation and cultural contestation, with a threatened local identity at its core

Ideological blackening, masculinity and comparative racialization: Situating Southeast Asian Americans

This contribution uses a comparative racialization framing to revisit Aihwa Ong’s notion of ideological blackening as applied to Southeast Asian refugee youth. Examining a case study of a Hmong teen in Wisconsin who received a long adult sentence based on his imputed gangster status, it disrupts generalized attributions to East Asian Americans of femininity and honorary whiteness. It interrogates instead the specific conditions that allow Southeast Asian newcomer young men to be treated as racially unmarked but implicitly “blackened” in the American racial order, and thereby sometimes subject to the state violence, excessive policing, and judicial overreach that have been denounced for Black Americans