Introduction to Anglophone Cultural Studies

1
Introduction to Anglophone Cultural Studies
Session 2 Chinatowns, Diaspora, Post-Colonialism
Chinatown, London
Chinatown, New York
Chinatown, San Francisco
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Outline of todays lecture

• Organizational Things Again
• Part I Chinatowns
• Part II The Term Diaspora
• Part III Postcolonial Theory and Criticism

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Organizational Things...

• Books/ background reading material
• Paul S. Boyer, The Enduring Vision
• Concise 4th edition (2001) 0-618-10198-5
  (approx. 33 Euros)
• Concise 5th edition (2006) 0-618-47382-3
  (approx. 70 Euros)
• Hardcover new edition (2007) 0-618-80159-6
  (approx. 53 Euros)
• PPPs
• Handouts
• Stinshoff/Schwarzkopf again
• Refer to the Email sent around by Olaf Simons
• Anything else?

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Exercise What is mediated here?
The theater in Chinatown was crowded to the
doors. Every night actors brought from Canton
played and sang the old Chinese operas. If Billy
Pan, the manager, announced a deficit at the end
of the end of the lunar year, businessmen
contributed money to cover it. The theater was a
bulwark of home to them. Their children went to
American schools, spoke the American language,
acted like American children. The fathers and
mothers were not highly educated people, and they
could not express to the children what China was,
except that it was their own country, which must
not be forgotten. But in the theater the children
could see for themselves what China was. (Pearl
S. Buck, Kinfolk) bulwark barricade sth.
serving as a defense or safeguard
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Notes

• Immigrants did not cut their ties to China
• Difficult adaptation processes characterized by
• cultural change and social conflict,
• integration and pluralism
• Where do I belong problem of rootedness? And
  what are the consequences?
• The consequences of refugee and/or immigration
  experience the difficulty to craft an identity
  out of the unusual hybrid experience and
  upbringing of children
• The difficulty of transmitting an idea of China
  to their children they want their children to
  know about their origin aligned to that is
  the problem, then, what China can be conceived of
  as authentic? The Chinese Opera?

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Chinatowns

• How would you define Chinatowns?
• Section within an urban area (e.g. New York City)
  with a large number of Chinese living outside of
  China
• What are Chinatowns?
• Ethnic urban enclave miniature Chinas?
• Segregated ghettos?
• Immigrant settlements (e.g. Little Italy?)
• Chinatown in San Francisco first to be
  established outside Asia
• The term Chinatown
• Chinatowns came to represent Chineseness
• Then and now different conceptions?!

7
Now...

• center for commercialism, consumption, tourist
  attraction, food, venues for, e.g. Hollywood
  films?
• 1990s Las Vegas Chinatown, Chinatown Plaza
• http//www.lvchinatown.com/

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Then...

• Chinese immigration
• first period 1848/9-1882
• second period 1882-1965
• third period 1965 to the present
• the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s

• 1862 Congress authorized the construction of a
  transcontinental railroad
• completed in 1869
• Last Spike, 1869

• Job positions
• e.g. on the Transcontinental Railroad
• mine workers

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What do the cartoons suggest about public
sentiment towards Chinese immigrants?
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Discriminatory Laws

• Hall vs. People (1856)
• special taxes on "foreign" miners and Chinese
  fishermen
• 1870 The Naturalization Act
• Excludes Chinese from citizenship
• prohibits the wives of Chinese laborers from
  entering the United States
• 1875 The Page Law
• forbids the entry of Chinese, Mongolian, and
  Japanese contract laborers, prostitutes, and
  felons
• Exclusion Act (1882-1943)
• 1892 The Geary Act

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The Chinese Exclusion Act

• United States Government passed the Chinese
  Exlusion Act in 1882
• the first immigration restriction law aimed at a
  single ethnic group.
• The Act prohibits the entry of Chinese laborers
  into the United States
• Economic consequences
• into small import-export businesses
• into labor-intensive manufacturing and
• into service industries (laundry, domestic work,
  and restaurants)
• into agriculture in rural communities in
  California
• The Geary Act (1892)
• All Chinese in the United States are required to
  carry registration certificate

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20th Century

• The Exclusion Act repealed during WWII
• The Magnuson Acts sets a quota of 105 Chinese
  immigrants a year.
• The repeal allowed Chinese-American veterans to
  bring their families
• During the 1960s
• 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act many
  of the basic rights denied Chinese Americans were
  restored
• The end of the Vietnam War brought a wave of
  Vietnamese refugees of Chinese descent, who put
  their own stamp on San Francisco Chinatown

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Chinatowns, summarized

• Complex urban phenomena shaped by, e.g.
• immigration politics,
• colonial history
• trade relations,
• commercial exchanges,
• exploitation, and nowadays in particular by
• tourism
• Chinatowns differ (depending on location)
• What are Chinatowns?
• Chinatowns diasporic phenomena?

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Part II The Term Diaspora

• Diasporic?
• Diaspora?
• Etymol. Greek
• dispersion, from diaspeirein, to spread about
• dia- apart
• dia- speirein, to sow, scatter (of seeds)
• the dispersion or spreading of something that was
  originally localized

(Simplistic) Definition The term diaspora
describes an ethnic community that because of
expulsion (Ausweisung/Vertreibung) or emigration
has spread from an original center to at
least two peripheral places.
15
Dinh Q. LêVietnamese-American Artist
Personal Memories, 2003
Born in 1968,  Hà-Tiên,  Viêt Nam In 1978 his
family emigrated to Los Angeles Major theme real
and imagined memories of the Vietnam War
Persistence of memory no.8, 2001
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Historical Context

• Vietnamese-American the difficulty to craft an
  identity out of an unusual hybrid experience
• 1975 1990 more than 2 million refugees left
  Viêt Nam, Laos, and Cambodia (figure 1)
• about 1.5 million resettled in Australia, Western
  Europe, and North America.
• Viêt Nam, Laos, Cambodia former French colony of
  Indochina
• refugee crisis owing to the cold war

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South East Asia

• Laos and Cambodia under French colonial rule
  until 1953
• Viêt Nam until 1954 (Fall of Dien Bien Phu)
• American intervention in Viêt Nam
• Domino theory US foreign policy prevent
  Communist
• 1961 the U.S. signs a treaty with Saigon to help
  the South in Viêt Nam
• 1965 first combat troops land in Danang
• 1973 last American troops leave Viêt Nam
• 1975 Fall of Saigon (North wins)

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1975-

• official reunification as the Socialist Republic
  of Vietnam (1976)
• all other political parties are banned,
• reeducation camps
• estimated 1 million people were imprisoned
  without formal charges or trials

• boat people
• Viêt Kieu (Vietnamese-American)
• Vietnamese Diaspora

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Diasporas

• To repeat The term diaspora describes an ethnic
  community that because of expulsion or
  emigration has spread from an original center
  to at least two peripheral places
• Diasporic identity/ies
• Diaspora term gained importance in social
  science, cultural studies and literary studies

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Part III Postcolonial Theory Criticism

• Diaspora and Postcolonial Studies
• 1980s and 1990 central discourse in Cultural
  Studies
• Key topics/issues/areas of concern
• (Im)-Migration zones of contact and contestation
• Imperialism
• Economic, political cultural legacies/inequities
  caused by colonialism
• Theorists/critics/writers (selective) Edward
  Said, Arif Dirlik, Benedict Anderson, Homi K.
  Bhabha Gayatri Spivak, Robert Young, Robin
  Cohen, Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, Salman
  Rushdie, and many more!

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Terms explained

• 1) Colonialism
• expansion
• recurrent feature of human history
• conquest and control of other peoples land and
  goods
• 2) Imperialism
• OED imperialism pertaining to Empire
  (defined as political system)
• defined as economic system system of penetration
  and control of markets
• processes that lead to domination and control
• Imperial country the center
• Colony the place which the center penetrates
  and controls

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What is the post?

• Post in a temporal sense after
• By 1930s, colonies and ex-colonies covered
  approx. 85 of the land surface of the globe.
• Only parts of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan,
  Mongolia, Tibet, China, Siam and Japan had never
  been under formal European government
  (Fieldhouse, 1989)
• So post after colonialism?
• Post-colonial used to cover cultures affected by
  the imperial process from the moment of
  colonization to the present day

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Post ...

• Post-colonial theory involves discussions about
  experience of various kinds
• migration,
• slavery, suppression, resistance,
• representation,
• difference,
• race, gender, place,
• Post-colonial theory responses to the influential
  master discourses of imperial Europe
• None of these is essentially post-colonial, but
  together they form the complex fabric of the
  field. (Ashcroft/Griffiths/Tiffin)

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What do postcolonial critics do?

• Post-colonial literature is writing by members
  of marginalized groups writers who are
  struggling to find voices in which to express the
  world view of their groups, who are struggling to
  be heard and to be understood, who are struggling
  against cultural hegemony and assimilation and
  neo-colonialism.
• Postcolonial critics analyze these writings
• Lets be more precise here

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Contd...

• radically question expansionist imperialism of
  colonizing powers,
• critically reflect on the relationship between
  colonizer and colonized
• study the effects of cultural displacement that
  followed colonial conquest,
• explore consequences for personal and communal
  identities,
• examine ways of resistance and defense
• analyze the role of literature in the production
  of cultural representation
• foreground questions of cultural difference and
  diversity

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Some terms found/used/elaborated on

• Ethnicities
• Hybridity cross-overs
• Identity
• Binary oppositions
• Self and Other(ness)
• Colonization and de-colonization
• Exoticism Orientalism
• Nationality nation-state citizenship
• Power
• See, for example Loomba, Ania.
  Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. London New
  York Routledge, 2005.

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Stop think

• Developments in the field of postcolonial studies
• New approaches in postcolonial studies
• why?
• Global changes and processes of migration
• old terminology no longer suffices
• Diasporas from negative connotation to
• a term that allows for an approach to global
  phenomena in society, culture and literature that
  denounces simplistic nation-state categorization
• Refer to Mayer, Ruth. Diaspora Eine kritische
  Begriffsbestimmung. Cultural Studies 14. Ed.
  Rainer Winter. Bielefeld transcript, 2005.