Notions of authenticity are a running theme in the chapters I’ve read so far in East Main Street. In this post, I’ll be looking at authenticity in the three chapters for this week’s reading.
What does it mean to be Asian or Asian American? Where do the borders between race, ethnicity and nationality lie? Who is “authentically” Asian, and what right do they have to engage with Asian cultures outside of their ethnicity/nationality?

In the chapter “Model Minorities Can Cook”, Anita Mannur focuses on dissecting Asian fusion cuisine. She uses two celebrity chefs as focal points for her argument, Padma Lakshmi and Ming Tsai. Questions of authenticity arise when looking at the way that both chefs present (and subsequently commodify) a wide range of Asian cooking styles outside of their respective cultures or training. They claim all of Asian cuisine as their own, with no regard for establishing a pan-Asian culture, instead, ”Asianness, as it filters into their respective culinary styles, emerges as something that they instinctively understand because they are Asian American” (85).

In ” ‘Alllooksame’? Mediating Asian American Visual Cultures of Race on the Web” the website alllooksame.com  is put under scrutiny. The website has a series of quizzes to test the user in identifying Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. Lisa Nakamura purposes that alllooksame challenges notions of authenticity by putting the user in the role of racial profiler. Who is Japanese? Who is Korean? The inevitable failure of the user in correctly categorizing “Asian” faces leads to the questioning and eventual discarding of essentializing notions of race. Alllooksame.com disconnects race from the realm of the visual, and reveals the role of the user in participating in the construction of race, “By calling into question what “Asian” is, at least in visual terms, Suematsue is interrogating the basis upon which racial taxonomies like ‘asian’ are built” (267).

Like Nakamura, Shilpa Dave locates race outsides of the body in “Apu’s Brown Voice”. Dave interrogates the role of accents in relation to power and cultural citizenship. Using the character of Apu from The Simpsons, Dave introduces the concept of “brown voice” to describe the particular Indian English accent that is mimicked by a white voice actor for the character of Apu. Brown voice homogenizes South Asian immigrant cultures, and because of the history of British colonialism, it aligns itself more closely with whiteness than with Asian American identity. Dave questions the authenticity of accent in performing Indianness. By performing brown voice, the user gains control over how they are going to be culturally received because of the accents association with class privilege. Examining the legacy of “mimicry” and the creation of the colonial subject, one is lead to question notions of authenticity in regards to voice and accent.