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Orientals

The Coolie and the Making of the White Working Class

COOLIE: cheap Chinese labor. In 1970 and 1850 has been called the “period of proletarianization” Prices were set by craftsmen which gave way to wages set by employers.  Artisans and independent small producers still represented a large portion of the economy.pg. 55  women, children, and immigrant labor. immigrant labor was being introduced into factories as well as new machinery. This new machinery obviously reduced the need for skilled work, but opened up sho doors to immigrant workers with minimum training and apprenticeship.

Though immigration employment in factorys was big, the spread was uneven among jobs. native born anglo-saxon men maintained their privilegded position in such industries as iron molding, furniture making, and ropemaking. Immigrant women &children worked in textiles and clothing factories and replaced native born women. Irish and French canadian catholics entered the shoe making factories. HOWEVER, machinery threatened the need for these skilled workers. (55) Different kinds of work for different wages & payments. Chinese  v. Irish. anti-chinese groups prominent in those groups, chinese saw irish and short-tempered and undisciplined. The 200 whites that worked with the 600 chinese attacked their neighborhood killing 15 and wounding more. This act barred many Chinese from entering the country. Chinese later tried to mend things with white workers, but whites resisted.

White men worried that chinese will be married to white women. (72 &74) Many women who did marry Chinese men were Irish. These interracial marriages disrupted the Irish men community…(76) Half-breeds (82).

The Third Sex

(85)third sex is  oriental sexuality constructed as ambiguous, inscrutable, and hermaphroditic. male or female Oriental (the third sex). pg 86 [family is more depicted]. Sexual/questionable ones are where? Different ways they see thier sexuality presented. Chinese prostitutes are bound to corrupt the minds of young white men. 94- women & families=racial questions if interracial.

 

Orientals

The “Heathen Chinee” on God’s Free Soil

California as it was and is: False claims in the song. Chinee miners in the mining districts of Cali had NTHING to do with the decline in gold prices. The song created a nostalgiz pastoral vision of CA for nineteenth-century American audiences.Popular musc offered a powerful medium for an ideology of nostalgia. Many of the songs were not ethnological and pirated.(17) Goes over mining, steamer days and how great it was (18-19). Between 1848 and 1851 some 22000 chinese had arrived and doubled within the next two years. The arrival of the Chinese ruined the nostalgic tone for California. TRADES: fur trade, hide trade, CA merchants developed a near-monopoly on the HI and Philippine trade, built a respectable trade with Japan and shared the China trade with NY. Chinese immigration was part of the global working class migration that fuled SF’s explosive population growth in 1850s and 1860s. CA also attracted immigrants from the hinterlands of Europe, Latin America, and Asia. (ENTIRE WORLD-WIDE WORKING CLASS MIGRATING TO ECON CORE)(22-23). in 1850′s erratic economy (24) Many Chinese settlers in CA undermined the definition of Oriental difference which relied on distance…construction of racial different as present at threatenin. FEW V THE MANY(28) PAGE 31 [p 2 china not jus for trade, but for workers...museum in china vs. ordinary chinese stuff in US]. Chinese is to blame for the past and having it go away. (32) MINSTREL show became an entertainment for the new urban working class. minstrel was seen as the construc to Chinese polluting the racial other in the popular imagination. (siamese twins) (32). the show contained and displayed a line up of raceial and ethnic characters. Minstresley can be understood as the ritual response to boundary crisis. Zipcoon represented freedom w/o self control needed for republican virtue. the ideological representation of chinese immigrant as racial other relied on trope insurmountable cultural difference.  CULTURAL DEGREGATION. made fun of pidgen, hair, food, syntax, vocabulary, symbols. pg 43- yellowskins get out! free persons of color v 5 broad positions. (47) LASTLY, there is like a revenge from the whites by cutting pay, labor, and resources

Orientals

Introduction

“Yellowface” makes the Asian body as unmistakably Oriental. Only Orientals are yellow, not Asians. Asia is a place, a big place, so there are many colors and hues. Orientals have overbites, slanted eyes, and mustard yellow skin color=socially defined as markers of racist differences. What does yellowface signify?  Race is a mode of placing cultural meaning o the body. Yellowface marks the Oriental as indelibly alien.(2)

  • POLLUTION: objects or persons perceived to be out of place. They create a sense of disorder symbolicaly and anomaly in the structure of society. A source of pollution: Aliens/foreigners.
    Foreign v Alien Foreign objects are not always alien, only those whose presence disrupts the nattative structure of the community. FOREIGN: refers to that which outside or distant, while ALIEN describes things that are immediate and present yet have a foreign nature. Only when the freign is present does it become alien. Alien v foreign is like immigrant vs. tourist. So if an outsider comes without an intention to leave it becomes an alien. Only when aliens exit or are “naturalized” (cleansed of their foreignness and remade) can they shed their status as polltants. Alienness is both a formal and political/legal status and an informal, but no less powerful cultural status
  • Takao Ozawa was the denied the right to “naturalize” because he had Japanese “blood.” US v Thind, an Indian immigrant who was already an American by naturalization was stripped of his citizenship because his blood is not white blood.(3)

    POPULAR CULTURE AND RACE

  • The Supreme Courts “understanding” is a legal fiction. It gives popular conventio, the common sense of “real” Americans, the power to define race. Popular convention has the power.(5)
  • popculture is a process, a set of cultural practices that define Amrican nationality-who “real” americans are in any historical moment. nationality v citizenship CITIZENSHIP:carries the implicit assumption of promise if equality, at least in political and legal terms, while NATIONALITY contains and manages the contradictions of hierarchies and equalities of social formation. (6) Race can be “invisible” or camouflaged or rendered invisible, but once produced as a category of social difference it is present everywhere in the social formation and deeply imbedded in popular culture. RACE WILL ALWAYS BE THERE & SEEN. RACE IS POPULAR CULTURE.

    • SIX FACES OF ORIENTAL

  • The POLLUTANT: originated in mid nineteenth-century California. The Chinese constituted the alien presence in america. the chinese was both identified with the moral chaos of the gold rush and portrayed as the harbigers of industrial wage slavery.
  • the COOLIE: came about the US working class was formed in the 1870s and 1880s. chinese immigrants found themselves segregated into racially defined state of subordination as “coolie labor” the UNfree, servile, a threat to the white working mans family. (even though they came to america as FREE workers).
  • the DEVIANT: a figure of forbidden desire. the deviant represents the possibility of alternative desire in a period which middle class gender roles and sexual behavior were being codified and naturalized into a rigid heterosexual cult of domesticity. WOMEN WERE FORCED INTO PROSTITUTION. Men were then brought in to be domestic house servants.
  • the YELLOW PERIL: A threat to the nation, family, and race.
  • the MODEL MINORITY: popularly identified in the late 1960s and 1970s. a mythology substituted a narrative of national modernization and athnict assimilation through heterosexuality familialism and consumption. MODEL MINORITY: THE PERFECT WORKER.
  • since the 1970s, the model minorty image has coexiste and reinfoced a representation of the Asian American as a GOOK.
  • the GOOK: Asian american represented as the invisible enemy and the embodiement of inauthentic racial and national identities.

    with all these stereotypes NON of these have been created by the ACTUAL LIVES of asian americans.

    • Week 3 Class Notes…

    -racialiscious.com

    -How I Met Your Mother

    -ANA Airlines commercial

    -Chozen (TV Series)

    -Richard Sherman

    -Culture: “The integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, actions, and artifacts and depends on man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations, the customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial religious or social group (Webster’s Definition)

    -Pop Culture: Examples: Ethnic culture, Evergreen Culture, Athlete Culture, Gender Culture, 60′s culture, ETC.

    people/groups/places/time

    John Storey’s ‘Ideas of Pop Culture’

    1. “Culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people.” (quantitative, how much money it brings in?)

    2. “Culture which is left over after we have decided which is high culture.” (Who decides what high culture is? People with money, power, etc.)

    3. “Mass Culture”

    4. “Culture that originates from ‘the people” (Who are the people ?!)

    5. Culture rooted in exchange and negotiation between [dominant and subordinate groups]”

    6. “[in a postmodern terrain] culture which no longer recognizes distinctions.”

    -Stereotype:

    Greek- Stereos: hard, fixed ; Typos: blows, impressions

    -Orientals: Paull Shin wanted the word ‘oriental’ out of books.

    Whats wrong with oriental? — Oriental is a rug, it is a racial category that lumps all Asians together, “Far East”, The West defined them as being far away, Euro Centric

    -Yellow Face: reference to ‘Black Face’ (1830′s-1840′s) , marks them as orientals, “opposition to whiteness”

     

    Class Notes Jan 23rd,2014

    Last day to change obsessions is Monday.

    Radicialious (sp) website for Asian Studies,other zines and blogs.

    Pop Culture: Playground or battleground

    Selling airlines,meeting mothers,Katy Perry,How I met your Mother and other racial sterotypes.

    “Coded language” using racial slurs in history and present.

    Culture:The intergrated pattern pof human behaviour that includes thought,speech,action and artifacts;depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge yto succeeding generations;the customary beliefs,social forms and material traits of a racial,religious,or social group.

    PoP Culture: “Culture Theory and Popular Culture”

    -culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people.

    -culturfe which is left over after we have decided what is high culture.

    -mass culture

    -culture which originates from “the people”

    -culture rooted in exchange and negotitation between dominant and subordinate groups.

    -(in post modern terrain) culture which no longer recognizes distinctions

    -Antonio Gramsai(hegemony)

    hegemony-indirect form of government and of imperial dominace in which the hegemon (leader state) rules geopoliticially subordinate states by the implied means if power, the threat of force,rather than by direct military force.

    -Gramsci’s(1891-1937) theory is one social class can manipulate the system of values and mores of a society,in order to create and establish a ruling class.

    -sterotyper-n.-something conforming to a fixed or general pattern;especially:a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified attitude or uncritical judgement.

    -Eurocentrism-centered or focused on Europe or European peoples especially in relation to historical/cultural influence.

    -”Far East”; wilderness (American context)

    -”yellowface”-slang-people of ASian background or racial sterotyping of Asian ideals or people. Historically used to incite the common man to racial superiority or violence by journalism,race riots etal

    Movie: “The Debut”

    January 23, 2014 Notes

    -Week 9 is “Anime Week Wong”-No presentations planned for this class
    -Tom Ikeda will be visiting Evergreen campus on February 27, 2014
    -Racialicious blogs
    -ANA commercial, HIMYM, Katy Perry’s geisha outfit, and racial slurs in response to Richard Sherman
    +Coded language used against Sherman
    -Category “What’s the big deal?” on race issues
    -Culture: “the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action, and artifacts and depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations; the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group” (Webster)
    +Nerd, stoner, counter, car, Evergreen, athlete, historians, gendered, 60s, 90s, artifacts
    +Culture does not have to be defined by people, but also by place, time, and objects
    +Transmission of continuity, differed by “dead cultures”
    -Definitions of culture
    +Definitions are, by John Storey,”culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people”, “culture which is left over after we decided what is high culture”, “mass culture”, “culture which originates from ‘the people’”, “culture rooted in exchange and negotiation between [dominant and subordinate groups]“, “[in a postmodern terrain], culture which no longer recognizes distinctions”
    +For “the people” has to be defined, possibly the majority, or working class
    +Culture is a battleground
    +Postmodernism is a set of ideas usually found in the arts that define things are relevant (?)
    -Post-Structuralism: “If you can’t make it, fake it and over explain it”
    +”I wish it was like the good ol’ days,” PS “Which good ol’ days? The days people lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation?”
    -Popular Culture: (Storey’s story)
    -Antonio Gramsci (hegemony, Greek for “power of leadership)
    +Hegemony are people in power who use manipulate the mechanisms to stay in power
    -Stereotype: (Stereos = hard, fixed; typos = blow, impression)
    -The term “Oriental” in Latin means “in the East”
    -Eurocentrism: “Far East”; “wilderness” (American context)
    -Eric Lott, most provocative minstrel writer
    +Proposed white Americans hated black culture, but liked black culture; complex phenomenon

    -News “ANA”

    I want to share this interesting news, because this news is the opposite side from the news which is “HIMYM” our last weekend’s assignment.

    ANA which is one of Japanese airline company made fun of foreigner person in the advertisement. Here is the link more detail;

    http://news.yahoo.com/japanese-airline-sorry-over-39-racist-39-commercial-041244706.html?soc_src=mediacontentsharebuttons

    And I found the advertisement movie;

    Click here to view the embedded video.

    Orientals’ Reading to p.50

    I never heard of Orientals referred to as rugs until after reading this passage. In the book Orientals, the first 50 pages go over through plenty of information concerning 1800s America. While the beginning half just went over stuff that didn’t quite catch my attention, the latter half turned out to be interesting. The one thing that kept getting mentioned plenty of times was minstrels, small bands that played tunes and songs about the world around them. The minstrels would sing songs of “John Chinaman” and how he is not to be trusted, such as how they sang about John Chinaman came here to steal all the gold or refuse to trade. These minstrels often incorporated stereotypical Chinese Engrish into their songs to describe how “inferior” the Chinese were.

    Another thing that was interesting was the Siamese twins Chang and Eng. Normally the Americans would act negatively to Chinese immigrants, but when these people saw Chang and Eng, they were astonished. Chang and Eng became a traveling attraction and married the Yates sisters, ending up with 22 children altogether. Apparently a bizarre Chinese worker is more acceptable in society than a normal Chinese worker. I don’t think American men back then would not allow the Chinese men to interact with their women, but for Chang and Eng they made an exception.

    Finally there was the white mens’ “revenge” on the Chinese laborers.  Aside from cutting their quenes, or payment, for labor, the whites pursued the activity of cutting off a Chinese man’s pigtail. To the Americans, it reminded them of the times they did scalping on Native American heads. Loss of a Chinese man’s pigtail indicated a loss of status of age and class. Americans did this to vent out frustrations and to display that the Chinese were no better than “savage Indians”.