So keeping up with looking at Racialicious for the scissors category. While there were no post about API’s necessarily in the news there was a post on comedy: Friday morning comedy videos: Akilah Hughes and Hari Kondabolu, which shows a clip from Hari Kondabolu upcoming album Waiting for 2042. If you don’t want to watch a funny three minute video, he basically talks about the “white minority” prediction in 2042 and how stupid everyone’s freak out is about it, by not only pointing out that 49% of white is not a minority unless the other 51% is just “you people” but also how race is made up. I personally appreciated that part because Hari gave a great example of asking white people what their culture is and the rattle off these percentages of different European countries instead of say “White culture” in reference to Black and Asian cultures.
Part 1 Chapter 1
I’ve started looking up some texts that have to do with gender and race in video games and I’m gonna start reading them and writing my preconceptions of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Z.O.T.) in light of the texts. If people know of anything please pass it along!
First up this week is an article coming from Cracked.com, 5 Prejudices That Video Games Can’t Seem to Get Over by J.F. Sargent. The five categories talked about are: “Racism as a Gameplay Mechanic; Relationship Mini-Games Create Exclusively Unhealthy Relationships; Strong Female Characters (Are More Satisfying to Demean); There Are No Gay Men, Just Lesbians (And Those Chicks Can Be Converted); The Fundamentals of Game Design Make Racism Easier”. Except for the, “There Are No Gay Men, Just Lesbians (And Those Chicks Can Be Converted)” and somewhat the “Relationship Mini-Games Create Exclusively Unhealthy Relationships” part of this list, I feel that the prejudices are very relevant to Z.O.T.
“Racism as a Gameplay Mechanic”:
In this section Sargent talks about how depending on characters race/humanoid species they have certain characteristics that are solely because they come from that race. Sargent also points out that most of the races are based off of real races and use real stereotypes for portrayals. Sargent just so happened to mention the Gerudo race in Zelda as one of the examples. Sargent states that they are based off of Gypsies, and I would say have some Indian undertones as well and are referred to as a the “thieving Gerudo race.” It’s also pointed out that Ganondorf (for those of you unfamiliar to the game he is the protagonist), who is the only male of that race (I’ll get into the male part later), is a non-white character and is very power hungry. Looking further though the other races in the game from Gorons, and Zoras to Kokiri and Sheikan all of them have certain characteristics that end up affecting Link (who is the Hero).
“Relationship Mini-Games Create Exclusively Unhealthy Relationships”:
Sergent uses this space to talk about how female characters are used in romantic ways in video games for the hero’s gain, and how in some games these relationships are based off of what character you chose to play. However in Zelda it’s pretty simple, while there is only one obvious “romantic” relationship, all of Link’s interactions with females in up with him gaining something from them. Starting with his friend Saria, she gives him an ocarina, and ends up being one of the seven sages who’s power helps him bet Ganondorf. Till the last female character Link encounters, Nabooru, who sorta ends up forfeiting the Silver Gauntlets and also ends up being one of the seven Sages.
Gerudo Gaurd
“Strong Female Characters (Are More Satisfying to Demean)”:
Basically the more independent and stronger a female character is, the less clothes she is wearing or the more sexed up she is. While there are a lot of female characters in Z.O.T. the most independent one is Impa who is Princess Zelda’s bodyguard and then there is the clothing for the women of the Gerudo race. While Impa’s outfit is nothing compared to
Impa
the Gerudo’s, compared to other females that war dresses, she is in a skin tight short body suit that accent her boobs. As a race the Gerudo only have a male born every hundred years and besides that they are all women which makes them pretty independent from men and because they are thieves they need to guard their treasures. They wear low cut pants and basically bras.
“The Fundamentals of Game Design Make Racism Easier”:
This basically talks about how the bad people in video games are usually people of color and that you need to kill them in the game. It’s pretty obvious from the other implications with the Ganondorf, but in case you’ve missed it he’s non-white and evil and you need to kill him in the game to win.
East Main Street and The Wedding Banquet- Deals with Language
In the movie the Wedding Banquet it was pretty awesome to witness that the father of Wai-Tung spoke English. Not only did his son not know that he spoke English but his own wife didn’t know that he spoke English. When Wai-Tung, his partner, Simon, and Wai-Tungs roommate/pretend wife/babies mother got into a fight the father was telling the mother “mind your own business, don’t bother.” Even though he was actually listening and understanding what they were talking about. He finally went to the Simon and told him that he was happy that he made his son happy. The movie made it seem as if the father would be the one that would be disappointed and upset but in reality he only wanted a grandchild. Not caring who his sons life partner was. The question that went unanswered was why would the father pretend not to speak English? Why would he not talk to his family English? Did he not want his son to know just so he can find out his secrets? Or was it because he didn’t pronounce English words the way Americans thought it should be pronounced?
In chapter 16 in East Main Street the writer talks about Apu from The Simpsons and how he talks in broken English. Apu is shown to be an Indian but voiced by a white man. It explained in the book how the produces thought this would cause a lot of problems but it didn’t because it was such a laughing matter that people didn’t care. I like how the author expressed how this is a problem. Which I believe it is. We are always quick to say its wrong for whites to act as black/brown face and to represent the stereotype of these people but we don’t think its wrong when someone does a voice over to gain a laugh? I honestly wouldn’t stop watching this show because of the voice but I do see how people that know the history and have thought it was wrong can be hypocrites in saying that it was wrong for whites to play black/brown face but when this history continues to relive to find humor they began to think its okay. Would it be that hard for The Simpsons casting crew to hire a South Asian to voice the character of Apu?
I think that even though that the book and the movie deal with language differently it still deals with the same matter of how we look at Asian’s in America. People believe that an Asian man visiting from Taiwan can’t speak english and when you become a citizen or live in America for awhile (Like Apu) you won’t be able to speak English like people that have been living here.
Tuesday Reading
Model Minorities Can Cook
-Rachel Ray ‘diversity and ethnicity in NYC/ fusion cuisine is truly American “because it melds the immigrant palate to mainstream tastes.”‘
-fusion cuisine came into popularity in the 80s and 90s
-Ming Tsai and Padma Lakshmi are faces of fusion cuisine on TV
-”how the public performance of racialized gendered national identity maps onto the public performance of culinarity.” pg 74
-Fusion cuisine placed in same context of diversity, difference and assimilation in US
-myth that fusion cuisine can be separated from the political terrain on which consumers of fusion cuisine are located
-Ming Tsai Asian tastes mingling w/American palate
-”Eastern ingredients makes western food better” never ‘fusion’ rather than even
-Tsai on par with young, high income who usually partake in fusion
-selling his performance as model minority (Yale engineering grad, pro squash career)
-seen as attractive, not feminized or desexualized
-portrayed as assimilated model minority
-Ming’s Quest – him hunting, gathering for ingredients (masculine)
Padma Lakshmi
-exotically ethnic
-Cook book split into different countries (starting w/European)
-Seen as racially ambiguous
-turned into sexual object
-sexualized in the book and on show
-Lakshmi online groups more interested in her sex appeal than her cooking
-both seen as “exotic ethnic” and “assimilated model minority”
-Pg 83 “Lakshmi part of a group of emerging South Asian Americansfor whom ethnicity appears to be an optional adornment”
-pg 83 Fusion only deemed desirable and assimilate…
-knowledge of a range of dishes comes from being Asian
it’s just a story, remember?
Notes
These are probably some better examples of mine, even with unfortunate handwriting.
Music Videos
A mix of my notes & thoughts
Manong/manag – referring to a brother or older male figure typically (Filipino)
‘contentless’ –problems of keeping it real for the black eyed peas
hegemony or hegemonic-fighting the attempted dominance, any language music etc. that defies a mainstream group without shame
black eyed peas are creating music without shame
heavily modified multiculturalism – a tactic that is born of diasporic experiences and rooted in the aesthetic language of Filipino strategies of colonial resistance
bebot, the APL song, where is the love = black eyed peas
Where is the love ended up becoming an overplayed song somewhat and sort of losing its power over time compared to when it first came out.
“As I get older, people get colder” – black eyed peas, where is the love
APL song (black eyed peas)
-remembering and alternate storytelling
bilingualism – song is half Filipino and have English ( back an fourth throughout)
“resistance vernaculars” (tony Mitchell)
-sampling and the dialogics of hip hop (Mikhail bakhtin
“Balita”
loss- the war war 2. When the war was over Filipino fighters had their benefits taken away after them being promised for fighting with the americans against Japan in the war
Bebot a dollar a day a dime a dance reference
Stockton California labor work
No flipinos allowed signed at beginning of video
Generation 1 & 2
Adobo
Definitely not all Filipino girls (I think?)
Mama Filipina
Take me to the phillippines
(in the own separate album unfound??^^ last two)
Blue scholars
HI 808 ( Hawaii. Area code)
Morning of America
Notion of morning and mourning America and the loses occurring through the 1980s
People power and political movement in the Philippines
Caught em shipping arms to Iran for Nicaraguan Contras – weren’t supposed to have contact w Iran but we were selling them arms….big embarrassment for the government (usa)
Asian American in Detroit in the 1980s –idea of all the jobs being taken from american car companies.
-The school of the Americas – help train a lot of future dictators in latin America -Just say NO – started in a classroom with majority African American children and she (teacher) whispered it and was completely obvious to her surroundings
Linsanity
Jeremy Lin has made headlines starting in 2011-2012. He had became a real over night sensation. In the 2011-2012 season Lin was deep on the bench, he was the 15th man.(If watch basketball for even a split second you see that 5 play at a time and might go 8 to 10 deep unless your losing or winning by a lot.) Lin got his break when the coaching strike happened in 2011. This gave the coaches time to really look at Lins work effort. “He was the first to arrive and the last to leave.” Lin has made a big difference for the Asian American basketball community by showing everyone that Asians can play basketball. He has shown people that there shouldn’t be stereotypes regarding basketball because as long as you have skill, color doesn’t matter. Lin has made a difference not only with having millions knowing his name but taking time to run basketball camps in China for children.
“When I was growing up, I was playing in the AAU [amateur] tournaments. We’d be playing games, and a couple times people would be like, ‘Yo, take your ass back to China,’ or like ‘You’re a Chinese import,’ or whatever. When I got to college, it just, like, got crazy. ‘You Chink, can you even open your eyes? Can you see the scoreboard?’ You know, just like crazy stuff.”
I think its sad that when we see an Asian man in the NBA we think its surprising yet when we see a black man or white man we think its completely natural. We think thats where they belong. I think its really inspiring that Jermey is a new(ish) face for basketball players because we see a lot of the Kobe’s, the Lebrons that didn’t go to college but are the face for African Americans trying to become the next superstar. As a basketball player its nice to see someone get a lot of hype for working hard despite all the nasty [(not that Kobe and Lebron didn’t work hard to get where they are).
Thursday reading
“…not much work has been done to carefully examine what it means for white American youth to consume these symbols of ‘otherness.’”
What are the consequences of thinking about, or representing, a culture in one set way? Goa trance is a teenage culture that uses Hindu gods and symbols in their dance clubs, a representation that Hindu and Buddhist people didn’t want to be associated with. Even some of the ‘kids’ at the rave were trying to pull away from their association as ravers and more towards the title ‘dance kids’, in an attempt to pull away from the negative connotations of raves and drug usage.
But while the culture of trance alienates those that it finds as inspiration, music itself has a way of bringing cultures together. “…I’ve always lived in the West, …but for me, the music is a worldwide thing and that’s why it’s so important to me because I feel that it’s a force that can connect us all, regardless of our origins, our gender, our physical characteristics” (pg. 22), “Music at this time had more meaning than just entertainment; it also served the important role of connecting refugees and exiles to the homeland they thought they had lost.” (pg. 35)
not done yet
Week 5, Thursday readings on Davé (focus on article 5)
I’m focusing on “‘Pappy’s House’: ‘Pop’ Culture and the Revaluation of a Filipino American ‘Sixty-Cents’ in Guam¨ by Vincent M. Diaz for this section because of the use of vernacular and because we didn’t discuss it in class. This article also strongly demonstrated the way that context really influences translation and how language has been used both as an oppressive tactic and cultural resistance.
First, the oppressive tactic. The roots and usage of pappy/pappi and then leading to Mammy in this article put the words into a new light. While Diaz illustrates how pappy/pappi has been used to signify race relations (page 104), the use of “papa”, “daddy”, and “padre” in a mixing of languages still produces pappy to signify the patriarchal father figure (page 110). However, Diaz also points out that the use of mammy brings one general archetype to the mind; the women who lived the real life hardships of the Southern Mother without ever being given credit to what she did and how she worked. We do not picture a white southern women when Mammy is mentioned because even if the white women was the female head of the house and the mother of the white children, it was the black women who became the Mammy. And while these are two exact examples that are given in the article it demonstrates how vernacular has been used to impress stereotypes in such a subliminal way that it can be hard to recognize the intent withou knowing the history.
Despite this (and secondly) this vernacular can be the cultural resistance which powerfully remains after physical resistance is pushed down. As discussed in the lecture, resistance vernaculars (Tony Mitchell) usually associated with native/local/indigenous languages. (Those which have been historically ridiculed and used as a way to discriminate.) By using one’s own native/cultural language, and thus vernacular, it is a form of cultural resistance.) It is not only in the actual usage and speaking of the language, but also the reappropriation of terms. Throughout the article Diaz uses vernacular to pull the reader in and to also use words that may not have always been acceptable in an American academic writing. His style goes against the created and accepted “norm” and in doing so he establishes the racist history from where some words came from (107-109) as well as using humor to show how normal the “not normal” truly is. (Seng it out, page 103!!) Contemporary artists do this in mainstream music, such as lecture-introduced artists Blue Scholars and Black Eyed Peas. Both use pop culture and personal history vernacular to challenge their images and their stereotyped identity.
However, another point this article led me to was the response to this year’s Superbowl commercial from Coca Cola:
Click here to view the embedded video.
**Here is where I add that I have no affiliation with Coke and rarely drink it nor do I watch the Superbowl but Go Seahawks and hey, yeah, here’s the commercial**
I wanted to mention this not because I think Coke is doing some amazing thing because I’m sure the speculation on their intentions can go one way or another, but because of the unbelievable response to this commercial! The outrageously racist comments this commercial received demonstrated how native languages other than English are still being majorly rejected. NPR did an interview about the responses to the commercial which can be found here (includes both a written dialogue and audio). I will allow you to make your own judgments on the interview, but I did have a few things I wanted to point out.
1. I don’t speak any of the languages used other than English, but it’s stated the one of the languages is Keres Pueblo. Meaning that every other language used is, at the root of it, an immigrant language.
2. When two people are trying to communicate and both are doing so in different languages, that is frustrating (for both parties). But not being able to speak a language does not inherently mean that one person isn’t trying or that there is a personal attack happening, etc. When I lived in Arizona and came across people who struggled with English because it wasn’t their first language, my frustration did not give me an excuse to be an indecent, rude person. The song “America the Beautiful” is a known song so it being sung in a different language- whether parts of it or the entire thing- is not language barrier. You still know the song.
after all, the truth always sounds the most fake
Bravely Default
One thing that I really adore is turn-based RPGs. As such, this post will be about a game that recently came out in America, Bravely Default.
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The game was only very recently released, having come out last Friday. It’s about a fictional world where the balance is kept by four crystals, and the bad guys are trying to change the order of the world by corrupting the crystals so that people will no longer have faith in them. However, things in the game are not quite as clean cut as in many other games. One of the main character, Edea, is the daughter of the man responsible for trying to corrupt the crystals. She joins your party early on in the game, and has to come to terms over the course of the game with the fact that much of her life has been a lie. Her people have vilified the crystals to such an extent that they believe the people who watch over them to be evil witches. She’d been taught that they were the most wicked beings, when in fact the girls guarding the crystals were priestesses (miko, 巫女, translated as “vestal” for some reason), and are not only seemingly vegetarian but generally pacifistic, and spend the majority of their lives praying to the crystals. Though not necessarily the specific main character, Edea needs to learn throughout the game how the war raging is completely evil not on the part of the crystal worshipers, but on the part of her own family.
I haven’t finished the game yet, but Edea’s route in it so far reminded me a lot of our class, and how we’ve learned a great deal about the way that history is written to not necessarily be accurate. Everyone wants to paint themselves in a good light, even when they have done a great deal of wrong.