this is a journal writing about the reading and all the YouTube the video you watch in the class I will attach all the reading material and videos.
Unit 5: World War II and its impact of Asian American Religions: From Melting Pot to Religious Pluralism
Read assigned readings, watch lecture and videos,
Susan Martin. “Nation of Refuge,” in Nation of Immigrants (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 220-250.
Joseph Tamney, “Buddhism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Society, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/buddhism.htm (Links to an external site.)
Irene Lin, “Journey to the Far West: Chinese Buddhism in America,” in Amerasia Journal 22:1 (1996), pp. 107-132
Jonathan H. X. Lee, “Guangong: The Chinese God of War and Literature in America – From Celestial Stranger to Common Culture (1850-1012 C.E.),” in Asian American Identities and Practices: Folkloric Expressions in Everyday Life (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014).
Immigration Reform Post-1965 and Changing Religious Landscape
https://sfsu.instructure.com/courses/33984/external_tools/retrieve?display=borderless&resource_link_lookup_uuid=800414e3-6732-40b7-a883-943d654e9a39
Religious Racialization
Legacies of Discrimination
PowerPoint
This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she sweeps west; she holds a school book. The different stages of economic activity of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation.
Occident
Orient
Christian Supremacy
non-Christian
White Supremacy
Asian
American Exceptionalism + Manifest Destiny
Threat to White-Christian purity
Ideology that is put into practice due to: economic motivation and job competition.
America’s racial hierarchy
White
Black
Native Americans
Where do the Asians fit?
Racial hierarchy
Real world materialization
Racist policies
anti-Asian immigration and exclusion
denial of naturalization rights
In discussion of politics and immigration, religion has often time been left out of the equation:
Christianity supremacy fuel white supremacy and white racism.
Religious racialization = expression of Christian and white supremacy
this is example of what the journal supposed to look like. 👇🏾
When taking in this week’s readings I really tried to keep in mind how Southeast Asians were either partaking in civic engagement or being politically apathetic. What I found was that in some cases, Southeast Asians were never intentionally being politically apathetic, more so that they simply didn’t have the resources or that there were language barriers in place that didn’t allow for them to be politically engaged. These restrictions seemed to be more at play in Kanjana Thepborituk’s Translation Counts: Comparative Analysis of Thai Texts for the 2010 U.S. Census, as well as in Adelaide Chen’s Census 2010: Counting the Burmese Poses a Particular Challenge. In Thepborituk’s piece it became obvious that due to culturally irrelevant translations, too many translations, and initially no translations of the U.S. Census, Thai Americans had a hard time participating and being actively engaged. With the presence of the THAIS’ translation of the census, however, Thai communities could begin to take part in a census that was culturally relevant in its translation. As Thepborituk puts it: “The availability of Thai texts in the 2010 Census signaled the official arrival of Thais into immigrant discourses in the United States,” (Thepborituk, 68). Once there was a census that was culturally relevant, Thai Americans could become civically engaged and grow past being lost within the “Other Asian’ category.
Similarly, in Chen’s piece, an issue of needed aid to understand the Census as well as very real fears of exposure are present. As Lorraine Lee stated in the article, “…I see there’s a lot of barriers for them, challenged, because of the language,” (Chen, 62). Without someone there to help with translations it appears that many Burmese populations are at risk of appearing politically and civically unengaged. There also appears to be a lack of Americans who speak Burmese and languages of the Karen minority. In regard to fear of exposure, it seems as though there is a fear that by taking part in the Census, Burmese families will be exposed for living with one unit.
Contrasting to Thepborituk and Chen’s articles, in Yuanxi Huang’s Laotian Community Fights Chevron, the Laotian community of Richmond is not seen at all as politically apathetic, but instead triumphs as being civically engaged. When reading this article, I grasped that throughout the last 15 years, the Laotian community of Richmond has sought to educate fellow Laotians and remain seen and heard within their broader community. Through educating one another, fighting to transgress language barriers, and standing up against large corporations, such as Chevron, the Laotian community has been civically engaged and have sought, “‘to make sure people understand that they can-not just understand-that they can fight against injustice policy,’” (Huang, 150).
Works Cited
1) Chen, Adelaide. “Census 2010: Counting the Burmese Population Poses a Particular Challenge.” Contemporary Issues in Southeast Asian American Studies, by Jonathan H. X. Lee and Roger Viet Chung, Cognella Academic Publishing, 2013, pp. 61–63.
2) “Civic Engagement 101.” YouTube, 24 Jan. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrmwYdp6gU&t=181s.
3) Huang, Yuanxi. “Laotian Community Fights Chevron.” Contemporary Issues in Southeast Asian American Studies, by Jonathan H. X. Lee and Roger Viet Chung, Cognella Academic Publishing, 2013, pp. 149–151.
4) Thepborituk, Kanjana. “Translation Counts: Comparative Analysis of Thai Texts for the 2010 U.S. Census.” Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States: Memories and Visions, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, by Jonathan H. X. Lee, Cambridge Scholars, 2015, pp. 47–72.