Possibilities – serie

From brutal Nazi killers to Hanukkah heroes in the ’hood, tough Jews refute images of doomed Holocaust victims, wandering Jews of exile before them, and the post-war ‘nice Jewish boys’ who followed. They foster belligerent responses to polemics of fear and self-hatred, and as such, materialize as a challenge for postmodern cultural identity. A Culture of Tough Jews reframes the tough Jew as an enduring act of rhetorical regeneration by reifying a related figure, the vital Jew. As corrective to the tough Jew, the vital Jew encourages robust cultural production and dialogue. For audiences of rhetoric and cultural studies, the book offers critical and theoretical study of rhetorical regeneration, including original constructs of postmodern blackface and transformative performativity, as a resource for contemporary rhetorical invention. It also constitutes a case study for the postmodern critique of identity by invoking concerns of (post)assimilation, gender and power, and the social construction of race, ethnicity, class, and power to advance conversations on fractious cultural exigencies. A Culture of Tough Jews is a spirited call for postmodern cultural vitality that responds to contemporary politics of identity and memory.

The first national recognition of disparities in access to information technologies – a digital divide – surfaced in a 1995 report by The National Telecommunication and Information Administration. Despite efforts to close the gap and promote digital inclusion, statistical data over the course of nearly 20 years indicate a significant disparity remains in poor and minority communities. In this accessible yet scholarly work, Joy Pierce illustrates the need to examine the societal status of information technologies at the micro level. Digital Fusion is a sustained and integrated project that combines more than a decade of community participatory research in two regions of the United States. Using qualitative research methods and drawing from critical cultural studies and social theory, Digital Fusion is an interdisciplinary project that engages digital literacy and social justice issues related to race, ethnicity, language, class, and education. Thought-provoking, multi-vocal, and multi-lingual narratives from racial and ethnic minorities as well as institutional administrators lay the groundwork for potential policy implications and digital infrastructure and design. Digital Fusion illuminates the complexities of digital access and use at the micro-level and offers a participatory project that seeks to co-create a digital space; one that speaks to the specific cultural, linguistic, and social needs of underrepresented communities.

Beginning in the 1990s large numbers of women from Mainland China and Southeast Asia married men in Taiwan. They now number over 400,000, warranting some to call them «Taiwan’s Fifth Ethnic Group». This book argues that the rise of these marriages is a gendered and relational phenomenon, linked to the forces of globalization. Traditional ideas of marriage, such as the belief that a woman «marries out» of her natal family to be dependent upon her husband and his family, and the idea that a man should «marry down» to a woman of a lesser social and economic status, have not kept pace with changes in women’s educational and career opportunities. How these relationships are formed, how they impact gendered understandings of women and men, how families are constituted and relationships developed, and how they affect the children of these families and their education, are the issues explored in this book. It breaks new ground in our understanding of transnational and cross-border marriages by looking at the long-term effects of such marriages on communities, families, and individuals.

This book situates migrating individuals’ sense of Otherness in receiving countries front and center and systematically illustrates the configuration of Western migrants’ Other-identity during their reverse migration from the West to China, which has become a new destination of international migration due to its rise to prominence in the global labor market. Consequently, international migrants from Western countries, especially those with skills desired in China, have become this country’s main target in the global race for talent. In this context, this book attends to American migrants on the Chinese mainland, who are perceived as the prototypical waiguoren in this region, as an illuminating case, and illustrates the configuration of their Other-identity, rising from their intercultural adaptation as the privileged but marginalized Other in an asymmetric power structure. This book also attempts to reveal the condition and process of Chinese Othering of American migrants that exists but is far less openly discussed in China.

Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics examines media representations and everyday interpersonal intercultural negotiations of vernacular discourses around sticky rice—an "Asian" man building sexual and romantic relationships with other "Asian" men. Specifically, Eguchi interrogates the following elements of sticky rice: the way sticky rice recycles, rethinks, and shifts the settler colonialist logics of whiteness that sustain ongoing histories of anti-Asian racism; the way sticky rice resists and reifies the mundane operation and execution of whiteness that organizes gay sexual cultures; the way sticky rice reproduces, reconstitutes, and challenges intra-regional political rivalries, economic hierarchies, and historical tensions in and across Asia and Asian diasporas; and the way sticky rice suggests alternative mappings of queer sex, desire, intimacy, and relationality. By taking further steps to unpack the complexities and contradictions of sticky rice as a gay vernacular, Eguchi offers an additional and alternative space to question and critique "Asians loving Asians." Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics will be of interest to academic audiences coming from various disciplines such as communication, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Asian and Asian American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, sociology, and more.

Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics examines media representations and everyday interpersonal intercultural negotiations of vernacular discourses around sticky rice—an "Asian" man building sexual and romantic relationships with other "Asian" men. Specifically, Eguchi interrogates the following elements of sticky rice: the way sticky rice recycles, rethinks, and shifts the settler colonialist logics of whiteness that sustain ongoing histories of anti-Asian racism; the way sticky rice resists and reifies the mundane operation and execution of whiteness that organizes gay sexual cultures; the way sticky rice reproduces, reconstitutes, and challenges intra-regional political rivalries, economic hierarchies, and historical tensions in and across Asia and Asian diasporas; and the way sticky rice suggests alternative mappings of queer sex, desire, intimacy, and relationality. By taking further steps to unpack the complexities and contradictions of sticky rice as a gay vernacular, Eguchi offers an additional and alternative space to question and critique "Asians loving Asians." Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics will be of interest to academic audiences coming from various disciplines such as communication, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Asian and Asian American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, sociology, and more.

The research of international topics and writing about cultural identity formations does not automatically equate to transnationalizing intercultural communication. Studies often perpetuate a hegemonic and U.S.-centric way of doing research, and by default doing intercultural communication scholarship. Thus, intercultural communication and critical intercultural communication (CIC) has not yet fully experienced a transnational turn. Instead, by considering the ideas of nation-state, nationality, and citizenship through theoretical frameworks that are developed by non-U.S.-scholars and transnational scholars within U.S. academia, this book addresses the citationality politics present in the field.While past studies of critical intercultural communication have been international in scope, with researchers from international backgrounds, their visibility and voice have remained limited in CIC. To achieve transnational inclusivity with CIC, the authors of this book advocate for the use of critical and cultural multi-methods or fusion of them or incorporation of new hybrid methodologies to answer complex, multidimensional, intersectional, and transnational issues and represent those lives and stories.Collectively, the authors address different topics that help further conceptualize transnational critical intercultural communication. They all call attention to examining global cultural disparities, mediated transnationalities, and transnational oppressive cultural and political structures. Many chapters offer narrative-based writing or autoethnographic methods to unearth these issues and spotlight oppressive structures and inequalities. This book will be essential reading for scholars of CIC and those interested in how transnational cultural practices, regulations, expectations, and limitations continuously shape and reshape the lives of transnational individuals.

The research of international topics and writing about cultural identity formations does not automatically equate to transnationalizing intercultural communication. Studies often perpetuate a hegemonic and U.S.-centric way of doing research, and by default doing intercultural communication scholarship. Thus, intercultural communication and critical intercultural communication (CIC) has not yet fully experienced a transnational turn. Instead, by considering the ideas of nation-state, nationality, and citizenship through theoretical frameworks that are developed by non-U.S.-scholars and transnational scholars within U.S. academia, this book addresses the citationality politics present in the field.While past studies of critical intercultural communication have been international in scope, with researchers from international backgrounds, their visibility and voice have remained limited in CIC. To achieve transnational inclusivity with CIC, the authors of this book advocate for the use of critical and cultural multi-methods or fusion of them or incorporation of new hybrid methodologies to answer complex, multidimensional, intersectional, and transnational issues and represent those lives and stories.Collectively, the authors address different topics that help further conceptualize transnational critical intercultural communication. They all call attention to examining global cultural disparities, mediated transnationalities, and transnational oppressive cultural and political structures. Many chapters offer narrative-based writing or autoethnographic methods to unearth these issues and spotlight oppressive structures and inequalities. This book will be essential reading for scholars of CIC and those interested in how transnational cultural practices, regulations, expectations, and limitations continuously shape and reshape the lives of transnational individuals.

The Chinese in the Philippines constitute one of the many Chinese communities globally. Although many Chinese have maintained their cultural traditions, most of them are Filipina/o citizens and have always considered the Philippines home. Embodying "Tsina/o" (Chinese) and "Pina/oy" (Filipina/o) identities, Tsina/oys must learn how to negotiate their hybridity through cultural and linguistic practices in everyday life.Using a multimethodological approach to ethnography (critical ethnographic interview, autoethnography, and cyberethnography), (Trans)national Tsina/oys: Hybrid Performances of Chinese and Filipina/o Identities examines Tsina/oy identity as intersectional performance of ethnicity, nationality, and class in physical and online environments.The book draws from critical intercultural and performance studies to analyze what makes "Tsina/oy" a complex identity and what it could mean for the future in and beyond the Philippines.The book is well-suited for undergraduate and graduate students and academics who study international and intercultural communication, qualitative research methods, and performance studies. It is also of great interest to scholars in anthropology, Asian American studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, geography, liberal studies, sociology, among other disciplines. "This book is a travelogue to places and spaces of knowing the self in culture; crossing borders to different but familiar locations, and (re)discovering the socializing practices that shape culture and identity. Hao introduces us to complex ways of revisiting notions of intersectionality not just through the complex meeting places of oppressions in social contexts, but through the importance of a diasporic transnational hybridity. He eschews the notion of hybridity as just a mixture of discrete cultures, but the complex co-informing aspects of ethnicity, nationality, class, and the politics of place that shape a sense of self in relation to common origins and the performative variations of identity that are held in contradistinction to those shared roots. Using diverse and interlocking ethnographic and qualitative methodologies, (Trans)national Tsina/oys: Hybrid Performances of Chinese and Filipina/o Identities asks the reader to engage at the intersections, the hyphens, and the parenthetical constructions of hybridity that make the subjects of the study, including himself, both/and always searching for homeplace in communities of recognized co-informing identities that are at once the same and not the same."—Bryant Keith Alexander, Ph.D., Dean and Professor, College of Communication and Fine Arts, Loyola Marymount University “(Trans)national Tsina/oys: Hybrid Performances of Chinese and Filipina/o Identities stands as an exemplar of critical intercultural communication studies and the deep-level insights that it provides as a field to uncover the intricately woven layers of cultural identity, performativity, belonging, and the cultural politics that constitute ‘home.’ Dr. Hao’s book also highlights the key role that critical intercultural communication studies plays in unpacking the complex of diasporas in terms of (but not limited to) their identity dynamics, the power effects in claiming/remembering/clarifying one’s identity in relation to a ‘home’ (of memory, of place, of relational cultural space), and the thorny assemblage of meaning around ‘belonging.’”—Rona Tamiko Halualani, Ph.D., Professor of Intercultural Communication, Department of Communication Studies, San Jose State University

Intercultural communication scholars have done important work tracing how the legacies of colonialism continue to structure our world. Missing from this corpus, however, is sustained attention to (North American) Indigeneity and its repression under settler colonialism as foundationally linked to contemporary imperialisms and Euro-American domination.Unsettling Intercultural Communication brings together essays by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors that make a strong case for centering Indigeneity and, by extension, settler-colonialism, as core analytics that can transform the field. Drawing upon the insights of critical Indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies, the contributors approach Indigeneity not as an additive but central concept that demands thorough engagement by intercultural communication scholars if we are to make sense of the unequal and violence-ridden world that we live in. In doing so, they open some of the core intercultural concepts to deeper examination.