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Qianchi Chen
Professor. Lytle
AS AM POP CULTURE
August 12, 2021
Popular Culture
Popular culture has been attributed to Asian culture for a long time, and the rapid spread of some cultural highlights in the country has allowed the more significant population to access the ways of understanding Asian culture. There is a need to apply new understanding of the cultures from their music, the food, the dressing, films, and movies that are currently widely shared around the globe. In this week’s readings, we analyzed three scholarly works related to Asian culture and primarily focus on the history and growth of American Asian popular culture. These readings help us to explore how these have influences the current culture on the demographic.
“KOREANS GONE BAD” by David Choe was triggered by the rendering of a not guilty verdict on a group of police officers who had brutally beaten a motorist, Rodney King, in 1999 in Los Angeles. The event triggered a multicultural riot involving conflicts among Asians, African Americans, Latinos, and white Americans (Sung, 2016). Despite the composition of the uprising, the riots pitted the African Americans against Asian shopkeepers and caused a race war. While the overall trigger was the jurors’ ruling, the riots were fueled by a complex array of underlying injustices by the region’s police force. The work by Choe is an account of the memory, the racialization, and the masculinity in Asian popular culture and how the events of the riot influenced it (Sung, 2016). Choe places Asian American popular culture’s masculinity in a matrix of relationality based on race and how racial affinities continue to affect everyday life.
Cathy J Schlund-Vials’ From the Mekong to the Merrimack and Back: The Transnational Terrains of Cambodian American Rap is an artwork on the language of rap as a form of music culture and stories of oppression in Cambodian culture. The literal artwork tells the role of Asian rap in creatively resisting pressure and points out the dominance of Cambodian Rap in Lowell, Massachusetts. The area has the second-largest Cambodian American Population after Long beach California (Schlund-Vials, 2016). The book emphasizes the role of rap in the culture and mentions that there are many unsung creatives in these popularized regions. While they have left a mark in the areas they have resided in, their music was not known as other cultural artists. The author writes of the disparity in occupation from when the city was founded with the initial dwellers envisioning a “Manchester in America” as it is now filled with Cambodian culture (Schlund-Vials, 2016). Therefore, the work highlights Cambodian American culture in the country as the cultural participation in the growth of Asian Popular culture in food, music, and other artworks.
“Picturing the Past Drawing Together Vietnamese American Transnational History” by Timothy K. August is a chronicle on Tran’s attempting to draw social fragments of culture to create a transnational history of Vietnamese American culture. From an analysis of this work, here things become evident (August 2016). The first one is that Tran carefully employs the flattening of time and multiple perspectives to link the continuity of Vietnamese American culture o those of Vietnamese society. Secondly, Vietnamerica is the social body that is visible in the culture. Finally, Tran’s used a reflexive description of the process to attract readers from different generations. The experience then renders Tran as a cultured Vietnamese individual rather than an easily consumable individual.
Popular culture has been attributed to Asian culture for a long time, and the rapid spread of some cultural highlights in the country has allowed the more significant population to access the ways of understanding Asian culture. The three artworks are critical in amplifying the history of the Asian American people and their journey to modern-day popular culture.
References.
August, T. K. (2016). Picturing the Past: Drawing Together Vietnamese American Transnational
History. Global Asian American Popular Cultures, 165-179.
Sung, W. (2016). David Choe’s “KOREANS GONE BAD” The LA Riots, Comparative
Racialization and Branding. Global Asian American Popular Cultures, 89.
Schlund-Vials, C. J. (2016). From the Mekong to the Merrimack and Back The Transnational
Terrains of Cambodian American Rap. Global Asian American Popular Cultures, 107.
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