L005: Critical Race in Asian Studies II: Performance, Visuality, and Beauty

Organizer(s)

• EL

  Elizabeth LaCouture

  The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Chair(s)

• EL

  Elizabeth LaCouture

  The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Paper Presenter(s)

• JP

  Jason Petrulis

  The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• EC

  Emily Chow-Quesada

  Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
• 

  Andrea Carolina Urrutia Gómez

  Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa, Mexico
• EL

  Elizabeth LaCouture

  The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Session Abstract: This panel examines technologies of race-making from performance and print culture to social media and cosmetics and proposes new frameworks for analyzing race and Asia, Each paper describes how race is forged at the crossroads of local, regional, and global interactions, and together they aim to de-center European Whiteness from the study of race. Jason Petrulis explores performances of Blackness across 19th century Asia by Commodore Perry’s sailors, examining how discourses of race were articulated through conversations between US, British, Japanese, and Chinese empires. While Petrulis argues that performing Blackness became a means of expressing imperial power, Emily Chow-Quesada argues that Hong Kongers’ representations of Africans in social media can sometimes represent solidarity through social movements, despite the fact that racialized depictions of Africans in memes and GIFs usually replicate imperialist racialized power structures. Andrea Urrutia Gómez introduces genealogies of racialized Chinese and Korean beauty in Latin America by tracing the multiple layers that produce race across time and space, including indigeneity, histories of colonialism, contemporary global markets and corporeal experiences. Elizabeth LaCouture concludes by examining Chinese beauty beauty practices across the Sinophone, arguing that Chinese racialized identities are relational, formed through multiple positionalities as both powerful and powerless and that Chinese racialized beauty becomes visible on the peripheries and in subordination to power. Together, these papers demonstrate that race in and of Asia is not simply a Euro-American import, but is instead an amalgam of ideas articulated through the interactions between center and periphery, and local and global.

Presentations:

• Black Sailors, Black Ships, Blackface: Episodes in Race-Making Across Commodore Perry’s Pacific, 1853-56
  

  Paper Presenter: Jason Petrulis – The Education University of Hong Kong
• “The Black Man’s Question Mark”: Representations of Africa in Social Media in Hong Kong
  

  Paper Presenter: Emily Chow-Quesada – Hong Kong Baptist University
• What is “Asian” Beauty? Chinese and South Korean Racialized Appearances in the Mexican and Peruvian Makeup Industries
  

  Paper Presenter: Andrea Carolina Urrutia Gómez – Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa
• Beauty, Race, and Pain in the Sinophone
  

  Paper Presenter: Elizabeth LaCouture – The University of Hong Kong