557 Views
Inter-area/Border Crossing
Elizabeth LaCouture
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Elizabeth LaCouture
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Jason Petrulis
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Emily Chow-Quesada
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Andrea Carolina Urrutia Gómez
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa, Mexico
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.
Paper Presenter: Jason Petrulis – The Education University of Hong Kong
Paper Presenter: Emily Chow-Quesada – Hong Kong Baptist University
Paper Presenter: Andrea Carolina Urrutia Gómez – Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa
Paper Presenter: Elizabeth LaCouture – The University of Hong Kong