Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: An interesting aspect of the persona of Karen Carpenter is how her fans continue to grieve her death, almost twenty-five years after the fact. Numerous websites provide vehicles for fans to express the meaning of her life and death, creating a virtual, but unconventional community of mourners in the process. Concomitantly, the posthumous popularity of her music has grown well beyond that of her original career and has drawn in a generation of fans who never knew her alive. Using moral theory and cultural studies to illuminate processes of collective memory, public grief, and the formation of ethical perspectives, this paper examines online discourse about Karen’s death as an ongoing expression of moral worldviews with profound implications. Viewing Karen through the discourses and practices of her remarkably loyal fans lends insight into a larger social context for that grief. Conventional narratives of sudden tragedy and death, especially in the entertainment industry, yield to more unconventional interpretations of her demise. The mourning Karen becomes a microcosm of sorrow for a loss of certain social values as well as an affirmation of unrealistic moral aspirations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper will explore the relationship between the second and third waves of feminism through various forms of popular culture including rock and roll and film. It contrasts the anarchic punk rock approach to sexuality with the Carpenters' mainstream pop of the 70's by exploring the queer basis of Todd Haynes' film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in conjunction with Erica Rand's work, Barbie's Queer Accessories.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, I will examine Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in illustration of one of the themes of this conference. That is, how to address issues of American hegemony, militarism, and commercial imperatives by looking at Yamashita’s fictional portrayal of Japanese-Brazilian interaction in contemporary Brazil through a comparative lens. My analysis departs from two available approaches to this novel, namely, to see Yamashita’s portrayal of such an encounter as either an affirmation of the virtues of postmodern aleatory juxtapositions, or an unambiguous substantiation of the workings of Post-Fordism in terms of what David Harvey calls “time-space compression.” For both approaches tend to reinforce normative transnationalism as largely an economic process and leave unexplored the historicity of emotive and temporal elements in the novel that are very much a part of Yamashita’s critique of the American nation from a non-traditional perspective.

Specifically, I see Yamashita’s representation of Kazumasa Ishimaru’s encounter with the ball and his later interaction with contemporary Brazil in the novel as inherently linked to the sea voyage made by Japanese immigrants to the same destination, which Yamashita describes in her 1992 novel Brazil-Maru. This linkage then makes Kazumasa’s participation in the North-South migration more a material choice than a historical accident. In my analysis, I locate the significance of the novel not simply in its critiques of capitalist commercial values, but also in its rendering of the novel’s temporal structure through which the plastic ball is made to impinge both on Kazumasa’s body and on the readers’ consciousness as a kind of future afterthoughts, especially in terms of how the timings of the ball’s emergence and disappearance relate to the critical space Yamashita herself occupies in writing her book.

Issues to be addressed will include the ontological status of the ball in relation to global capitalism, the political anatomy of the Matacão in contexts of post-WWII U.S. hegemonic control over Latin America through Pan-Americanism and related military arrangements, an examination of Yamashita’s representation of ecological disaster through the concept of “prediction in the future anterior” and of “transvaluative mapping of the future," the political implications of Yamashita’s redeployment of the modernist tropes of death and rebirth, of destruction and regeneration in the novel, and the novel’s critical engagement with the post-socialist world order maintained through a U.S.-inspired imaginary of mobility and development.

In my analysis, I treat Yamashita’s efforts in this novel as a reflection of her desire to create a self-viewing space for Asian America from beyond the geographical and ideological certainty of the field, with an explicit purpose of disrupting its supposed singularity of Asian Americanness. I also want to show that despite their radical departure from traditional Asian American representations, Yamashita’s novel registers and critically responds to discourses that are directly or indirectly traceable to the hegemonic operations of the United States, thus insistently bringing issues of colonial dependence, social inequality, and class privilege to the forefront of the transnational consciousness she negotiates.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Too often the dilemmas for resident Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Asian Americans—in their disparate pacific crossings—center on negotiating, inside and out, their various (dis)placements or (dis)positions in the national narrative. However, the growing articulations of “transnational” histories, communities, and subjectivities has begun to expose the development of an alternative literacy of the pacific—namely, critical discursive projects of Asian and Pacific cultural re-memory and re-invention that do not shun cultural contradiction nor flee from incongruous national identities. These are not simple narratives that resist by retreating to idealist, essentialist, or pan-ethnic identities. Rather, they are complex discursive responses to the struggles and complications arising from social, political, and economic conditions of the Asian Pacific diaspora. This moves our understanding of these “transpacific” narratives away from the broad strokes of humanist individualism to a more contextualized lore of empire, colonization, migrancy, and transnation.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s combination of personal essay and fiction in Circle K Cycles, is one such example. One the one hand, Yamashita’s collection challenges and blurs our common sense understanding of memoir and fiction, a necessary but critical path if we are to re-think, re-write, and re-member Asian Pacific history and narrative as diaspora—the variant criss-crossing of the Pacific by multiple communities. Simultaneously, however, her work also reflects the uneven material conditions of Asian diaporic subjects and the asymmetry of their (inter)national affiliations. What emerges from the collection, I argue, is a critical transpacific literacy that creates a discursive space for the production of transnational narratives of the Asian Pacific diaspora. Yamashita subtly maneuvers and positions these counter-narratives within the complex contradictions (fissures) of colonial and imperial history. What we glean from Yamashita’s project is a transpacific literacy that highlights the impact and influence of empire and colonial history rather than a flat postmodern articulation of hybrid identities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In March 2004, the New York Times broke the story that the Bush Administration had developed and disseminated a video news release (VNR) about the 2003 White House-backed Medicare law. This VNR, featuring narration from public relations practitioner Karen Ryan, appeared on more than 40 stations over several weeks beginning in December 2003. Subsequent press stories and editorials in early 2004 framed the airing of the Ryan VNR as an unethical communication that violated journalism's professional standards. This piece explores, from a deontological perspective, how journalists and scholars have articulated those standards. Then, press criticism of the Ryan VNR is examined, with an eye toward how journalists did not examine sufficiently how duty to news owners increases the attractiveness of VNRs. This is a critical oversight, because the influence of the news owner not only constructs the economic realities of the newsroom, but also influences how journalists perceive their range of ethical choices regarding news selection and dissemination. News owners' market-focused needs shape a hegemony of expedient action in the news room. A renewed self-reflection by news workers will better enable journalists to determine ethical decisions that more adequately balance their responsibilities to news owners, peers and the public.