Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T01:46:19.615Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Violence, Hmong American Visibility, and the Precariousness of Asian Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Louisa Schein  and
Ya-Megn Thoj
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When the murders at Virginia Tech in spring of 2007 began to be processed, by mainstream media and Asian American commentators alike, in tenuously racial terms as the un/intelligible acts of a Korean American student, Seung-hui Cho, some observers of media racialization recalled the spectacularizations of Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong hunter who killed six white hunters in the woods of Wisconsin in 2004. Were these events likely to be discursively linked, and if so what effect would they produce? Would they destabilize tropes of Asian American men as studious, reserved, effeminate model minorities? Would we see the rise, or the return, of a racial menace in the form of gun-toting, ruthless, killer Asian males, and what would be the fallout? What difference would it make to discursive homogenization that one of the killers was Hmong, a member of a group that has articulated awkwardly if at all with prevailing images of Asian Americans?

Type
Correspondents at Large
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 5: Special Topic Comparative Racialization , October 2008 , pp. 1752 - 1756
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. “‘Look, an Asian!‘: The Politics of Racial Interpellation in the Wake of the Virginia Tech Shootings.” Journal of Asian American Studies 11 (2008): 27–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
A Deeper Look at the Hmong Hunter Incident. DVD. New York Asian/Pacific/Amer. Studies Inst., 2005.Google Scholar
Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, 1998.Google Scholar
Franklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000.Google Scholar
Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Google Scholar
“Nichols Pleads Not Guilty in Slaying of Squirrel Hunter.” 19 Mar. 2007. LexisNexis. Rutgers U Libs. 31 Mar. 2007 <http://web.lexis-nexis.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/universe/documents?_m=7684aa19fl>..>Google Scholar
Schein, Louisa, and Thoj, Va-Megn. “Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Incident: A Dialogue between Anthropologist Louisa Schein and Filmmaker Va-Megn Thoj.” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 1051–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasley, Paula. “U of Wisconsin Professor Discusses His Remarks about Hmong.” Chronicle of Higher Education Newsblog. 6 Dec. 2007. 16 July 2008 <http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=3568&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en>.Google Scholar
Yang, Jeff. “Asian Pop: Angry Asian Men.” SF Gate 8 May 2007. 25 Feb. 2008 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/05/08/apop.DTL>.Google Scholar