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<p> Following the 1975-1979 genocide, Cambodian exiles in the U.S. recreated cultural institutions through music. Music remains significant in rebuilding cultural life in diasporic Cambodian communities. Live bands perform contemporary and classic ballads during Cambodian New Year in April, at wedding parties and in restaurants on weekend nights. Live rock bands continue to dot community celebrations as survivors collectively create musical repertoires and schedule practices to perform at festive community events. Despite the ubiquity of live musical performance in Cambodian communities, this aspect of Cambodian American cultural formation has been scarcely addressed in the literature. This Thesis addresses the deficiency in the literature through ethnographic fieldwork with a Southern California rock band called the Soriya Band, comprised of three guitarists, a keyboardist, a drummer and two vocalists who are all first generation Cambodian survivors. Music persists as a vehicle for cultural creation and change for Cambodian American refugee-survivors. </p>

Asians have been part of the American South's physical, cultural, and economic landscape since Reconstruction when plantation owners introduced Chinese immigrants to replace newly freed African Americans as their primary labor source. Nearly a century later, sweeping immigration reform led to the influx of thousands of Asian immigrants who transformed the region's social, economic, and physical landscapes. Southern Orientation: Reimagining Asian American Identity and Place in the Global South utilizes twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and oral histories to investigate how the socio-spatial practices of Asians produce new iterations of place-bound identities that unsettle traditional notions of southern community. Drawing from spatial theory, cultural trauma, and ecocriticism, this dissertation argues that the appearance of the Asian engenders new anxieties and reawakens past anxieties about racial and ethnic integration in the post-Jim Crow South. However, the growing visibility of Asians in the region also hints at the possibility of new multiracial and multiethnic coalitions and new place-bound communal identities centered on the shared struggle against material, social, and spatial inequalities.;With the exception of a few studies, there is a noticeable lack of scholarship on Asian Americans in southern literature and film. But the increased focus on the South in a global context and the growing number of narratives depicting Asians living in the region are compelling reasons to further explore the ways in which Asians influence and are influenced by southern cultural practices. These recent texts highlight the global movements of peoples, cultures, and economies that mark the region as both a transformed and transformative place. Works including Monique Truong's short story "Kelly" (1991) and Cynthia Kadohata's children's novel Kira-Kira (2004) illustrate how the internationalization of southern locales can reintroduce segregationist practices as a means of safeguarding long-held communal boundaries based on racial, ethnic, and class differences. Other narratives such as Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala (1991) and Cynthia Shearer's novel The Celestial Jukebox (2004) reveal how Asians are part of a larger narrative of exploitation, exclusion, and survival that interweaves the history of multiple "Souths.".;For Asians migrating to the American South, defining home often involves the complex interplay between stasis and movement, acceptance and opposition, remembering and forgetting. This study foregrounds the critical intersections between Southern studies and Asian American cultural politics in order to better understand how global processes influence the ways in which an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic population define, inhabit, and transform communities in the American South.

This thesis examines the stereotypical ideology of Asian Americans that persists in mainstream contemporary television and argues that these representations manifest themselves in viewers’ minds. It also illustrates the shifting paradigm within the media from producer-created to consumer-created content through social media demonstrated by the Jeremy Lin phenomenon. Lastly, this thesis argues that it takes alternate channels to convey race in an accurate way using Asian American independent media as a source of positive representation.

During World War II, over 100,000 Japanese American were confined in relocation and internment camps across the country as a result of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. While many of their families were behind barbed wire, thousands of other Japanese Americans served in the US Army's Military Intelligence Service and the all-Japanese American 100th Infantry and 442nd Regimental Combat Team. These circumstances were largely public knowledge during the war years, but a pervasive silence on the subject became apparent in the decades following the war. Due to widespread racism and recognition of the hypocrisy evident in a democratic country confining its own citizens, many Americans were content to allow the Japanese American experiences to be forgotten. The destruction and scattering of communities through evacuation and resettlement and a sense of shame within the Japanese American community helped perpetuate the silence amongst Japanese Americans as well. Through the Civil Rights Movement, the social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and ultimately through the redress movement in the 1980s, the Japanese American voice gradually entered the public consciousness. Following the discussion of the historical context for the WWII experiences of the Japanese Americans, this research analyzes the period of forgetting and the various factors that combined to allow for eventual change. An analysis of public commemoration through war memorials, museums, historic sites, community events, and the less traditional memorials of novels, artwork, and films reveals how members of the Japanese American community and sympathetic Caucasian Americans overcame racist opposition and demonstrated determination in their efforts to pay tribute to the sacrifices of the soldiers, preserve relevant sites, and provide for the education of current and future generations on the subject of the Japanese American experience. The research also demonstrates the diversity within the Japanese American community, by disproving the common stereotype of homogeneity within the "model minority," and revealing the strength of individualism within the community as a significant contributing factor to memorialization efforts.

<p> My main research questions explore how contradictions of unity, organizing structures, gender, sexuality, citizenship, class, and ability are addressed within Filipino leftist organizations that utilize dialectical materialist theory. I also ask: How have US-based women of color feminist and queer of color theory impacted Filipino nationalist frameworks in the US? How do they also remain at odds with one another? I interviewed 21 NYC-based activists and organizers involved in anti-imperialist Filipino organizations the summer of 2012. I also used participant observation as an active member of study groups, educational workshops, and a town forum. </p><p> My central framework explores conflict as contradiction using Mao Tse-tung's "On Contradiction" and the Haitian concepts of balans and konesans. In doing so, I examine how hard-lined leadership has impeded dialogue. I also interrogate how sexism, transphobia, masculinist organizing structures, and neoliberalism impact women, trans, queer, disabled, working class, and undocumented organizers&mdash;particularly those with overlapping identities of marginalization. "The Movement's" familial dynamic, combined with the value of <i>utang na loob,</i> creates hierarchies that cause some members to feel both silenced and guilty. I name these feelings as indicators of invisible emotional labor "for the sake of the movement" that lead many members to eventually leave their organizations. Their departures raise questions of sustainability. Lastly, I ask how the Fil-Am Left can draw strength from its familial dynamic but still address hierarchical issues that mirror societal hierarchies of oppression.</p><p> Applying work by Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and other women of color, along with feminist grounded theory and sociological movement theory, I highlight three strategies that New York City based Filipino organizations have taken within the past ten years. I argue that organizations have recognized problems with sustainability and are creating their own interventions as theory-producers. Organizers' relationships to the National Democratic movement in the Philippines shape both the creation of interventions and how they respond to new ideas. Drawing on Arlie Hoschchild's concept of "stalled revolution," individual behaviors lag behind organizations' formal ideological shifts. Thus, they are works in progress.</p>

<p> This study explores the issue of Japanese internment camp in the United States and Canada during World War Two. It argues that Japanese immigrants, who were totally innocent, became historical victims and experienced camp. During World War Two, the Japanese army attacked Pearl Harbor, a territory of the United States. This incident made mainstream American and Canadian society suspicious of Japanese immigrants, who had the same ethnicity and blood as the army, the "enemies." This study is an attempt to find the voice and feelings of those who had to experience trauma in camp. As subaltern figures, all they had to do was endure and accept their fate. As immigrants, who seemed not to have English fluency, they had to accept the requirements of America or Canada in order to be allowed to live. At the same time, this study seeks to analyze how Japanese-Americans and -Canadians forged their identity after overcoming the trauma of camp and the agony of assimilation. In so doing, this dissertation considers the work of four novelists who have written about these difficult issues. Chapter 1 explains how other Asians &ndash; Koreans and Chinese &ndash; were affected by the Japanese army and how mainstream society looked at Japanese immigrants. Chapters 2 and 3 explore Joy Kogawa's <i> Obasan</i> and <i>Itsuka.</i> Naomi, the protagonist, struggles to find a sense of "home-ness." Chapter 4 examines Monica Sone's <i> Nisei Daughter</i>. Kazuko, the protagonist, has to experience negative aspects of the United States. Chapter 5 explores Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's <i> Farewell to Manzanar.</i> Jeanne, the protagonist, has to go through painful experiences and racism up to the last section of the novel. Chapter 6 analyzes John Okada's <i>No-No Boy.</i> Ichiro, the protagonist, suffers self-alienation. He cannot fix his identity between his duality until he can find his "home." Chapter 7 examines the authors' intentions and asks in which direction Japanese-Americans and -Canadians can move forward in the future.</p>

<p> This qualitative study explores the lived experiences of Chinese immigrants who have successfully adjusted and resettled in the United States. Immigration and its related processes can be stressful and traumatic; migration entails challenges affecting one's sense of personal identity and psychological well-being. This study represents an attempt to obtain a deeper understanding of immigration's challenges, the psychological coping mechanisms used to meet those challenges, and the factors that contribute to successful adjustment and resettlement in the United States.</p><p> Participants were recruited through the researcher's social and professional network, using snowball sampling. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 11 adult immigrants of Chinese descent who (a) immigrated to the United States more than five years prior to the study, (b) self-identified as having adjusted well, and (c) reestablished their lives in the United States and viewed it as their "home." Grounded theory-based qualitative analysis was applied to the interview transcripts to identify codes, themes, and categories describing the participants' experiences and psychological processes of immigration and resettlement. </p><p> Data analysis produced eight thematic categories. The eight thematic categories identified as helpful toward understanding the complex process that Chinese immigrants undergo during adjustment and successful reestablishment of their lives in the United States were (a) migratory loss and grief; (b) acculturative stress; (c) self-determination in reestablishing "home" in the United States and mastering related challenges; (d) learning new skills and learning about U.S. culture; (e) expanding and making use of interpersonal relationships and support systems; (f) use of emotional-focused coping; (g) maintaining positive attitudes and outlooks; and (h) feeling at "home" and well-adjusted in the United States. </p><p> A conceptual model was then developed to describe (a) causal conditions that underlie the development of Chinese immigrants' coping and adjustment strategies, (b) the phenomenon that arose from those conditions, (c) the coping and adjustment strategies employed, (d) contextual and intervening conditions that influenced strategy selection, and (e) the consequences of adopting the chosen strategies. In addition, a "Success of Immigration" scale was used to assess the level of successful adjustment. Clinical implications of the study and suggestions for future research are also discussed</p>