This thesis addresses how Japanese and Japanese Americans may have lived and been perceived in Virginia from 1900s through the 1950s. This work focuses on their positions in society with comparisons to the nation, particularly during the “Jim Crow” era of “colored” and “white,” and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It highlights various means of understanding their positions in Virginia society, with emphasis on Japanese visitors, marriages of Japanese in Virginia, and the inclusion of Japanese in higher education at Roanoke College, Randolph-Macon College, William and Mary, University of Virginia, University of Richmond, Hampden-Sydney College, and Union Theological Seminary. It also takes into account the Japanese experience in Virginia during Japanese internment, while focusing on the Homestead, Virginia, as well as the experiences of Japanese students and soldiers, which ultimately showed Virginia was distinct in its mild treatment towards the Japanese as compared to the West Coast.

The purpose of this study was to examine what factors contribute to and result from body dissatisfaction using the theoretical framework of the Tripartite Model of Influence, which included family, peer, and media influence. Participants were recruited from SONA and student organizations and participated in an online survey (N =148). A MANCOVA indicated that Asian and White females did not differ in body dissatisfaction and other health outcomes. Thin-ideal internalization mediated the relationships between media influence, peer influence, and body dissatisfaction among Asian American females. Moderation analyses indicated that ethnic identity, Asian American identity, and acculturation did not moderate the relationship between the three tripartite influences and body dissatisfaction. Finally, a series of multiple regressions indicated that body dissatisfaction significantly predicted disordered eating, cosmetic surgery endorsement, and cigarette use among Asian Americans. Findings suggest that Asian American body dissatisfaction may be more related to Western influence than current literature shows.

<div> <p>This dissertation examines the transnational networks of Gospel of the Kingdom megachurch (the Indonesian Mennonite Synod) with Pentecostal/Charismatic institutions in the United States. It begins by asking what can American Studies as a discipline learn about the United States from examining a story of an Indonesian megachurch, far away from U.S. geographical borders? The dissertation specifically asks: 1) How is the growth of Gospel megachurch closely related to its partnerships with Pentecostal/Charismatic (P/c) institutions in the United States? (2) How does Gospel church apply teachings and values from their American partners?</p> <p>Through archival work, fieldwork, and interviews, this dissertation finds that, first, Gospel church under the leadership of Pastor Petrus Agung, partners with the JKI (Jemaat Kristen Indonesia) or Indonesian Christian Congregation synod, located in both Orange County, California and Central Java, Indonesia under the leadership of Pastor Sutanto Adi. The transnational Indonesian/American synod highlighted the contribution of Indonesian immigrants. Second, Pastor Petrus Agung, the leader of Gospel church, partners with other non-immigrant Pentecostal/Charismatic leaders such as John Avanzini, Morris Cerullo, Harold Gingerich, and Bill Wilson. In their direst needs to get out of debt, Gospel church found an affirmation in teaching on “Biblical economy” with emphases on financial independence, concerns for the marginalized poor, and giving as key to church growth. Gospel church had consistently applied the teachings from transnational partnerships in the contexts of local struggles against poverty and religious marginalization in Indonesia. Third, from 2005 until 2016, as the teaching was confirmed by continuous growth in finances and numbers of congregations, Gospel church sought collaborations with five other P/c institutions in Indonesia to form a <i>Bahtera</i> (translation: Ark) movement. Gospel church and <i>Bahtera</i> predicted their institutions and Indonesia would be the center of the world’s economy and spiritual movement. Bahtera sought to bring the movement abroad to many different countries, especially through the worship dance performances. </p> <p>My work contributes a transnational understanding of American cultural histories, particularly the diversity and networks of Pentecostal/Charismatic and Mennonite movements. It is a conversation with the field of Asian American Studies to fill the gap of literature on Indonesian immigration and the lives of Indonesian immigrants in particular, and Southeast Asian immigrants in the United States in general. This research will be of interests for scholars particularly in Sociocultural Anthropology and Sociology that continue to examine the issue of “structure and agency” especially in religious spaces. Lastly, In portraying Gospel church’s story and struggles as part of “archives of America,” this dissertation joined scholarship in American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Anthropology that challenged the one-directional narrative of American influences. Gospel church is one example of a community that lives “against America.” In both their periods of struggles and high prosperity, Gospel church did gaze at America for inspiration and affirmation, to eventually prophesy for an agentive ability of an Indonesian Pentecostal/Charismatic, Mennonite institution to play a central role in the prosperity of the world and thus hint at the fight against America’s hegemonic power and influence. Analyzing Gospel church’s transnational partnerships with Christian institutions in the United States, therefore, is moving to the center a narrative from of an “empire striking back.”</p> </div> <br>

This study fills a critical gap in research on the immediate postwar history of Japanese American community culture in Los Angeles and South Bay. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute research and literature of the immediate postwar period between the late 1940s resettlement period and the 1960s. During the early to mid-1940s, Americans witnessed World War II and the unlawful incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. In the 1960s, the Sansei (third generation) started to reshape the character and cultural expressions of Japanese American communities, including their development of the Yellow Power Movement in the context of the Black and Brown Power Movements in California. The period between these bookends, however, requires further research and academic study, and it is to the literature of the immediate postwar period that this thesis contributes. Furthermore, this thesis contributes to the nearly absent literature of Japanese American community redevelopment in the transboundary Los Angeles/South Bay area. It is in this area that we find the largest and fastest growing postwar Japanese American population in the country. This community built lasting networks and relationships through the revival of cultural celebrations like Obon and Nisei Week, sport and recreation – namely baseball and bowling, and ethnic resources in the form of food and ethnic markets. These relationships laid the foundations for later social activism and the redefining of the Japanese American community. Far from a period of silence or inactivity, Japanese Americans actively shaped and reshaped their communities in ways that refused to allow the wartime incarceration experience, so fresh in their minds, to define them.

Guided by Ogbu's cultural-ecological model of human development, this comparative study offers a comprehensive and explicit way of conceptualizing and measuring parenting within the cultural context. Multiple hypotheses are generated for the cross-cultural comparison of parenting styles in Asian Americans and European Americans. The study uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health survey data collected from a nationally representative sample of adolescents from grades 7 to 11. Logistic regression, ordered logit, and OLS regression models are employed to analyze ethnicity effects on parenting characteristics and adolescent competencies separately, adding adolescent gender, age, and parent education level as statistical controls. This study explains why family-based and individual-based parenting styles are culturally appropriate for competence acquisition in Asian-American and European-American families respectively. Findings of this study suggest that Asian parenting is largely motivated by the welfare of the family rather than the individual's needs. This pattern is seen in the high emphasis on education, different parental control levels over various behavior domains, characteristics of parental warmth and school involvement, and the way parents approach their adolescents. Greatly influenced by their cultural values about competencies necessary for success, Asian-American parents apparently inculcate the sense of filial obligation in adolescents with an emphasis on school success. European-American parents, on the other hand, develop the quality of self-expression in adolescents with an emphasis on self-esteem. Family-based parenting may be more advantageous to academic and behavioral competencies while individual-based parenting is relatively more effective for psychological adjustments. However, adolescents from both groups score reasonably well over measures of all competence variables. Thus, they may be all considered competent within their cultural contexts, with their differences echoing the fundamental diversity between the two parenting styles. This study presents some challenges to the traditional way of understanding and judging Asian parenting. A more complete scientific understanding of Asian Parenting would be useful for explaining competence acquisition in Asian-American adolescents. / Graduation date: 2003

<p>This dissertation examines space as a privileged yet <italic>repressed</italic> site of cultural production in a global America, in response to ongoing attempts to reconfigure American literary and cultural studies through the lens of globalization, postnationality, worlding, and planetarity, and to build conversations between literature, the arts, and space. Drawing its inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of social space and Fredric Jameson's theory of postmodern global culture, this project studies globalization with a particular emphasis on its unique spatial apparatus, which through geographical expansion and contraction and worldwide connection and disconnection produces hitherto unprecedented social spaces, including most notably the global city, virtual space, transnational diasporas, postmodern architecture, and the "non-places" of shopping malls, airports, and highways. I discuss how these global social spaces radically alter our experience of the lifeworld (<italic>Lebenswelt</italic>) and transform our representational practices, by analyzing innovative contemporary cultural forms such as literary theory (Jameson, Derrida, Adorno, and Deleuze), deconstructive architecture (Peter Eisenman), video art (Nam June Paik), diasporic writing (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), postmodern detective fiction (Paul Auster), the cyberpunk novel (William Gibson).</p> <p>While I thus mediate global spatial production and cultural production, I argue that the predominant focus on deterritorialization, disjuncture, and postspatiality in much of contemporary discourse on globalization oftentimes diverts our attention from the complex mechanism whereby the spatial world system of globalization brings the entire globe into its all-encompassing and totalizing force field. I formulate the concept of a <italic>spatial unconscious</italic> in order to address the salient, though repressed, presence of the totalizing spatial logic of global capitalism that underlies contemporary cultural production. In so doing, I demonstrate that diverse contemporary literary and cultural forms have their conditions of possibility the newly emergent global spatial network of cultural flows and exchanges; and that those literary and cultural forms function as symbolic acts or registering apparatuses that reflect, remap, and reimagine the multifaceted and even contradictory spatial configurations of the world today. By bringing a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective to American literary studies, this study seeks to shift our critical attention from a putatively unitary and homogeneous national literature towards manifold cultural loci crisscrossed by dynamic interplays and fluid interchanges amongst multiple axes and nodal points on the globe.</p> / Dissertation

With the remarkable increase in immigration since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, approximately one in five children in the United States has at least one foreign-born parent (Hernandez & Charney, 1998). This study was an investigation of how students’ perceptions of their parents shaped the kind and degree of motivational goal orientations that they adopted in their mathematics classroom taking students’ different cultural and ethnic backgrounds into account. In this study, students of different ethnic backgrounds enrolled in an American high school reported their achievement goal orientations and self-regulated motivations for their math class, as well as their perceptions of parents’ goals for them, parents’ motivating styles, and the classroom’s goal structures. A total of 138 9th grade Anglo American students and Asian American students were included in the data analyses. In path analyses, Anglo American and Asian American students’ goal orientations were predicted by their perceptions of their parents’ goals for them as well as their parents’ motivating styles, mediated by the students’ self-regulated motivation. For both Anglo American and Asian American students, autonomous self-regulated motivation predicted mastery goal orientation, and less autonomous self-regulated motivation predicted performance goal orientations. However, the students’ perceptions of parental influence from different ethnic/cultural backgrounds were different in predicting students’ self-regulated motivations. Interestingly, Asian American children’s perceptions of parents’ controlling style as well as parents’ autonomy support could predict their mastery goal adoption via identified regulation, and their perception of parental control even predicted their intrinsic regulation. It was also interesting to note that Asian American students’ perceptions of parents’ goal orientations for them predicted their own goals not only directly but also mediated by their self-regulated motivations, unlike Anglo American students whose perceptions of parents’ goals predicted their own goals only mediated by their self-regulated motivations. An integration of self-determination theory and goal theory is offered, broadening the application of these two theories to students of different ethnic/cultural backgrounds. / text

Asian Indian Americans are a highly successful subset of Asian Americans. According to a 2012 Pew Center report, this population has the highest level of degree attainment among Asian Americans as well as the highest median income among Asian Americans ("The Rise of Asian Americans," 2012). However, there is a cloak of invisibility surrounding this population. There is little research on how second-generation Asian Indian Americans navigate the expectations of academic excellence and cultural adherence in their relationships with their first-generation parents. There is limited knowledge and understanding of this population that is burdened by family expectations, community expectations, institutional expectations, and their own self-expectations of academic excellence. The paucity of research on this population creates the invisible minority where students’ needs may be ignored based on unfounded assumptions on part of the community and the institution. This phenomenological study adds to the sparse literature on Asian Indian Americans by exploring the intergenerational relationships of Asian Indian American undergraduate students in a narrowly focused area of academic choices and academic performance. This study examined students’ perceptions of the communication between first-generation parents and second-generation children who are currently enrolled at Southern State University. Further, this study examined the stress generated by the intergenerational relationships and the coping strategies employed by the students for dealing with the aforementioned stress. Findings from this study indicate that first-generation parents stress academic excellence and enrollment in certain majors based on their own experiences as new immigrants as well as to uphold the honor and prestige of the family. While the expectations of academic excellence from parents create stress for the students, the students remain grateful to their parents for instilling such values in them. However, the findings reveal that students felt stress from the expectation of excellence from the community, family, and institution to perform well. The findings of varying levels of intergenerational issues suggest that the parent-child relationships in this population were complex and non-linear. / text

Taiko is a highly physical and theatrical form of ensemble drumming that was popularized in 1950s Japan and has been widely practiced in Japanese American and other Asian American communities since the late 1960s. Taiko’s visual and sonic largesse—outstretched limbs and thundering drums—contrasted with pervasive stereotypes of Asians as silent and passive. This dissertation uses ethnographic participant-observation, archival research, and performance analysis to examine how North American taiko performance produces and is produced by the shifting contours of racial, gender, and sexual identity and community. Taiko groups create, re-shape, and challenge familiar notions of Asia, America, and Asian America through their public performances and in their rehearsal processes. While sometimes implicated in Orientalist performance contexts, taiko players use performance strategically to commemorate Asian American history, to convey feelings of empowerment, and to invite feminist, anti-racist, and queer forms of spectatorship. This dissertation explores taiko’s roots in the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, its implications for 1990s multiculturalism, as well as its intersections with contemporary queer communities. My analysis focuses on three case study groups whose origins, philosophies, and geographic locations offer a diverse view of North American taiko and the Asian American/Canadian communities with which they are associated. Chapter One considers how San Jose Taiko’s early articulation of their identity as an Asian American taiko group continues to influence its practices and performances, particularly their taiko-dance piece, “Ei Ja Nai Ka?” and their national tours. Chapter Two examines how Minneapolis-based Mu Daiko negotiates its members’ diverse racial, ethnic, and gender identities within a Midwestern context that values multiculturalism. Chapter Three considers how the all-women’s group Jodaiko conveys Asian American lesbian identity and invites queer spectatorship through theatrical performance choices and its members’ everyday gender performances. My analysis extends from my ethnographic participant-observation, which includes personal interviews, attendance at workshops and performances, and spending time with performers; archival research in formal collections, groups’ internal documents, and my personal archive of taiko programs, posters, photographs, DVDs, and other ephemera; and performance analysis that is informed by my twelve years of experience as a taiko performer. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-216).