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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Machida, Margo. "The Poetics of Positionality: Art, Identity, and Communities of Imagination in Asian America," University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, June 2002.
This dissertation examines the generative relationship between contemporary artists’ life-worlds and the art they create. It considers artworks that represent a particular body of cultural production in which matters of identity and identification are central. For these individuals, art-making is a means of clarifying the nature of their lived experience and social circumstances as Asians in this nation and in Western culture. Through the insights they provide, these works help us to map the shifting intellectual and political terrain of Asian America, and to develop grounded understandings of how larger social processes related to globalization, warfare, migration, and intercultural contact and mixing are swiftly reconfiguring today’s world. After broadly contextualizing issues of identity formation in the visual arts, the dissertation explores how such ideas are formulated in works by nine artists of Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese descent. The works are grouped in three thematic chapters reflecting primary nodes of identification, as well as of resistance and critique, that mark these individuals’ engagement with this society: 1) Othering: Primitivism, Orientalism, and Stereotyping; 2) Social Memory and Trauma; and 3) Migration and Place. Finally, it examines the use of art as a basis for initiating communitarian dialogue, enabling members of different Asian groups to recognize common interests, histories, and struggles. By focusing on artists as knowing subjects, my approach to interpretation emphasizes the reality and significance of individuals’ understanding of their lives, actions, and products in the world. Throughout I have sought to share interpretive authority with artists, using audiotaped interviews to make the intricate connections between their ideas, backgrounds, inner lives, and artmaking, the foundation for my writing. Given that the symbologies of visual art remain largely opaque to viewers-especially in encountering work by artists from non-Western societies or heritages-it is only through a connective tissue of narratives providing access to the sensibilities and intentions of the maker, that more nuanced understandings are possible. Such insights expand our awareness of the multiple standpoints that comprise an increasingly globalized and fluid American environment.
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