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ASA-JAAS
ASA-JAAS Delegate Report 2002
Koji Toko
University of Southern California
First of all, I would like to say that I am grateful to the JAAS and ASA for inviting me to the ASA conference this year, and spending so much money, time, and energy on me. Attending this conference provided me with a great experience. I was able to hear many good presentations, and the luncheon and party were very good. I met many people, and went sightseeing in Texas.
Just attending ASA was a revelation for me. I saw many famous professors such as Alan Trachtenberg and David Eng. I had read Prof. Eng’s Racial Castration, so I attended the panel on Wong Kar-Wai, a Chinese filmmaker. Prof. Eng was a commentator on this panel and his talking style was overwhelming. He spoke energetically and quite extensively about the presentation of queerness in the film, Happy Together. The content of his talk synchronized his positionarity as a gay Asian scholar, making his talk quite convincing.
I was interested in the presentations of Prof. Eiichiro Azuma and Prof. Mari Yoshihara. Both of them dealt with the representations of Japanese-ness in the US. Prof. Azuma talked about the history of chicken sexing in Japanese American and the reaction of the US media to it. Prof. Yoshihara made a presentation on Suzuki method, a training method of violin invented in Japan, and accepted in many countries. Though their topics are different, they both made great presentations using many interesting sources, and explained the historical processes and reactions of media by good English. Their presentations told me that not only learning from the American studies in the US is important, but also attending and changing it by expressing what is going on in Japan and between Japan and the US is crucial. They gave me a hope that I might be able to be a scholar like them in one day.
At the luncheon and party, I spoke with many people, such as Prof. Iino, Prof. Ikui, and friends from Japan and from the University of Southern California. With Prof. Iino, I talked about the difficulty of studying America for us Japanese. She told me that when she studied about Japanese Americans, they always asked her whether she could understand them without being a Japanese American. As an answer to this question, she said that she concluded that there must be something that can be understood only from the Japanese viewpoint. I totally agreed with her argument about going beyond the identity politics, and talking with her gave me a lot of energy. We also talked about the importance of the JET program. I said that I have many friends who went to Japan as teachers of English through the JET, and now they study Japanese history and culture in the East Asian studies program at the University of Southern California. When I told her that the JET programs functions as a Japanese version of Fulbright and improves mutual understanding between Japan and the US, she was glad. She said that she is one of the committee of the JET, and now working with the Japanese government to improve it. I was very surprised. The party of the ASA was really fun. There was a Salsa band, and when I saw Prof. George Sanchez, the former president of the ASA, danced quite well, I was amazed. This was the first time to dance Salsa, but I enjoyed very much. I danced for almost two hours, and got exhausted.
I also went sightseeing. I visited the Johnson space center of the NASA, and went to Galveston. In Johnson center, I saw space shuttles, space colonies and the Apollo 18th rocket. I was surprised by the size of them. The interesting thing was that there were many cows beside the rocket! When I saw them, I felt strongly that I was in Texas. I was so moved to see the control center of the landing on the moon in 1969. The center was so much smaller than I imagined, but I thought that this was one of the important sites of the history of the humankind. At Galveston, I saw the Atlantic Ocean. I only knew the Pacific Ocean, so this was a great memory for me.
All of these experiences, attending good presentations, meeting stimulating people, and sightseeing Texas was enabled by the support of the JAAS and ASA. I would really like to thank the JAAS and ASA again. I believe that this program of supporting students has a crucial meaning for us who study about the US.
Tsuyoshi Ishihara
University of Texas, Austin
This year’s ASA Annual Meeting was particularly memorable for me. I had two reasons for my excitement about this year’s meeting. First, I presented my paper as a panelist. Second, the convention was held in my home state, Texas, where I stayed as a graduate student for more than two years.
Although I had already presented some of my papers at the academic conferences in America, the ASA Annual Meeting was truly the largest convention I had ever experienced. Naturally, I felt like a minor league baseball player who finally obtained a chance to make his debut in the major league. However, I was truly fortunate to have the wonderful “head coach” and team mates, and they greatly reduced my stress in the actual conference. My “head coach” was Prof. Susan Smulyan from Brown University, the chair of our session, the “Pacific Translation.“ She was truly an experienced major league “head coach” who knew how to relax inexperienced player like me. Because of her great sense of humor, I did not get nervous as much as I had expected before the presentation. At the same time, she also proved herself as a coach with keen insights. She knew how to improve my paper and gave me various perceptive comments after my presentation. My teammates, who were the panelists in our session, Ms. Naomi Tanabe Uechi from Indiana University and Ms. Manako Ogawa from Univ. of Hawaii, Manoa were also very wonderful. We instantly became good friends since we share the academic interests and experiences in America.
My paper, “Juvenile Delinquents, or Democratic Heroes? Juvenile Translations of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, 1945-1950,“ mainly discussed the ways in which Japanese translators for juvenile readers transformed Huck and Tom in terms of the cultural climate of Japanese society during the occupation. I argued that both Huck and Tom were idealized in Japanese juvenile translations as American democratic heroes, since they could be the models for Japanese children under the movement of American democratization during the occupation. At the same time, I also suggested that Japanese translators were apprehensive that Tom and Huck might help to justify the juvenile delinquency, and as a result, they bowdlerized both Huck and Tom in their juvenile translations. In our session, I received a variety of insightful comments and questions on my paper, such as the possibility to compare Japanese juvenile translations of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer with American juvenile editions in the same era. Although some questions from the audience concerned the issues that are beyond the scope of my study, many of those comments and questions were truly helpful for my paper in future publications.
I also learned a lot from other sessions and events at the ASA annual meeting. Among other things, ASA’s new president Prof. Stephen H. Sumida’s presidential address was truly exciting. In his address, President Sumida claimed the significance of internationalization of ASA. He criticized the American researchers’ scholarly neglects of international scholars and encouraged the American scholars to pay attention to their scholarly achievements, mentioning various studies by international Americanists, including those by Japanese scholars. As one of the international Americanists, I felt greatly energized by President Sumida’s encouragement for the internationalization of ASA. I strongly believe that there are hundreds of great international scholarly achievements in the sphere of American Studies, which have been neglected among American scholars just because they are written in languages other than English. At the same time, however, I also think that internationalization of American Studies is very challenging for international scholars as well, since it means that international scholars’ studies are expected to meet the academic global standard. Listening to the presidential address, I, as an international scholar, felt like receiving a significant challenging task for my future studies.
Finally, I would like to thank Japanese Association of American Studies for providing me the financial support for my presentation at the annual meeting.
Yuko Itatsu
University of Southern California
It is my great pleasure to report that attending the American Studies Association meeting at Houston was indeed an extremely fruitful experience, not only in terms of attending panels and educating myself in the various topics, and grasping the characteristics of this particular academic organization, but also in terms of engaging in intellectual and academic conversations with other scholars and graduate students. I am very much appreciative of the generosity of the Japan U.S. Friendship Fund in association with the JAAS-ASA International Committee for enabling me to attend the ASA conference, which I would not have been able to do without this travel grant.
I had three themes that I followed in the ASA panels: trans-nationalism, ethnic and minority communities, and popular culture. All three of these themes are vectors that I am trying to appropriate into my understanding of the United States and its relations in world civilization.
Particularly interesting to me was the transnational theme throughout the conference and the ways in which American Studies is studied outside of the United States. In particular, the panel “American Studies in a Hostile World: U.S. Culture and Global Politics After September 11th” addressed the various stages American studies programs are in and how domestic politics shapes American studies in places such as Nigeria and India. Professor Stephen Sumida’s Presidential Address included a lengthy list of the various American Studies journals published outside of the U.S., and the titles of the journal articles were very much indicative of the different angles America was studied in.
Although it is of constant importance to me as a graduate student to think about how I can contribute to the field of American History, this occasion pressed me to think about the state of American Studies in Japan and the contributions I can make in this particular arena. It was self-evident that the rich history of American Studies in Japan has contributed widely to not only U.S-Japan History and Japanese American studies, but also many other subfields in American history as I met many Japanese scholars and graduate students working on both sides of the Pacific Rim. By going to panels on minority and visual culture which applied photography, film representation, internet, magazines and posters analysis on ethnic, queer, and women histories, I was reassured of the potential minority popular culture could offer not only in a local and domestic context but also in a global and diasporic context. The conference reconfirmed my belief that there is rich soil yet to be plowed in the field of transnational popular culture, which not only contributes to the different minority studies, and the hegemonic American popular cultural history, but also to our understanding of the larger phenomenon of modernity.
On a practical level, the “Graduate Student Workshop for Publishing Work in Journals” was very helpful in demystifying the process of journal publications. The panelists gave very realistic observations and suggestions on the logistics of the process. I plan to follow this model of professionalizing graduate students when I become a university instructor in the future.
Being affiliated with a History Department at the moment, the panels presented a reminder as to how methodologically American studies is an interdisciplinary and protean field as well as the flexibility as to how American Studies can cross national borders. What was also interesting and encouraging was the fact that the ASA meeting was consisted of many younger scholars compared to other organizations of American history. Meeting these scholars and graduate students from various disciplines and nationalities was a crucial part of my ASA experience. The professional friendships that I made, reestablished, and strengthened, were all productive steps in launching my career.
Toru Umezaki
Department of History
Columbia University
First, I would like to thank the American Studies Association (ASA) and the International Committee of Japanese Association for American Studies (JASA) for giving me an opportunity to attend the ASA annual meeting in Houston, TX, from November 14 to 17, 2002. As an observer, I learned about the ASA’s and JAAS’s organizational efforts to develop an intellectual community. Blatant throughout the talks was that globalizing American studies is not only an intellectual but also an organizational endeavor in progress. Throughout the experience stimulated me to question what “global/local” means in American studies today.
After a three-and-a-half hour flight from New York City, it was a statue of George Bush, standing “against wind” that welcomed me at the international airport in Houston. Texas, once an independent republic, still seems to uphold its “pride” as the “Lone Star State.“ The meeting was held in Galleria, a huge shopping mall with an ice-skating ring, home of Olympic medalist Tara Lipinski. Thinking about globalization in American studies from a shopping mall accentuated for me how American consumer culture acts an integral part of the globalizing (or standardizing) process of our life.
Besides the actual phenomenon of globalization, there are at least three co-related aspects of the globalization of American Studies that came to the fore at the conference: organizational efforts, regional exchanges, and theoretical developments. It is not an easy task for Americanists to go beyond the border of “American” studies, either institutionally or rhetorically. As its thick program book suggests, however, it was the accessibility of the ASA that made productive discussion on global/local by the hundreds of participants possible. The panelists and audience were not limited to American scholars, but they included many European, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American scholars and students. I believe that an accumulation of bi-national organizational cooperations, such as the ASA-JAAS project, is significantly helping create the foundation for a global network of scholars in this field.
Secondly, there were exchanges concerning the intellectual context of American studies. The presidential address highlighted the significance of learning American Studies abroad. In a roundtable discussion, “Changing American Studies in a New Europe,“ Americanists form Germany, Austria, and the United States argued that, with the end of the Cold War, newly integrated Europe is continuously seeking a way to establish a “European” intellectual discourse about the United States. Although European American studies does not automatically provide an alternative perspective for the rest of the world, the co-existence of multiple contexts of American studies could promote contentious case about what American studies should be in the global age.
Finally, and most importantly, I observed collective efforts for the theoretical development of American studies. Some argued from a Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony when they talked about American capitalism. Some used the literary theory of “negation of negation” to analyze cultural representations of the United States. In fact, the entire spectrum of literary and historical concepts intimately linked to globalization theories came to the fore, with emphasis on language, context, violence, gender, race, class, Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean, and diasporas. Of particular interest for my own work was Thomas Bender’s presentation in a roundtable entitled “American Studies in a Hostile World.“ In his talk, Bender pointed out that both the American Left and Right are now using the same narrative of American politics and culture. I believe that this dilemma requires an institutional as well as a theoretical rupture from the intellectual confinement witnessed after September 11th.
In considering how to develop a framework of my own dissertation project, the ASA meeting provided me with a profitable intellectual experience. I appreciate the financial support from the ASA and the JAAS once again, and hope to see fellow Americanists from the world in Hartford next year.
In closing, let me reiterate how unambiguous I am in my feelings about the trip. It was a completely wonderful opportunity for me to get a more active sense of the American Studies scholarly community in Japan. It has made me excited about pursuing a range of possibilities for future connection and collaboration with Japanese colleagues. It also made me excited about returning to Japan in the future. Within the next month I will be contacting Warren Soiffer, Program Development Officer of the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, whom I met at the JAAS conference, to see about arranging for the JAAS delegates who attend the ASA conference in Houston this fall to extend their trip for a visit to the International Forum for U.S. Studies that I co-direct. Hopefully, during that visit we could explore other possibilities for collaborative research, translation and publication issues, issues of greater access by the U.S. community to the work of our Japanese colleagues, and the possibility of research residencies by Japanese scholars at the Forum. My thanks again to my wonderful hosts and to the funders of this initiative who have made it all possible. This will have a lasting impact on my work.
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