Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
Imagining and Enacting Chineseness in the Context of Chinese Adoption
In this talk, Professor Andrea Louie will discuss the construction of identities for children adopted from China
Where
Prof. Louie will address the strategic construction of “Chinese” identities by both Asian American and white adoptive parents in St. Louis, MO and in the San Francisco Bay area for their children adopted from China. In the context of globalization and the acute awareness of adopted children’s connections to China (however fraught), how do adoptive parents imagine both themselves and their “Chinese” children as inhabiting a cosmopolitan, multicultural world? Parents engage in imagining themselves and their children as a family at the same time that they rework their own identities in relation to the increasing presence of “difference” in their own lives. Chineseness is seen as a form of cultural capital at the same time that it remains laden with essentialized ideas tied to concerns about cultural authenticity. This is reflected in the fact that parents’ approaches to “difference” attempt to both tame it and turn it into a resource, as parents try to negotiate their own relationships to difference as cosmopolitan subjects.
At the same time, while there is potential for the construction of Chineseness to take on varied meanings as attached to new understandings of race and racism, Orientalist conceptions of Chineseness as a form of racial and cultural difference continue to shape ideas about Chineseness.
Andrea Louie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University. She is author of Chineseness Across Borders: Re-negotiating Chinese Identities in China and the U.S. (Duke, 2004) and is revising her second book focusing on the “cultural socialization” and racialization of children adopted from China in the U.S. She has recently begun a research project on international Chinese students at Michigan State University.
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Please join us for the Grad Mixer! Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, Enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow students across USC Annenberg. Graduate students from any field are welcome to join, so it is a great opportunity to meet fellow students with IR/foreign policy-related research topics and interests.
RSVP link: https://forms.gle/1zer188RE9dCS6Ho6
Events
Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow international students.
Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author David M. Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.