A core component of CSREA is supporting faculty and advanced students in the development of cutting-edge, collaborative intellectual work. “What I Am Thinking About Now” is an informal workshop/seminar series where faculty and graduate students present recently published works and works in progress for early-stage feedback and development.
——
Before Hello Kitty: Asian Cuteness in the American Imagination
Erica Kanesaka, Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Postdoctoral Fellow, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
In this talk, Dr. Kanesaka will position the contemporary fetishization of Japanese kawaii (cute) culture in longer histories of American racism and the alignment of Asian bodies with cute objects. Drawing on archival research in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s material culture, she will illustrate how seemingly innocent objects such as teddy bears have underpinned notions of Asian cuteness, associating Asian people with toys, animals, and children in ways that have disguised racial, sexual, and imperial violence as forms of love, protection, and care. With a focus on the forgotten Orientalist backstory of a teddy-bear-like toy called the Billiken doll, Dr. Kanesaka’s talk will discuss the importance of childhood’s lost objects—items that were quite literally “loved to pieces” before being discarded—for how we think about Japanophilia and Asian American sexual politics today.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Erica Kanesaka is Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Postdoctoral Fellow, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Next year, she will be starting as an Assistant Professor of English at Emory University. Her work has received awards from national scholarly organizations, including the Association for Asian American Studies, and can be found in the Journal of Asian American Studies, positions: asia critique, Victorian Studies, and other academic and public forums.