Asian America in the Age of Professionalization
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Tabares, Leland
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 04, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Tina Chen Goudie, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Tina Chen Goudie, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Michael Francis Berube, Committee Member
Ebony Coletu, Committee Member
Eric Robert Hayot, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Asian American Studies
professionalization
institutionality
racialization - Abstract:
- Asian America in the Age of Professionalization examines the institutional, ideological, and cultural formations that legitimize and regulate Asian American working professionals across various professional industry settings in the twenty-first century. No longer perceived simply as working class wage laborers, or professionals fixed to model minority careers in medicine, law, accounting, or engineering, Asian Americans are increasingly involved in an array of contemporary American industry fields. Nevertheless, they encounter exclusionary and inclusionary institutional formations that affect their professional mobility and shape their professional and cultural belonging, which lead to new cultural conceptions of Asian Americanness. I use ‘professionalization’ as a critical concept to interrogate the institutional processes that govern Asian American access, mobility, and belonging in a range of professional workspaces. In doing so, I demonstrate the complex ways that Asian Americans influence the institutional and ideological makeup of American professions in the twenty-first century. To grasp the conditions and consequences of professionalization that inform Asian American racial formation, this project reads across disciplinary boundaries, archives, and institutional settings. Because Asian Americans in the twenty-first century are both diversifying their participation in the professional labor economy and revising cultural conceptions of industries historically associated with Asian Americans, this project takes an interdisciplinary approach that attends to critical histories in Asian American Studies, business economics and management, urban planning, sociology, literary studies, media studies, food studies, disability studies, and critical university studies. Asian America in the Age of Professionalization employs these critical discourses to read formal workspace documents, corporate policies and websites, film, cookbooks, food, television series, webseries, and online video blogs alongside literary fiction in order to expand previous conceptions of Asian America’s literary and cultural archives at a time when Asian Americans are gaining new opportunities to voice their experiences to broader publics.