Performing Race and Ethnicity Through Campus Culture Shows

• In Event: Roundtable Session 104
  In Roundtable Session: Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans: Roundtable Session on Higher Education

Abstract

Although race images profoundly shape people’s lives and circumstances, they neither define nor reveal the complicated realities of how people view themselves, make sense of racial ascriptions, and project themselves to outsiders. Through a qualitative inquiry, the paper examines how Hmong university students use cultural shows, to disrupt essentializations of Hmongness and Asianness in order to critique conceptions of diversity at a California university where AAPIs are a plurality of the student population. The paper argues that campus culture shows embody a struggle for legitimacy and productive peformative negotiations of contradictions found both in and beyond the university.

Author

• Rican Vue, University of California - Riverside