The Commodification and Consumption of Cultural Experience: Asian Americans in the White Suburbs

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Race

Abstract

The rapidly diversifying suburbs are a key site to understanding the intersectional dynamics of race, ethnicity, and class. In particular, the ways that diversifying suburban neighborhoods and communities are shaping and reconfiguring the relational dynamics of racialized groups remain an important consideration in understanding racialization as a relational project. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork within a Chinese immigrant community located in a predominantly white and affluent suburban region, this study seeks to examine and theorize the relational dynamics between whites and Asian Americans. I advance an ethnographically grounded theoretical conceptualization of the white-Asian suburban relationship, arguing that their social relations can be understood as a symbiotic cycle, driven by processes that I call the commodification and consumption of cultural experience. Focusing on the organizational activities of a Chinese cultural association in a range of public contexts, I argue that this Chinese immigrant community engages in the commodification of various cultural elements for the purpose of white consumption. While the Chinese community can acquire highly desired white public recognition as model community members and citizens, white suburbanites can satiate their appetite for diversity through the consumption of authentic cultural experience. Thus, their relational dynamic is held together by symbiotic interest convergence. This theory of commodification and consumption of cultural experience offers an explanatory framework that can help elucidate the relational connections between racialized groups.

Author

• Christopher Hu, University of Alabama