#black clover saly

[devinecummingsvoiceacting]

black clover anime discussion

[performingwomen-blog]

Asian/American - Response

It’s interesting to me that so much of the discourse about being Asian-American still has to focus on issues of reductive stereotyping, namely because discourse about being black in America seems to have gotten more complicated than that, though the issue is still relevant. I can’t find the exact quote, but somewhere early on in Kandice Chuh’s Imaginary Borders, she says that there is a long tradition of activism with respect to the rights of black Americans for which there hasn’t existed a parallel for Asian-Americans until relatively recently. I think this is the reason why the Asian-American movement still has to contend so breathlessly with poor or nonexistent representation and various kinds of essentalizing stereotypes, things that pro-black activists have been developing countermeasures for since the early nineteenth century. The performances of Canwen Xu and Denise Uyehara both seem to bear that out in their content, but also in their form; these are obviously two very smart, very talented women who, even in very liberal circles like (pseudo-)academia and the theater, still have to contend at a very basic level that they exist in complex ways that are distinct from one another and totally different from the various stereotypes that are propagated about them in popular culture. 

This is the same context that informs Celine Shimizu’s project in The Hypersexuality of Asian/American Women. Her call for the reclamation of the hyper-sexualized Asian woman is at once a legitimization of the experiences of Asian-American sex workers/other folks on the sexual and economic margins, a subversion of the trope itself, and a contestation of the model minority myth, which sterilizes/renders vanilla the range of acceptable Asian-American sexualities and personalities. It was also interesting to think about representation with respect to Avril Lavigne’s “Hello Kitty.” Somewhat similar to how Shimizu makes a case for the perverse, I wanted to unpack my initial reading of the video as problematic and bad. 

As Lavigne said in her tweets/Facebook post, the video was shot in Japan, with a Japanese director and Japanese choreographers, on her Japanese label, for her sizable population of Japanese fans. I did a little research to try and corroborate that last point: according to Business Insider, Lavigne’s self-titled album (released in 2013, featuring “Hello Kitty”) peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts in Japan and reached #1 in Taiwan and China. Furthermore, reports from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (via the Recording Industry Association of Japan--here’s the translated/collated/wiki-fied version, sources at the bottom) indicate that Japan has been the world’s second (and sometimes first) largest music market since at least 2004 (earliest available record), which means that Avril Lavigne has probably had fans in Japan since the first half of the second Bush administration (“Sk8r Boi” was released in 2002). So it actually isn’t any surprise at all that she ended up making this weird-bad dubstep remix of a poorly written English language J-pop song, and it isn’t a surprise that the music video she made for it rehearses many of the same tropes that show up in that genre. 

For comparison, here’s a recent showing from what Wikipedia tells me is one of the most popular J-pop groups on the planet, Momoiro Clover Z. Again, there are lots of pastel colors and cursory/superficial representations of Japanese culture, all of them within the aesthetic range of “Hello Kitty”--though the performances and production value are way, way better (bonus points for the rapping black guy). This is all to say that the J-pop genre literally exists to essentialize, objectify, and commodify Japanese culture. 

But to its credit, J-pop made by Japanese people is effectively Japanese people objectifying themselves willfully. Insofar as the performers are consenting parties, they are making their own choice to reduce and commodify their own racialized and gendered bodies.* And the objectification is very clearly meant for other Japanese people, which is to say that there is little to no risk of misrepresenting the culture, since the culture presumably knows what it’s own truth is and could effectively call bullshit if it saw that something about its representation was off. 

What makes the “Hello Kitty” video dangerous is that Avril Lavigne is a white Canadian, not Japanese. As a result, we, viewing it from an American context, can be forgiven for assuming that (1) she made it for us, (2) she made it without the consent of “the Japanese” (whoever they can be said to be, since there are Japanese people in the video, but presumably not the ones who are empowered to decide what is and is not an appropriate representation of Japanese-ness to an American audience), and that (3) she did so in order to make herself look cool and trendy and marketable to us, her audience in North America. So the “Hello Kitty” video appears to us as appropriation, and a rehearsal of reductive stereotypes about Asian-ness/Asian-American-ness in front of an audience that still, impossibly, doesn’t know how to make sense of Asian-American bodies beyond these stereotypes. And it does this all in the interest of capital, which makes it even worse. 

You could argue that because it’s a J-pop-style song and a J-pop-style music video, and because she has a significant fanbase in Japan, we Americans should recognize that Avril Lavigne did not intend the video solely or even mostly for North American consumption. You could also argue that because the whole creative team and label were Japanese, she didn’t take Japanese culture without asking the proper authorities. You could conclude (and I would hesitantly agree) that the “Hello Kitty” music video isn’t open appropriation, but a consequence of an evermore global music industry--albeit a really shitty showing of what that industry is capable of, even when it comes to making extremely vapid music (for comparison, I present exhibit B, the best-selling idol group in Japan, AKB48). You could even go as far as to say that, if anything, it was Avril Lavigne’s whiteness that her team were trying to commodify, packaging her and selling her to the Japanese public as the infantile, exotic Occidental, fumbling her way through the language and locales with childlike cuteness. But in the end, intent doesn’t excuse consequence. Avril Lavigne and her team should have recognized that because she’s white and Canadian, her primary place of relevance was (is? do people still listen to Avril Lavigne?) North America. Had they done this, they may have realized that their music video would also have a life as a piece of North American popular culture, and would therefore contribute to the North American popular mis-imagining of Asian-Americans.

Does this mean that people who produce popular culture for America at one time shouldn’t produce for another culture at another time if it means that the product might impact negatively the situation at home? Doesn’t that severely curtail the ability for popular cultures to interact across borders, eliminating or at least limiting the ways in which American artists can engage with the cultures of nations that have representative populations in the US? Well, maybe. I don’t know. It could be a really good thing to develop a global popular culture market that’s systemically adverse to exoticism, even/especially the kind that objectifies white people. Not least because it might prevent us from having to witness more of these atrocities.

-sali.

*This becomes a really fraught statement when you consider the fact that J-pop idol culture seems predicated on adult male sexualization of teenage girls (here’s a documentary for you if you want to learn more). I don’t feel confident in my ability to critique the statement further because I don’t belong to contemporary Japanese culture, nor have I engaged meaningfully in its study. But incapability or no, I felt that it would be irresponsible to not include this caveat.