Free Shipping for Orders Over $50
Delivery & Return:Free shipping on all orders over $50
Estimated Delivery:7-15 days international
People:14 people viewing this product right now!
Easy Returns:Enjoy hassle-free returns within 30 days!
Payment:Secure checkout
SKU:70935156
With a low rate of immigration and a high rate of interracial marriage, Japanese Americans today compose the Asian ethnic group with the largest proportion of mixed-race members. Within Japanese American communities, increased participation by mixed-race members, along with concerns about overassimilation, has led to a search for cultural authenticity, giving new answers to the question, Who is Japanese American? In Pure Beauty, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain tackles this question by studying a cultural institution: Japanese American community beauty pageants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu. King-O’Riain employs rich ethnographic fieldwork to discover how these pageants seek to maintain racial and ethnic purity amid shifting notions of cultural identity. She uses revealing in-depth interviews with candidates, queens, and community members, her experiences as a pageant committee member, and archival research—including Japanese and English newspapers, museum collections, private photo albums, and mementos—to establish both the importance and impossibility of racial purity. King-O’Riain examines racial eligibility rules and tests, which encompass not only ancestry but also residency, community service, and culture, and traces the history of pageants throughout the United States. Pure Beauty shows how racial and gendered meanings are enacted through the pageants, and reveals their impact on Japanese American men, women, and children. King-O’Riain concludes that the mixed-race challenge to racial understandings of Japanese Americanness does not necessarily mean an end to race as we know it and asserts that race is work—created and re-created in a social context. Ultimately, she determines that the concept of race, fragile though it may be, is still one of the categories by which Japanese Americans are judged.Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain is lecturer in sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
Disclaimer: the author is a personal friend. I was only dimly aware of this aspect of her work before I read this book; my eyes were OPENED by "Pure Beauty", and in a good way.I never took sociology at school, and while I agree, heartily with the dictum, "I am a man, and whatever concerns humanity is of interest to me", I'm generally not one to read sociology textbooks (which is how "Pure Beauty" scans to me) for pleasure!Yet pleased I was to take in the myriad details and interesting analysis of Dr. King's fieldwork as a beauty pageant volunteer, and later judge. I was fascinated by the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, multi-culturalism, identity, feminism, economics, exploitation and growth young Japanese-American women lived and explored as they sought to be crowned "Nisei Week" or "Cherry Blossom" Queen.I think some of the repetition noted by an earlier reviewer is due to the what I perceive as the structure of the book as a college level text, which would often be assigned in chapters in a survey course. Thus each chapter has to be able to stand alone, and be understood in isolation, even if certain theses have already been tangentially explored in an earlier chapter. But if you look past that, the chapters each give a richer, more nuanced picture of the issues that the Introduction sketches, and as my understanding of the lived reality of this ethnic experience (not one I own in the slightest; I am a Majority Male) grew as I read, the later chapters built on the earlier.In light of the election of President Obama, there has been a lot said and written about a "Post-Racial" society. I found "Pure Beauty" to be a well-researched and written opposition of empirical fact to this perhaps wishful notion. The participants in these pageants, particularly the young multi-racial women, seem to be BOTH rejecting and embracing the notion that race and ethnic identity don't matter; or to put it another way, they are more interested in REDEFINING boundaries and identities than blowing them up outright.Highly Recommended.
