Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines how racial passing is represented and articulated in Asian diaspora comics dealing with the theme of assimilation.I argue that there is a growing contingent of North American cartoonists of Asian descent exploring the practice of passing in revisionary and expanded ways.As a racialized group not usually associated with passing (except for mixed heritage individuals), the Asian American community does not view the practice as a viable option to facilitate assimilation.However, this impossibility does not stop some Asian Americans from yearning for the ability to pass for white, especially when they witness its benefits for members of other ethnic minorities, such as some Jewish Americans.Consequently, in the graphic novels I address, the yearning to pass is nuanced and depicted mainly as a fantasy.The cartoonists in my corpus favour fantastical, imaginative and aspirational forms of passing mainly because of their flexibility in capturing and representing the desire for, or fantasy of, assimilation rather than the actuality of being able to assume a different identity phenotypically.Moreover, the affordances of comics (image-text relations, history with racial representation and affinity with fantasy-oriented genres like the superhero genre) allow the creators to experiment with body transformation, build alternate versions of American society and creatively articulate the complex obsession that some Asian Americans have with whiteness.This dissertation starts with a theoretical introductory chapter anchored in Art Spiegelman's Maus, which serves as a reference for reframing racial passing.The analysis of Maus also helps illuminate and theorize the unique connection between Asian and Jewish Americans regarding passing and assimilation.I then focus on four graphic novels written by cartoonists of Asian descent: Gene Luen Yang's The Shadow Hero (in collaboration with Sonny Liew), Superman Smashes the Klan (with the artwork of Gurihiru), American Born Chinese (by Pat Fong iii Yang again) and finally, Aminder Dhaliwal's Cyclopedia Exotica.Each comic book deals with the role of racial passing as a fantasy in unique ways, using tropes and themes specific to some genres, such as superheroes, mythology and science fiction.With these different graphic novels, the dissertation is able to examine their different experimentations with the discourse of fantasy and, in the process, establish a thematic link that connects the different works of the corpus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".