Title: Learning to speak a new tongue : imagining a way that holds people together-- an Asian American conversation /
Authors: Matsuoka, Fumitaka.
Publisher: Pickwick Publications,
Year: 2011
Subjects: Asian Americans Ethnic identity; Group identity United States; Cultural pluralism United States
Abstract: What holds people together in a fragmented world? The response comes from a religious community that has not been very visible: Asian Americans. The author employs the threefold epistemological scaffold familiar to Asian Americans: (1) translocal value orientation embedded in the experiences of racialization, (2) a heightened sensitivity to pathos arising out of our dissonance with the societal norms and values, and (3) amphibolous spirituality, that is, a co-existence of multiple religious traditions without any resolution of their differences. The angle of vision embedded in this epistemological framework of Asian Americans' lives may well provide a clue to an alternate architectural paradigm in building a new peoplehood and to redefine democratic freedom as the historical paradigm of American peoplehood.
Contents: What holds people together in a fragmented world? -- The original language of American peoplehood and its corruption --0 People on the way : translocal and rupturally liminal experience of race -- The spirit of dissonance and dissent -- Amphibolous faith : reality is multiple.