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Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture
Local Invisibility,
Postcolonial Feminisms
Asian American Contemporary
Artists in California
Laura Fantone
Series Editors
Danielle Egan
St. Lawrence University
Canton, NY, USA
Patricia Clough
Graduate Centre
City University of New York
New York, NY, USA
Highlighting the work taking place at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality
studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, this
series offers a platform for scholars pushing the boundaries of gender and
sexuality studies substantively, theoretically, and stylistically. The authors
draw on insights from diverse scholarship and research in popular culture,
ethnography, history, cinema, religion, performance, new media studies,
and technoscience studies to render visible the complex manner in which
gender and sexuality intersect and can, at times, create tensions and fis-
sures between one another. Encouraging breadth in terms of both scope
and theme, the series editors seek works that explore the multifaceted
domain of gender and sexuality in a manner that challenges the taken-for-
granted. On one hand, the series foregrounds the pleasure, pain, politics,
and aesthetics at the nexus of sexual practice and gendered expression. On
the other, it explores new sites for the expression of gender and sexuality,
the new geographies of intimacy being constituted at both the local and
global scales.
More information about this series at

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Laura Fantone
Local Invisibility,
Postcolonial
Feminisms
Asian American Contemporary
Artists in California
Laura Fantone
Gender and Women’s Studies
University of California
Berkeley, CA, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-50669-6 ISBN 978-1-137-50670-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953884
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Cover Image © Nancy Hom

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
This book is dedicated to all the artists, activists, cultural producers,
creative workers and immaterial laborers, who keep struggling across
generations to reach visibility, not only for their own sake, but to
empower neglected communities in Asia, the Americas and across the
Pacific. I dedicate this work to the memory of Asian American artists
and activists I heard about, saw, met and recognized in their greatness
when I arrived in the Bay Area and those that have passed away since:
Al Robles, Carlos Villa, Ruth Asawa, Yuri Kochiyama and Him Mark
Lai. The generation I do not write about here, yet whose work inspired
my project, and keeps inspiring those who came after them. Asian
Americans or not, all those enjoying their bright light and powerful
words and images of these artists.
Acknowledgements
Writing the acknowledgments for this book is a great task. It allows me to

go back in time and to recognize the efforts, conversations, events,
encounters with people, to walk through all the turns that shaped this
book—so much time and energy shared with amazing artists, col-
leagues and friends. Their intelligence is the greatest gift that went into
this book.
Time and connections are the first gifts that must be acknowledged. All
the mistakes I made in the trajectory, and the many I was able to avoid
because of my colleagues and friends’ generous feedback, also need to be
acknowledged here.
The Asian American art I am so passionate about, evolves on its own; it
does not need a book like mine to be recognized. Asian American art’s
depth, diversity and multidimensionality will be acknowledged in more
relevant arenas, soon. I hope that this aspect of Asian American culture
will become more and more central to American culture, whatever that is.
Becoming aware of its limited visibility made me immensely more
thankful for the opportunities to find out so much about it while being in
Berkeley.
Going back to the beginning of the project, my deepest gratitude goes
to Trinh T. Minh-ha, whom I encountered on a hot day in Naples, eventu-
ally leading to research visual art, gender and postcoloniality. My thanks
extend as well to Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, the few experts who
endlessly support my oscillations between Asian and American cultures
and art, never asking me to stop crossing boundaries.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Nancy Hom and Michelle Dizon, whose work, politics and
ethics are an endless inspiration, and Cynthia Tom, whose energy and
dedication to Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) can not
be described fully with words. I am grateful to Cynthia for her welcoming,
friendly way of opening up to me, showing such amazing trust and soli-
darity given our differences. I would like to thank Moira Roth, whose vast
knowledge of AAWAA and feminist artists of color guided me, from afar,
and, at times, in wonderful, unexpectedly present ways.
There were many AAWAA artists whose work I could not include here,
even if their words sustained my project, bringing me new insights and
energy, welcoming me after my periods of absence: Shari de Boer, Kay
Kang, XiaoJie Zheng, Shizue Siegel, Lenore Chinn, Judy Shintani, Lucy
Arai, Susan Almazol, Reiko Fuiji and Irene Wibawa. Every show organized
by AAWAA led me to articulate new questions (certainly more relevant
than the naïve ones I had prepared) inspiring insights and turning points
in my research, becoming an endless conversation I do not wish to conclude
now that the book is printed. I regret that it has taken me so long to return
something to them.
On a scholarly level, I am deeply thankful and inspired by Margo
Machida, Mark Johnson, Gordon Chang, Alexandra Chang, Elaine Kim,
Constance Lewallen and Lawrence Rinder.
I am thankful to Tiffany Lin who accompanied me to my interview
with Betty Kano and Cynthia Tom, and helped me with recording and
transcribing.
I am thankful for the BAM PFA staff’s willingness to meet and show
me some of the original works by Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha. That experi-
ence was a turning point for my entire project.
While I was affiliated with the Beatrice Bain Research Group on Gender,
I benefited from the feedback of many brilliant scholars from all over the
world: Meeta Rani Jha, Wendy Sarvasy, Anna Novakov, Lin Bin, Veronica
Saenz, Nicole Roberts, Tomomi Kinawa and the amazing filmmaker Dai
Jin Hua. I don’t know how I could have managed without the friendship
of Yun Li, Rita Alfonso and the warmth of the BBRG common room.
In the same environment, sometimes I had the opportunity to meet
Berkeley graduate students in the decolonial working group lead by Laura
Peréz, and especially the members of the visuality and alterity working
group: Annie Fukushima, Dalida Marìa Benfield and Wanda Alarcòn.
My thanks to BBRG Staff, Gillian Edgelow, Charis Thompson, Paola
Bacchetta, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Juana Rodrìguez for their support in
the early stages. Today I wish to send my best, thankful thoughts to all
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ix
the University of California Berkeley faculty with whom I had the pleasure
to discuss my project; especially Mel Chen, Greg Choy, Catherine Ceniza
Choy, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Alisa Bierrìa, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong,
Francine Masiello and Heartha Sweet Wong.
I am deeply indebted for conversations on many topics that turned out
to be relevant to this book, though sometimes I was not open to take in
their insights, because they would have changed completely the structure
of my argument (as they ended up doing anyway obliquely).
My colleagues were a constant inspiration, offering conversation, com-
fort and tips, all gifts that last still today. I am especially thinking of Harvey
Dong, Greg Choy, Ayse Agis, Jac Asher and Barbara Barnes.
For their hospitality, generosity in listening to my many rants, thinking
hard on my early drafts’ feedbacks, thanks to Barbara Epstein, Lou De
Matteis, Marta Baldocchi, Silvia Federici, Shonya Sayres, Rose Kim, Patrizia
Longo, Martin Stokes, Eddie Yuen, Robin Balliger and Marco Jacquemet.
For their illuminating insights and criticism, I am indebted to Patricia
Clough, Hosu Kim and the anonymous reviewers who believed in the proj-
ect, and led me to major rearranging of the chapters, with a mix of grace
and piercing criticism that reminded me of many women in my family.
For the patient, meticulous editing, I am grateful for the assistance I
received from three brilliant women: Kathy Wallerstein, Lisa Ruth Elliott
and Katie Lally. I must thank Palgrave’s editorial team Lani Oshima, Alexis
Nelson and Kyra Saniewski for patiently guiding me from the beginning
to the end, pushing me to move on and conclude, beyond my doubts and
fears.
A final point on location: the book was completed in Italy. I am thank-
ful to all the women in my family who support me and who will never
read this book, but still understand how important it was for me to write
it. I am grateful to all those who believed in maintaining words and
images on the same plane, all those who cross borders with courage and
inspirations.
Finally, I am grateful for my rootedness: a specific place I always go
back to, my family home’s top floor. It is a former barn, where I could
hide and write in silence for hours and enjoy the view of the sun setting on
the Alps. Grazie nonni, papi e mamma per lo spazio fisico e mentale! In this
sentence the many struggles of living between languages lie, hardly hidden
behind this book’s inevitable surface—a trace of a wound, a gap, uno
squarcio, across languages, continents, cultures, generations of women:
appreciating art, being and writing in-between.
Contents
1 Introduction: Visuality, Gender and Asian America 1
2 Asian American Art for the People 25
3 Traces and Visions of In-Betweenness 63
4 AAWAA: Visibility, Pan-Asian Identity and the Limits

of Community 93
5 Red and Gold Washing 139
6 Opacities: Local Venues, Cosmopolitan Imaginaries 181
7 Conclusions 211
Bibliography 221
Index 233
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Working Women, poster by Nancy Hom 26

Fig. 2.2 Nancy Hom and filmmaker Loni Ding at Kearny
Street Workshop, photo taken by Bob Hsiang 34
Fig. 2.3 Icons of Presence book cover, designed by artist Choppy Oshiro 37
Fig. 2.4 Chris Iijima and Nobuko Miyamoto, singing outdoors
in New York City, photo taken by Bob Hsiang
on MLK Day 1971 42
Fig. 3.1 Photo of Nothing but Ways installation by Lynn Kirby,
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Photo by Trinh T. Minh-ha 82
Fig. 3.2 Photo of L’Autre Marche installation 2006–2009
(photo taken by Trinh 2006) 84
Fig. 4.1 Cynthia Tom and Shari de Boer AAWAA’s 15th anniversary
timeline as a tree, photo by Cynthia Tom 96
Fig. 4.2 Cynthia Tom, Discards & Variances: Human Trafficking
from a Chinese Family Perspective, photo by the artist, 2015 111
Fig. 4.3 Cynthia Tom, Hom Shee Mock, 1923. Acrylic on canvas, 2008 113
Fig. 5.1 Hung Liu, Goddess of Love, Goddess of Democracy. 1989,
paint on canvas 145
Fig. 5.2 Hung Liu, Golden Lotus. Red Shoe. 1990, paint on canvas 149
Fig. 6.1 Stephanie Syjuco, MONEY FACTORY: Economic Reality Game,
Taiwan national museum, photo taken by the artist 195
Fig. 6.2 Michelle Dizon, Balikbayan Box, installation,
photo taken by the artist 200
Fig. 6.3 Michelle Dizon, Perpetual Peace, still from film frame,
photo taken by the artist 203
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Visuality, Gender

and Asian America
The persistent questioning of the insider’s and the outsider’s position in

terms of cultural politics is yet another way to work at the difficult edge
between these movements—inside out and outside in.
—Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Digital Film Event, p. 193
In 2005, I met Trinh T. Minh-ha in Naples and there I saw her films for the
first time. She presented The Fourth Dimension, as an experiment in decon-
structing Japan and exploring frames in digital art (2001). At the time
I was writing about colonialism, neo-orientalism and Japanese characters in
video games. Her visual work and writings shifted my trajectory towards
Asian Americanness, visuality, women artists and alterity. The only other
East Asian visual artists I had in mind at that time were Yoko Ono and
Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha—artists associated with highly experimental work,
centered around gender, otherness and visuality. The encounter with Trinh
T. Minh-ha changed my perspectives in deep ways, and some of the intel-
lectual and spiritual pathways where it took me are still unfolding today.
In 2007 I traveled to Berkeley to see a show at BAM-PFA (Berkeley Art
Museum) titled One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now. The occa-
sion was perfect for me because I had just started pursuing my research
interest in Asian American art, and the show’s curatorial statement promised
“a challenge to extend the category of Asian American art”:
© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Fantone, Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms,
Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2_1
2 L. FANTONE
There can be no such thing as a collective definition of the constituency

called Asian America, … but the show was born from the desire to evaluate
an Asian American sense of self, an individualism that comprises an Asian
American cultural imagination. (One Way or Another brochure, 2007)
Curators Melissa Chu, Karin Higa and Susette Min surprised me in their
oscillation between using a collective, demographic category (Asian
American) and, at the same time, emphasizing the self and individuality
within it and thus denying its validity as a ground for a commonality, an
artistic style, or a shared set of concerns and foci in Asian American artists’
work. Theirs was a question coming from the inside, serving as a response
to the perception of art on the outside.
I wondered then how one was to define Asian American art. Is it art
made by people who live in the USA but are of Asian origins? Is it art that
reflects subjects and aesthetic styles or techniques typical of specific Asian
visual art traditions? Is it art that reflects the unique concerns, topics and
styles emerging from the experience of being part of the Asian diaspora in
the USA (Machida 2008, p. 29)? Many insides and outsides are at play in
the posing of such questions.
If there was no consensus on the definition of Asian American art
among the experts, then my initial research project was pointless. In that
moment I realized that my research would have to be an interrogation of
the history and meaning of Asian American art as an evolving, contested
cultural formation. As of now, after years of research and writing, those
same questions on Asian American art remain unsettled, even among
scholars and art historians specializing in Asian America—notably,
Machida, Chang and Johnson, Higa, Kim and Mizota—all of whom rec-
ognize the increased internal diversity of Asian American communities due
to the basic demographic growth of such groups across the USA, as well
as the vast differences among cultures and countries of origin. These are
some of the many outside factors shaping an externally imposed Asian
Americanness, a collective space of artistic, cultural and demographic shifts
and internal negotiations. The complicated question that remains on the
table is, how do demographics and cultural diversity influence style, sub-
jects and the foci of Asian American artists? Why, when, and to what pur-
poses do artists chose to identify with such a cultural or demographic
label, both in the past and today? Is it to claim visibility? To search for
belonging in the larger, diverse mix of American ethnicities and cultures?
These are the background questions to my investigation.
INTRODUCTION: VISUALITY, GENDER AND ASIAN AMERICA 3
Margo Machida, an incredibly talented art historian, ended her seminal

book Unsettled Visions (2008) by stating that Asian American art is deeply
shaped by a poetics of positionality. In surveying most of the Asian American
artists emerging in the 1990s, she pointed out that it was impossible not to
examine three reemerging themes: othering (identity and difference),
social memory and trauma, and migration and relationship to place.
Machida sees a continuity across generations of Asian American artists and,
while registering important aesthetic and subject-choice differences, she
maintains a position based on an imagined connection ever enriched by
heterogeneity. Machida develops the idea of “communities of cultural
imagination” in describing contemporary Asian American art as moving
away from the opposing traps of either embracing one’s identity while
policing its boundaries or self-erasing. She “recognizes that cultural imagin
ation is a communicative (and community) field in which the individual
and the collective flow back and forth, a field where human consciousness
(and creativity) is an active agent of innovation of the social imaginary”
(Machida 2008, p. 278). I use Machida’s conceptual guide to analyze con-
temporary art as a complex field full of tensions, yet still a shared ground.
She does not theorize a rupture among contemporary Asian American art-
ists, because ultimately her political goal is to promote a conception of the
Asian American art community as a plurality or, as she puts it, “communi-
ties of cultural imagination,” using art to give a heterogeneous group the
power of cultural, collective imagination (Machida 2008, p. 14).
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Karin Higa, in her 2002 survey
of Asian American women artists in California, entitled “What is an
American Woman Artist?” (in Art/Women/California, 1950–2000 2002),
claims that there are no connecting elements today to justify such a cate-
gory, even as she proceeds to describe the work of five major artists of the
twentieth century. Surprised again by this simultaneous negation and affir-
mation, I followed Higa’s writing, noticing how she honors the relevance
of the Asian American movement as the origin moment without which the
cultural and artistic production called “Asian American” would not be
recognized today. Higa also justifies the need to look at gender within that
category, given women’s double exclusion from feminist Eurocentrism
and from Asian American men’s oppression.
Superficially, this may seem a simplistic criterion based on an intersec-
tion of oppressions, justifying the search for the most oppressed subject,
the subaltern who can speak, and for whom, magically, the researcher-
translator will provide articulation of her oppression. I remained fascinated
4 L. FANTONE
by that oscillation between the present need to claim an identity and the
simultaneous recognition of diversity within it, as if the label, while used,
has become stifling and stale. As a feminist, postcolonial scholar interested
in social movements, I find this oscillation interesting to explore in com-
parison with the debates in transnational feminism concerning the use of
terms “queer,” “gay” or “feminist” as accepted and rejected by younger
generations or by non-American LGBTQI* communities.
As I was immersing myself in the literature on Asian American Women,
I was exposed to a new set of ideas and genealogical questions on Asian
American art. In Fall 2008, I saw Asian American Modern Art: Shifting
Currents, 1900–1970 at the San Francisco de Young Museum, curated by
Mark Johnson and Daniel Cornell. Chinese American historian Gordon
Chang, art professor ShiPu Wang, and curator Karin Higa, wrote intro-
ductory texts that gave a comprehensive set of views on the contribution
of artists born in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly in Asia, who
resided in the USA. Many prominent names, such as Yayoi Kusama, Yun
Gee, Isamu Noguchi, Chiura Obata, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik were
featured in the show. From a feminist perspective, it featured few female
artists; with only nine out of sixty artists being female, they were outsiders
within the show. These artists were Miné Okubo, Miki Hayakawa, Hisako
Shimizu Hibi (married to painter George Matsaburo Hibi), Bernice Bing,
Tseng YuHo, Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi and Emiko Nakano, all of them
connected to California. All the Japanese American women had experi-
enced internment.
I mention the show here because it was explicitly connecting Asian
American history with questions of representation, modernity and high
art. The show was defined by Higa as “the first comprehensive show that
examines the historical presence of artists of Asian descent in American art
[…] explicitly filtered through questions of race, identity and notions of
modernism” (Cornell and Johnson 2008, p. 15). This seems very much in
the same vein as Higa’s commentary on the One Way or Another show,
when Higa (together with Chu and Min) asks, rhetorically, what the poli-
tics of organizing a show around race could be, only to conclude its neces-
sity in the name of recovering the past of marginalized communities in the
United States (ibid., p. 17). The goal in each case is the validation of the
present communities by way of historicization, thus making the past useful
for the present. Higa demonstrates this in her language as well when she
points out that the term “Asian-American,” as one, hyphenated word, is
posthumous to most of the works and artists featured, and so the title of
the show keeps separate the terms “Asian,” “American” and “Modern.”
Reading Higa’s and ShiPu Wang’s insights led me to connect the

questions of modernity, modernism, primitivism and Eurocentrism in the
visual arts raised by cultural critics and postcolonial scholars like Kobena
Mercer, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Isaac Julien in the 1990s. These
scholars address questions of the politics of art museums in the West and
interrogate how the public spectacle of art plays a part in excluding from
modernity the colonial other, opening to current questions of cultural
equity. With a Gramscian approach, I took great inspiration from the
Asian American Modern Art show as a counter-hegemonic project on
modernism, cultural hybridity, and parallel and divergent modernities (to
use a term of James Clifford’s). I connect the materials presented in the
show with the critical questions posed by Kobena Mercer in his book
Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), part of the related MIT series of vol-
umes, Annotating Art Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual
Art (2004–2007). Mercer registered the 1990s growth of attention in
the art world to non-Western artists and those with minority backgrounds
in the West, partly due, he argued, to the rising generation of curators
and critics of non-Western or minority backgrounds whose agenda
involved a project of inclusion and diversity. Mercer asked questions that
became crucial to my own project: Why does the contemporary so often
take precedence over the historical as the privileged focus for examining
matters of difference and identity? Does the heightened visibility of Black
and minority artists in private galleries and public museums really mean
that the historical problem of invisibility is now solved? To what extent
has the curating of non-Western materials in blockbuster exhibitions led
to displays that may actually obscure the fine art traditions of countries
that experienced colonialism? Has the very idea of inclusion now become
a double-edged sword? Could the “cosmopolitan” serve as a conceptual
tool capable of cutting through the congested, confusing condition cre-
ated by competing vocabularies—terms such as the “global,” the “inter-
national,” the “cross-cultural” and the “culturally diverse” (Mercer 2005,
p. 9)? Mercer’s pointing at modernism and its underplayed cross-cultural
past becomes helpful in exploring the contemporary in terms of a multi-
plicity of time and diverse influences. His questions continue to guide me
in fundamental ways throughout this project, expanding from classic
texts like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), Franz Fanon’s Black Skins
White Masks (2008/1952), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other
(1989), Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) and the journal
Third Text, edited by Rasheed Areen.
6 L. FANTONE
The other fundamental text that inspired this work is Fresh Talk/Daring
Gazes, Conversations on Asian American Art, published in 2003 and
edited by Margo Machida, Elaine Kim and Sharon Mizota. Machida, in
her preface to the volume, defends the project of collectively writing about
Asian American artists in a context where identity is seen as rigid and
essentialist. She warns against the conflation of attention to the cultural
specificity of minorities and cultural nationalism. She also evokes the
need to embrace cross-ethnic communications on the parallels and con-
trasts between Asian, Latino and African American artists—a need that has
not yet been met today.
In the same volume, the key essay that deeply shaped the trajectory of
my research was “Interstitial Subjects: Asian American Visual Art as a Site
for New Cultural Conversations” by Kim et al. (2003, p. 1). In fifty pages,
Kim traces all the historical evolution of Asian American art since the first
photography studio in the 1850s’ Chinatowns. She argues for Asian
American art’s distinctive and unique Americanness, criticizing the art his-
torian’s desire to identify Asian art elements in the work of Asian American
artists as the only element that would authenticate them as such. Most
importantly, Kim develops a long section about the lesser-known artists of
the 1970s who played a crucial role in starting Asian American cultural
productions—written, visual and aural—often choosing the political form
of the collective. Kim’s focus here emphasizes the historical and political
aspects of art: the 1960s and 1970s’ openness to the streets, the public
space, the crowds protesting the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and police
brutality. She makes apparent the importance of the Asian American
movement and its interconnections with Black and Brown coalitions and
liberation movements as well as the new kinds of freely accessible art cre-
ated in the streets: murals and experimental printed materials such as zines,
posters and flyers. The collective impetus of that time still resonates
strongly and in my preliminary research I discovered quite a few texts
devoted to that period, written by Asian American participants. As much
as I liked the period, I felt that its chorality would have been hard for me
to study as a total outsider, separate in time, space and identity from that
movement and moment. I listened to the female voices of women like
Nancy Hom, Nellie Wong, Genny Lim and Janice Mirikitani; read their
poems, and appreciated their addressing of women’s multiple roles, their
activist messages, and, equally of importance, their silences. Their political
side came first, always the most visible priority, and then slowly came the
discovery of the inside, the personal, marked by gender and ethnicity: the
painful silences of exile and uprootedness.
“Interstitial Subjects” also gives an interesting reading of the 1990s’

increased attention to Asian American art, offering an enlightening point
on how public museums were in a budgetary crisis when they started to
court Asian American communities for financial support (2003, p. 18).
The politics of guilt, following the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles,
also brought sudden visibility to the Korean artists in California. Kim’s
sociopolitical reading of the ups and downs of institutional interest in
Asian American art led me to analyze San Francisco museums’ cultural
policies with a critical lens, looking at processes of circulation and com-
modification of Asianness. Kim articulates her critique in connection with
Latino and Black cultural critics (Coco Fusco, Isaac Julien, Faith Ringgold
and Guillermo Gomez-Peña), denouncing the disconnect between height-
ened cultural visibility and increased exclusion of the actual, local ethnic
communities. Ultimately, Kim calls for an assessment of Asian American
art as a cultural process in which identities and aesthetics are evaluated for
their impact and influence on American art. This assessment takes into
account the artists’ belonging to a racialized group, not for superficial
multicultural diversity, but because racialization in the USA has always
meant exclusion and marginality (2003, p. 46).
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss these topics with
Elaine Kim, and our conversations led me to considerable changes in the
organization of this book. On a personal note, Elaine Kim also helped me
to feel comfortable about researching Asian American art despite my out-
sider status, being neither Asian nor American. I had shared my transna-
tional feminist perspective on the artists’ work, but maintained a cautionary
distance until Elaine Kim and, in a different way, Trinh T. Minh-ha,
encouraged me to move closer to the topic. I grappled with my autobio-
graphical distance from Asian American artists and my curiosity for the
subject, as a feminist scholar interested in current “multicultural” policies
in European visual arts and the ongoing controversies on inclusivity and
diversity in key art venues in Paris, Venice and London. The cultural con-
text and social imaginaries are different, but the politics of representation
are similar in both cases, for one of the key tools used to defuse racial
tensions and xenophobia often involves cultural policies, art museums,
immigrant communities and ethnic minorities.
As an Italian feminist trained in social, cultural and postcolonial theory,
I struggled with the ways in which research areas and academic disciplines
in the United States tend to produce divisions based on identity. The
more or less implicit assumption is that one should speak from one’s own
8 L. FANTONE
biographical standpoint and only pursue research topics where biographical,

identitarian authority can legitimize the person’s statements. For obvious
reasons, I have no pretense to be an expert on Asian American history, nor
to be an American art historian. Yet I think that intellectual curiosity
should not be thwarted to the point that academic writing should be lim-
ited to a person’s background. If research is always moved by curiosity and
academic research is formalized curiosity (as argued by Zora Neal Hurston
almost a century ago), I believe that curiosity is the sister of difference;
both depend on each other and on the desire to listen to other voices, other
stories. My scholarship can work as an effort to translate the time and
space of women’s stories, within the Benjaminian conception of the
scholar as translator, always struggling with the fear and inevitability of
betraying the original, carrying the burden of being an archivist, and a
barely visible political ally. As a sociologist and a gender scholar, I under-
stand the power I have in gathering information on and about women,
starting from facts and objects of analysis, and choosing how to arrange
them into stories I frame according to my intellectual views. In the past,
in Italy, I dedicated myself to oral history precisely because I was uncom-
fortable with the power position of the detached researcher, gathering
objective information. I tried ethnographic writing, in which my authority
as storyteller and specialized expert was supposed to be compensated by
thick descriptions and extensive rounds of feedback from the people I had
interviewed. I embraced silence for a few years, uncomfortable with how
to be the one speaking “for” and about other women and gender minori-
ties, even when moved by the best intention to spread and convey their
voices further. Ultimately, I always found, and still find, the need to speak
against power or injustice. The writings of Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) as
well as Assia Djebar in her preface to Women of Algiers in their Apartment
(1992)1 offered me a way to discuss what I was curious about: sitting in
the corner, tiptoeing around it without speaking about it or for it through
any sense of European authority. The idea of solidarity as proximity and
vicinity is evoked both by Trinh and Djebar in their commitment to speak
“nearby,” in the vicinity, neither as an outsider looking from afar, nor as
an insider knowing it all. Trinh, while presenting images shot in Senegal,
professes with her voice off-screen:
I do not intend to speak about, just to speak nearby
Stressing the Observers’ objectivity,
Circles around the object of curiosity
Different views from different angles
Creativity and objectivity seem to run into conflict.

[…]
I am looking through a circle in a circle of looks
[…]
just to speak nearby
(Trinh 1992, p. 105)
Through these inspiring words I started to think of circularity, of writing

as a narrative relation, not just as a power relation. The horizontal posi-
tioning, so fundamental in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s poetic and cinematic work,
allows for a plurality of views and voices. It allows for knowing the self and
knowing the other, the outside-in and the inside-out, the artist and the
writers in a mutual recognition of support, and for a loss of control.
In writing close to the other of the other, I can only choose to maintain self-
reflexively a critical relationship towards the material, a relationship that
defines both the subject written and the writing subject, undoing the I while
asking what do I want wanting to know you or me? (Trinh 1989, p. 79)
Following Trinh’s ethical and aesthetic positions, dwelling in the readings

she gave me, and sitting in her classes at Berkeley deeply shaped my
thoughts on the current project, in ways I cannot fully express in words.
Her invitation to be inside/outside, neither one nor the other, gave me
the freedom to shift across different artists, speaking nearby their work
and life trajectories. Most importantly, it brought a new dimension to my
original commitment to female stories that were personal and biographi-
cal, moving at a different level than the great narratives presented by
the Western social sciences. The memories of Asian American women art-
ists of the 1970s and 1980s generations became a core part of my research,
bringing me back to my original passion for oral history, yet with a new
understanding of the circularity and shared repetition of such stories, told
in the vicinity of the ethics of “speaking nearby.”
In December 2008 I started following the activities of the Asian
American Women Artists’ Association (AAWAA), moved by the idea of
looking at art produced by women collectively, or at least art produced
within a female community. I went to their meetings and volunteered for
their art show preparation. I attended their panel discussion at the de Young
Museum in San Francisco, titled AsianAMERICANArt: Re-Framing
the Genre. In January 2009 I saw their Artists-in-Residence show at the
de Young Museum, featuring ten AAWAA artists. In these high-profile
10 L. FANTONE
events I registered a certain “identity fatigue” expressed by younger Asian

American artists, which was an eye-opener for me—a novel articulation of
rejection for the superficiality of cultural policies aimed at minority com-
munities, otherwise kept at the margin of fundamental economic processes.
In this light, I interpreted the series of workshops self-organized by the
AAWAA as a rejection of creative cages, attempting to limit market-driven
impositions on Asian American female artists. The AAWAA’s board mem-
bers took a decision to follow their internal pathways and to create deeply
biographical art unconstrained by external trends. These women were find-
ing energy from their fire within.
This is not dissimilar to what the artists and curators of the One Way or
Another show discussed in the show’s opening statement. Born in the
1970s and 1980s, they chose to distance themselves from the hyphenated
ethnic identity that so often led to creative constraints, including a pres-
sure to present their work as always consistent with the expectations of
said identity, seen as a fundamentally demographic or racial category and
imposed upon them by the dominant US population in its institutions and
daily interactions. Such expectations went hand in hand with Orientalist
exoticism in the worst cases and, even in the best cases, limited their art to
some reference to Asianness. Rebelling against both, they claimed the
right to opacity, the right to create art unrelated to their origins, the right
to reference California’s everydayness, and to work on global issues, in the
present and future, without necessarily referencing their ancestry and
biographies.
In 2010, in Berkeley, I spent many hours sitting in a room where I
could look directly, in person, at Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha’s original work,
and taking classes at the University of California on Asian American his-
tory, film and art. I was first opening myself to the outside, to the large
picture, and then zooming into the intimacy and materiality of the
exquisite objects produced by Cha. As a diseuse, Cha lends her voice to
many women, yet when you try to trace her steps she leaves the frame,
hardly visible (Cha 1981, p. 114).
As I read Cha’s interviews and her poetic prose, I further developed my
transnational feminist and postcolonial critical lenses2 and decided to focus
on contemporary Asian American female artists in California, active from
the 1970s onward.
These seemed sufficient grounds on which to define a group of artists,
because their art and its reception was connected to questions of minori-
tization, internal and societal oppression, and gender discrimination.
Moreover, their art was aimed at creating a feminist community across

identities. Using an intersectional, transnational feminist standpoint to
write about women artists was possible, as attested by the rich and influ-
ential volume Talking Visions, published in 1998 by Ella Shoah in collabo-
ration with Coco Fusco and Marcia Tucker of the New Museum of
New York. While its premises about claiming multiculturalism as a
term seem today too optimistic, the idea of crossing multiple boundaries
and embracing a multiplicity of female scholars and artists in dialogue,
across their differences, still holds great importance. Particularly valuable
is the fact that the images and written texts have equal weight, and that the
volume ambitiously crosses many canons and debates that are still peri-
odized as belonging to different eras. In more than five hundred pages, it
covers race and queer theories, anti-colonial and postcolonial critiques,
aiming to undo any stable binary (Shohat 1998, p. 4). I draw inspiration
from Shohat’s critical analysis of the interconnectedness of third-word
struggles and transnational feminisms, especially when she cautions against
the fetishization of the “revolutionary moment” by later generations.
Resistance is not black and white, but rather multiple and fragmented.
Feminist scholarship can thus be based in polycentric approaches
(ibid., 22). Talking Vision continues to be an inspiration to think with art,
resisting the separation of feminist research and theories from visual repre-
sentations, and it has changed my way of doing feminist work by thinking
with images of non-Western, female artists.
Contours of the Research

My book fundamentally connects Asian immigration, gender and art, reg-
istering the recurring forms of Orientalism in contemporary art, thus con-
firming much of the findings in the existing literature, and, most importantly,
drawing temporal and spatial continuities that have been buried under the
implicit narratives of local, identity-based art exhibitions. My research fol-
lows some of the literature used in Asian American studies since, as Susan
Koshy has noted, it “regards a political subject formulation that makes vis-
ible a history of exclusion and discrimination against Asian immigrants”
(2004, p. 17). Various publications in the field of Asian cultural studies have
opened a transnational space of cultural analysis in the last decade: Shu Mei
Shih’s Visuality and Identity (2007), Peter Feng’s Identities in Motion
(2002), and Gina Marchetti’s Romance and the Yellow Peril (1993), all
offer interesting tools and politically multifaceted positions, though their
12 L. FANTONE
main focus is on film and popular media. This book borrows some of their
tools to look at the framing of high art as a transnational discourse and
takes the freedom to move between a theoretical level, a global, political
analysis, and a critique of specific local artists. It looks at art and culture in
response to Orientalist gender and racial stereotypes in order to define
hegemonic culture and spaces of resistance and creativity. I borrow the
tools of postcolonial theory to outline the persistence of forms of Orientalism
and the more or less subtle ways in which it keeps returning. I examine art
politically, as a cultural formation where claims of belonging and exclusions
take place.
This book fundamentally connects Asian immigration, gender and art,
registering the recurring forms of orientalism3 in contemporary art. It
thus confirms much of the findings in the existing literature while choos-
ing a more recent timeframe than that in the texts mentioned above and
most importantly, draws temporal and spatial continuities that have been
buried under the implicit narratives of local, identity-based art exhibi-
tions. My research follows some of the literature used in Asian American
studies since, as Susan Koshy noted, it “regards a political subject formu-
lation that makes visible a history of exclusion and discrimination against
Asian immigrants” (Koshy 2004, p. 13). Various publications in the field
of Asian cultural studies have opened a transnational space of cultural
analysis in the last decade: Shu Mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity (2007),
Peter Feng’s Identities in Motion (2002) and Roger Garcia’s Out of the
Shadows (2001) offer interesting tools and politically multifaceted posi-
tions, though their main focus is on film and popular media. My book
borrows some of their tools to look at the framing of high art and to cri-
tique specific local artists.
This book covers contemporary art from the 1970s to the present,
moving in dialogue with three specific temporal nodes: the political legacy
of 1970s’ Asian American art in the United States, feminist art and the
emergence of a transnational feminist standpoint in the 1990s; and, the
contemporary East Asian/Pacific Rim networks of cultural and artistic
production. The main argument develops along two lines. On the one
hand I compare the 1990s’ celebration of ethnic identity, within the multi
culturalist frame of cultural policies, with the Asian American movement
of the late 1960s, in which art and politics were deeply intertwined. On
the other hand, I aim to problematize the “global” and the Chinese “art
boom” as buzzwords that reconfigure East–West discourses on contem-
porary art. The book intervenes in the contemporary shift of attention to
Chinese art, as a key locus where questions of value and cosmopolitanism

emerge. Looking at the opportunities of visibility and ghettoization for
such artists in three different moments (1970s, late 1980s/1990s and
2000s), two distinct questions shape my research: What spaces were avail-
able for diasporic female artists in the 1970s and 1980s, and how do
California-based Asian artists relate to today’s new attention to Chinese
art in the cultural arena? Furthermore, what differences, opportunities
and closures emerge for Asian American, female-identified artists in the
2000s? Do gender and ethnicity offer a pathway to connect Asian dia-
sporic female artists to contemporary art institutions in California? I argue
that the relatively “low visibility” of Asian American art has gendered
dimensions. With these questions in mind, I look at the intersection of art,
gender and Asianness as generative of a panoply of multilayered discourses.
Asianness here becomes a critical category to contrast historical forms of
orientalism reproduced in art. Seen together with gender, it offers the
opportunity to critique a persistent stereotype of the silent, obedient,
model-minority Asian female. The next step is to ask, how does it apply to
the artist? If art is often perceived as the realm of rebellion or the freedom
from controlling images, we must ask an established feminist art question,
translating it in intersectional terms: What is art for the female artist?
Moreover, how is the female artist perceived by the public? By curators
and critics? It is crucial for this project to move past registering the simple
predominance of male artists, offering an intersectional perspective.
Registering the low visibility of Asian American artists, I shine light on
an under-attended group of postcolonial, female-identified artists in
California; their unique methods, politics, poetics and aesthetics; and their
pioneering and embracing of visual art as a form of resistance against racial
and gender stereotypes. Their politics of refusal to fit into orientalist tropes
are varied and worthy of a close reading, which I will carry out for each
artist at the beginning of each subsequent chapter of the book. I ultimately
argue that affiliations with East Asia—China, especially—are becoming an
asset to artists, while their belonging to an American ethnic and gender
minority is losing ground. Looking at the last decade, no one can ignore
the ongoing historical shift rooted in the emergence of China as a global
power, nor how this economic and political change is reflected in the art
and cultural spheres (see Zhang 1997), reorienting the axis of identifica-
tion and marginality of Asian American communities vis-à-vis American
hegemonic culture. In the new scenario, affiliation with East Asia is
becoming an asset for artists in terms of visibility and marketability.
14 L. FANTONE
Lisa Lowe was likewise a crucial inspiration with regards to Asian

Americanness in defining the modern as a non-universal term with a spe-
cific geohistorical connotation. The modern is connected to progress and
development, clearly originating in the West even when it cannot be
thought of without encounters with other spaces and people. Lowe con-
trasts the Western with the contemporary radical reworkings of Asian
identities globally (1996, p. xxii). The Asian bourgeoisie becomes migrant
in the West. Such a social constituency finds itself fitting in the “minority
discourse” in the United States and also part of a narrative detailing the
consolidation of transnationalism. I will use Lowe’s point and elaborate on
such connections in what I define as “red and gold washing.” While my
project maintains a local focus, within California, it engages with ques-
tions of globalization, migration, gender and the temporalities of postco-
lonialism. Applying a transnational, postcolonial feminist approach, my
project also tackles questions of absence and presence of the gendered and
ethnically marked bodies of artists in the art space.
Questions of Location
Some of the artists I have interviewed since 2009 are first-generation
immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, while other artists were
born in America (as first, half or second generation). Still others are fourth
generation, having grown up in families of Chinese and Japanese origin,
and who have also been deeply imbued with multiple aspects of Californian
culture. I talked with contemporary artists Betty Kano, Nancy Hom,
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cynthia Tom, asking about their aesthetic choices,
the biographical experiences that determined their need to create a com-
munity and their opinions on the relevance of that collectivity in the new
millennium.
In my interviews, I focus on the interrelated questions of art, value and
work in various ways by focusing on the work of art as valued or devalued
in the Californian, Asian-immigrant community; the political work and
activism the artist performs for the Asian community; the limited mone-
tary value of the work of art produced by Asian female-identified artists in
America; and finally, the transformative value of such art, against oriental-
ist expectations. I argue that this group of female-identified, contemporary
artists of Asian descent in California are transforming the predomi-
nantly orientalist images still circulating in middle and high-brow art
institutions today, by either rejecting an exoticized use of their ethnic
background, or, when not born in the United States, refusing to tie their
work solely to their country of origin.
The stories of the postcolonial female artists I have chosen call into
question ethnic identifications and suggest far more interesting trajecto-
ries than the entrenchment in the multicultural ghettoes and identity poli-
tics that was so typically embraced in the 1990s. Therefore, if the central
subjects of this book are contemporary female visual artists of Asian
descent in California, this book is not strictly about Asian American iden-
tity. I use the umbrella term consciously, not to suggest a cohesive unity
but, rather, to reference an external label often imposed on the artists
through continuing social processes of becoming other, yet always already
American.
Throughout the book, I follow the artists’ ongoing attempts to gain
visibility and to create artistic connections based on identification and
mutual support within the Asian American diaspora in the San Francisco
Bay Area. I have chosen to analyze artwork that challenges the persistent
stereotypical images of Asian American femininities as passive and “orien-
tal.” I look at the specific cultural milieu, where transnational, intergenera-
tional and gender connections have flourished, demonstrating a unique
case of translation and a postcolonial crossing of East Asian and American
West Coast cultures. I argue that the artwork reflects a political and aes-
thetic urgency and a constant weaving of identities and languages, dislo-
cating many binaries and stable forms (centers and peripheries, male and
female, written and visual canons). The interview transcripts highlight the
fact that these contemporary artists present a complex positioning that
fluctuates through a poetic space without sacrificing a sense of rootedness
in their political community. I ask about their aesthetic choices, factors
that have determined their need to create a community and their opinions
on the relevance of that collectivity in the new millennium.
Why California?
This book focuses on California because of the unique role that the West
Coast has played as a primary destination for Asian (especially Chinese and
Japanese) immigrants since the nineteenth century, and for many other
East and South Asian groups in the twentieth century. California is a
highly relevant place for the development of Asian American communities
and cultural formations over the last two centuries.
16 L. FANTONE
Despite various waves of discriminatory laws, Chinese and Japanese

communities have been able to develop a strong culture and a fertile
ground for artists to find inspiration and subjects. California, along with
the state of Washington, is also an area where Asian art, culture and their
continuity with the local Asian American communities have become the
most publicly recognized in political and cultural spheres. With the influx
of Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Laotians, such spheres continue to
grow and take on new dimensions. The accumulation of history, memory,
art forms, languages and family traditions in California provides a rich
backdrop to the artistic endeavors of contemporary Asian American art-
ists. Thus, the work of contemporary artists who reside in California will
likewise offer critiques of traditions and of dominant images, configuring
unexpected intersections of class, gender and race in American culture.
Apart from the historical and epistemological dimensions, there are two
more reasons why I focus on these contemporary California-based artists.
First, many left-leaning curators and artists in California, and especially in
the Bay Area, typically see themselves as politicized and attentive to issues
of “diversity,” and are prone to espousing simplified “multicultural” lib-
eral narratives emerging from, and perhaps fixed to, the 1970s. I unpack
this issue throughout the book by examining the different political posi-
tions among the female artists interviewed, and make note of who chooses
to mobilize ethnic identity as well as when and why some artists reject
these tropes entirely. Second, the role of California in relation to the
Pacific Rim and the discourse of the “global” in its local interactions are
also key components to my argument. California and the West Coast more
broadly will continue to play a strong role in terms of US cultural politics
toward Asia, perhaps in the contradictory ways that echo the focus on Asia
uttered by the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia”4 slogan in 2010
and the dangerous Trans-Pacific Partnership drafted in 2015, and as of the
end of 2016 clearly never going into effect.
Questions of Positionality
I present Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Michelle Dizon
as postcolonial artists who have worked outside the strict boundaries of
nationality and ethnicity, thereby avoiding being situated in any of those
categories through their unique ways of crossing genres and contaminat-
ing languages, poetic forms and other media of choice. While questioning
the persistence of national labels applied to female artists with diasporic
backgrounds, I also discuss the work of Hung Liu, an accomplished

Chinese painter who resided in the San Francisco Bay Area, yet is widely
recognized in China as well. Liu presents an interesting tension, pointing
to discontinuities between the notion of Asian Americanness and the more
frequently acknowledged Sinocentrism today.
In my cultural critique of the art work at hand and its context of pro-
duction, I argue that the positions taken by the artists presented here,
including those of the younger generation, tend to resist fixed identities
and embrace autonomous spaces. In this part of the argument, I inter-
twine gender and postcolonial criticisms of globalization. As argued by
Arjun Appadurai and many others, globalization imposes on to scholars
the question of coevality, disrupting once and for all the dualism of the
future-oriented West vs. the traditional rest of the world, which is always
seen as traditional and described in the past tense. I apply such critique
to art institutions like the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which
persists in presenting shows that reproduce an imaginary orientalized
Asian past, moving away from contemporaneity and safely downplaying
the key theme of contamination, despite contamination being reflected
in Asian American art.
Organization of the Chapters

The book is organized into six chapters. This first introduces the overarch-
ing themes, theories and research tools, while the remaining chapters
develop chronologically from the 1970s to the 2000s, framing the work of
specific artists in the cultural and political milieu of California.
In Chap. 2, I focus on the work of first-generation Chinese American
artist Nancy Hom, active in political circles in the Bay Area since the
1970s. Drawing on her interviews, I explore the way gender and politics
have shaped her identification with Asian Americanness both as an emerg-
ing political concept and as a tool for building community.
In Chap. 3, I look at the 1980s and early 1990s, especially the shift to
video and experimental filmmaking, discussing the work of Theresa
Hak-Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha. I argue that these artists, who
have a uniquely transnational sensibility, do not fit neatly into a concept
of feminist art, nor do they present themselves as simply Asian American.
Rather, their work engages in political and poetic processes of “becom-
ing” that short-circuit localism and cosmopolitanism through an onto-
logical shift. Drawing from feminist theory, and specifically Elaine Kim’s
18 L. FANTONE
writings, I offer the analogy of “border writing” (a term first coined by

Gloria Anzaldúa) as it reconfigures any sense of stable identity, memory
or fixed language. This allows for the emergence of intervals, breaks and
fragments in poetics that act as reflections of multiple cultural, historical
and biographical ruptures.
The fourth chapter covers the late 1990s by focusing on Flo Oy Wong
and Cynthia Tom, and in particular the need for community building and
feminist support among Asian American artists. Their artwork is con-
nected to a turn in cultural politics and the prevalence of identity dis-
courses. The chapter then develops an analysis of the Asian American
Women Artists Association (AAWAA) founded in San Francisco in the
1980s. By interviewing its core members, Nancy Hom, Betty Kano and
Cynthia Tom, I examine how the association promoted solidarity and
strength among artists by using the term Asian American, reviving its con-
nection to 1970s politics of creative assertion of a community’s visibility. I
particularly give space to Flo Oy Wong, as a founding member of AAWAA,
to talk about the necessity to have a gendered and ethnicity-based artists’
association. What do AAWAA artists share? What is the interplay of ethnic-
ity and gender in Oy Wong’s work? What kinds of feminist negotiations
between the personal, on the one hand, and the ethnic, immigrant iden-
tity, on the other, underlie her creative processes?
This chapter also inevitably engages with the historical trajectory of
“Asian American” as a term moving from counter-hegemonic space into a
wide circulation in multicultural policies, which I consider in relation to a
current terminology crisis. I look at two generations of artists and the
evolution of the term Asian American as they use it, asking in my inter-
views what it means for them. By examining their answers, I connect them
to a key paradox explored by various cultural critics in the 1990s; that
once a hyphenated identity becomes a commonly used label, it loses its
potential to destabilize hegemony. Discourses of identity and resistance
have crumbled since the 1990s in a non-dialectical reconfiguration of
power and cultural hegemony that is still with us today.
Chapter 5 points to a shift from Asian Americanness to global, transna-
tional issues in the 2000s. I analyze the policies of local art institutions
and the self-positioning of Chinese artist Hung Liu, who has been living
in California for decades. I argue that her need to reference her national
identity and roots in presenting the subject of her art is connected to a
turn in cultural politics and the prevalence of Chinese national discourses.
I develop here my denunciation of the current transnational promotion
Another random document with
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10,000. One hundred and fifty-four of these were for families whose homes were
in the districts surveyed, but who were not at home at the time of the first survey.
These were omitted during the second survey, irrespective of whether individuals
were at home. In this group are also included a few in which children were at
home, but were unable to give reliable information. Fifteen of the 194 families
gave insufficient information, and 25 refused to co-operate. The small number in
this last group speaks well for the efficiency and methods of the inspectors. All
families accepted for tabulation co-operated to the best of their ability, and we
believe that the records are as accurate as this type of work may be made.
Dr. Niven, in the work referred to by Carnwath, made an inquiry covering
1,021 houses, with a population of 4,721. Five hundred and three households or
almost exactly one-half, were invaded in either the summer 1918, or the autumn-
winter 1918 epidemic. This proportion of families is quite similar to our own, but
it must be pointed out that Niven was not studying the same two epidemics that
we are discussing. Two hundred and sixty-six of his total households, or 26.05
per cent. were invaded in the autumn epidemic.
Previous to the present time the author has been unable to find records of
investigators having used this method of studying influenza to any appreciable
extent. Certainly there has been nothing done on the subject previous to the last
pandemic. Since then Frost has studied, as indicated in his report, family
incidence to the extent of determining the relationship to overcrowding and to
economic status, and Niven has studied family incidence with special reference
to immunity.
Thomas Sydenham, speaking of the epidemic of 1675, says that: “No one
escaped them whatever might be his age or temperament, and they ran through
whole families at once.”
According to Waldschmidt, during the epidemic of 1712, in Kiel, ten or more
persons were frequently taken ill in one house.
In 1732, Huxam tells us that, “not a house was free from it, the beggar’s hut
and the nobleman’s palace were alike subject to its attack, scarce a person
escaping either in town or country, old and young, strong and infirm, shared the
same fate.”
Metzger says that the influenza was so universal in March, 1782, that in very
many houses all of the inmates were attacked. On the other hand, Mertens did
not believe the influenza a contagion during the same epidemic for the reason
that according to his observations now only one, and again all, of the members of
a family, were stricken.
In 1833, in Königsberg, according to Hufeland, parents, children, and servants
were frequently smitten with the disease at the same time, so that strange help
had to be obtained for the family.
Parkes taught that, “Persons in overcrowded habitations have, particularly in
some epidemics, especially suffered, and several instances are on record of a
large school or a barrack for soldiers being first attacked, and of the disease
prevailing there for some days before it began to prevail in the town around.
Sometimes, on the other hand, schools and prisons have escaped. A low, damp,
ill-ventilated and unhealthy situation appears to predispose to it, and in some
instances, in hospital patients, it has assumed a malignant character. In other
cases again, hospital patients have escaped; for example, the old people in the
Salpêtrière in 1837, when the younger attendants were attacked.”
Effect of overcrowding.—The family or household forms a social unit in which
human intercourse is very close, and in which the opportunities for contact
infection either direct or indirect are manifold. In addition to all of the
opportunities which each individual has for contracting the disease outside of the
family every case in the family exposes every other member many times during
the day. One of the first questions arising in a study of the disease in the family
is, therefore, whether the size of the family in and of itself exerts any
predisposing influence on the total incidence in any one family. Are large
families more likely to have a greater percentage of cases than small families? We
have endeavored to answer this question by grouping together all families
containing only one individual, all of those with two, three, four, etc., and
determining the percentage of individuals contracting influenza in each of the
groups. The standard for comparison is the percentage of the total 10,000 who
contracted the disease in either year, or in both. 19.71 per cent. of all persons
canvassed contracted influenza in 1918–19. Reference to Table IV shows that of
persons living in families of one, 17.95 per cent. developed the disease; of those
in families of two, 18.46 per cent.; in families of three, 19.96 per cent.; in families
of four, 20.10 per cent.; and in families of from five to seven, between 22 and 23
per cent. Families of over seven all showed lower, but varying incidence of the
disease. As is seen by the table, they comprise only a small number of families.
TABLE IV.
The incidence of influenza in families of different sizes.
(Influence of size of family).
Total No. of Number of these individuals who
No. of individuals developed influenza.
No. of such
individuals included in 1918. 1920. Total.
families.
in family. all such Per Per Per
families. No. No. No.
cent. cent. cent.
1 39 39 7 17.95 3 7.69 10 24.42
2 260 520 96 18.46 55 10.58 151 29.04
3 359 1077 215 19.96 128 11.88 343 31.85
4 396 1584 319 20.10 169 10.67 488 30.81
5 375 1875 423 22.56 203 10.83 626 33.39
6 264 1584 361 22.79 151 9.53 512 32.32
7 179 1253 279 22.27 109 8.70 388 30.96
8 103 824 156 18.93 55 6.67 211 25.61
9 57 513 85 16.57 21 4.09 106 20.66
10 28 280 40 14.14 26 9.29 66 23.57
11 15 165 10 6.06 7 4.24 17 10.30
12 4 48 0 0.0 5 10.42 5 10.42
13 2 26 5 19.23 3 11.54 8 30.77
14 1 14 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0
In 1920, 9.55 per cent. of the entire canvassed population contracted the
disease. The table shows that 7.69 per cent. of all individuals in families of one
contracted influenza, and between 10 and 12 per cent. in families of from two to
five individuals. Above the family of five the incidence rates again are lower and
varying within wide limits. The last column shows the percentage of individuals
by size of family contracting the disease in either or both epidemics.
The average size of all families was 4.7 individuals.
If we consider only those family groups having over 1,000 individuals as being
sufficiently large to be representative, we may conclude that families of from
three to seven individuals show no progressive increase in influenza incidence
with increase in size of the family. But all the available evidence indicates that
other things being equal, the age incidence is a very important factor. Its
influence will be felt in the subject under consideration, and it will modify the
results. Thus, families of one or two are almost invariably adults; families of
three are very frequently made up of two adults and a child or infant, while
families of from five to seven will be more likely to have a high proportion of
young adults—the age period more seriously affected.
The next question arising is whether those families, large or small, which are
living in crowded circumstances, are more likely to develop the disease. Arbitrary
standards must be chosen as indices of crowding. We have chosen two in order
that they may check each other. The first is based upon the number of
individuals sleeping in a bedroom. Families are classified as follows: Maximum
sleeping in a single bedroom, 1; maximum sleeping in a single bedroom, 2;
maximum per bedroom, 3, 4, etc.
The second standard of crowding is based upon the ratio of the number of
individuals in the family and the number of rooms occupied. One person living in
one room is not crowded; two in two rooms, three in three rooms, four in four
rooms, eight in eight rooms, twelve in twelve rooms, are not crowded. Two
people living in one room four in two rooms, six in three rooms, twelve in six
rooms, are decidedly more crowded. On the contrary, one individual in two
rooms, two in four, three in six, four in eight, five in ten, etc. have an unusual
amount of room.
The ratios P⁄R are then throughout, ¹⁄₁, ²⁄₁, ½. These are used as dividing lines.
All families with ratios higher than ²⁄₁ are classed as very crowded. Families with
ratios above ¹⁄₁ up to and including ²⁄₁ are classed as crowded. Families with
ratios above ½ up to and including ¹⁄₁ are classed as roomy, and those with ratio
of ½ or lower are classified as very roomy.
Classifying all families in all six districts according to these last four degrees of
crowding, we find, as is shown by Table V, that there is a progressive increase in
the proportion of families with one or more cases of the disease, with increase in
the extent of crowding.
According to the standard first described we find as is shown in Table VI that
families with three, four and five individuals sleeping in a single room show a
progressive increase of incidence over those families with but one or two per
bedroom. This again is shown best in the total for all families, but is borne out in
a study of each district. These statistics are however of little value for the study of
the effect of overcrowding, because crowded families are usually large families.
With an influenza incidence of 20 per cent. we would theoretically expect every
family of five or larger to have one or more cases. This would amount to 100 per
cent. infected families and such a state would not only influence, but dominate
the statistics regarding overcrowding.
TABLE V.
Effect of crowding on development of influenza in families.
(A higher proportion of crowded households than roomy are invaded).
(Standard used: ratio of number individuals to number rooms).
Proportion of these families visited by influenza.
In both
Total
No. of In 1918– epidemics
Living In 1920. families
such 19. (Recurrent)
conditions. invaded.
families. .
Per Per Per Per
No. No. No. No.
cent. cent. cent. cent.
District I.
V. Cr. 53 30 56.61 15 28.31 12 22.64 31 58.49
Cr. 195 107 54.87 59 30.26 43 22.05 123 63.08
R. 79 36 45.57 24 30.38 18 22.78 42 53.16
V. R. 16 7 43.75 1 6.6 0 0.0 8 50.00
District II.
V. Cr. 4 1 25.00 1 25.00 1 25.00 1 25.00
Cr. 137 70 51.09 31 22.63 2 8.76 89 64.96
R. 208 70 33.65 39 18.75 7 8.17 92 44.23
V. R. 103 20 19.42 7 6.80 2 1.94 25 24.27
District III.
V. Cr. 13 9 69.23 2 15.38 1 7.69 10 76.92
Cr. 213 99 46.48 65 30.52 40 18.78 124 58.22
R. 143 62 43.36 35 24.48 15 10.49 82 57.34
V. R. 21 8 27.59 2 6.89 2 6.89 8 38.09
District IV.
V. Cr. 0 0 0 0 0
Cr. 27 18 66.67 8 29.63 5 18.52 21 77.77
R. 137 72 52.55 50 36.49 21 15.33 101 73.72
V. R. 95 38 40.00 27 28.42 12 12.63 53 55.79
District V.
V. Cr. 6 2 33.33 4 66.67 2 33.33 4 66.67
Cr. 110 67 60.91 37 33.64 25 22.73 79 71.82
R. 209 104 49.76 70 33.49 38 18.18 146 69.86
V. R. 14 3 21.42 3 21.42 0 6 42.84
District VI.
V. Cr. 0 0 0 0 0
Cr. 2 1 50.00 0 0.0 0 0.0 1 50.00
R. 92 57 61.96 23 25.00 14 15.22 66 71.74
V. R. 189 65 34.39 46 24.34 19 10.05 92 48.68
Per Per Per
Living No. of No. No. No. Per
cent. cent. cent. Total.
conditions. families. 1918. 1920. both. cent.
1918. 1920. both.
Very
80 43 53.75 25 31.25 18 22.50 50 62.50
crowded
Crowded 693 372 53.68 201 29.00 126 18.18 447 64.50
Roomy 865 394 45.55 244 28.21 125 14.45 513 59.31
Very Roomy 443 143 32.28 87 19.64 36 8.13 194 43.79
Per Per Per Per
All Total 1918 1920 Both Total
2081 952 45.75 557 26.77 305 14.66 1204 57.86
TABLE VI.
Effect of crowding.
(Standard used: maximum number sleeping in one bed room.)
Proportion of these families with cases of
influenza.
Maximum No. No. of Total
In 1918– In both
sleeping per such In 1920. families
19. epidemics.
room. families. invaded.
Per Per Per Per
No. No. No. No.
District I.
1 16 6 37.50 4 25.00 3 18.75 7 93.75
2 93 52 55.91 31 33.33 20 21.51 63 67.74
3 145 65 44.83 47 32.41 27 18.62 85 58.62
4 79 43 54.43 25 31.65 17 21.52 51 64.56
5 24 11 45.83 11 45.83 6 25.00 16 66.67
6 10 3 30.00 3 30.00 1 10.00 5 50.00
District II.
1 90 15 16.67 7 7.77 2 2.22 20 22.22
2 211 68 32.23 36 17.06 14 6.64 90 42.65
3 115 59 51.30 23 20.00 10 8.69 72 66.61
4 33 20 60.60 11 33.33 6 18.18 25 75.76
5 3 1 33.33 2 66.67 1 33.33 2 66.67
6 0 0 0 0 0
District III.
1 26 10 38.46 3 11.54 2 7.69 11 42.31
2 179 73 40.78 47 26.26 23 12.85 97 54.19
3 145 72 49.66 37 25.52 23 15.86 86 59.31
4 39 20 51.28 15 38.46 8 20.51 27 69.23
5 8 5 62.50 2 25.00 1 12.50 6 75.00
6 0 0 0 0 0
District IV.
1 53 15 28.30 15 28.30 6 11.32 24 45.28
2 165 80 48.48 56 33.94 22 13.33 114 69.09
3 42 29 69.05 15 35.71 10 23.81 34 80.95
4 5 4 80.00 0 0.0 0 0.0 4 80.00
5 0 0 0 0.0 0 0
6 0 0 0 0 0
District V.
1 23 8 34.77 6 26.08 1 4.35 13 56.52
2 156 70 44.37 48 30.77 24 15.38 94 60.26
3 130 81 62.31 44 33.84 27 20.77 98 75.38
4 27 18 66.66 14 51.85 12 44.44 20 74.07
5 6 3 50.00 4 66.67 3 50.00 4 66.67
6 1 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00
District VI.
1 120 42 35.00 24 20.00 10 8.33 56 46.67
2 146 77 52.74 34 23.29 22 15.07 89 60.96
3 10 5 50.00 5 50.00 1 10.00 6 60.00
4 0 0 0 0 0
5 0 0 0 0 0
6 0 0 0 0 0
Total
1 328 96 29.27 59 17.99 24 7.32 131 39.94
2 450 420 44.21 252 26.53 125 13.16 547 57.57
3 587 311 52.98 171 29.13 98 16.69 381 64.91
4 183 105 57.38 65 35.52 43 23.50 127 69.39
5 41 20 48.78 19 46.34 11 26.83 28 68.29
6 11 3 27.27 3 27.27 1 9.09 5 45.45
An objection will be raised, and justly so, that we have up to this point been
studying influenza in families irrespective of how many cases there are in each
family. Until now the family with one case was classified exactly the same as the
family with eight cases. In the following classification we have taken first all
families with a maximum of one sleeping in one room, and sub-divided these
into families with no influenza, those with one case, two cases, etc. We have
likewise classified families with maxima from two to six per bedroom. For the
sake of brevity we will consider only the last column of Table VII, influenza
incidence among the individuals of the various classes of families for both
epidemics. Study of the table will show a correspondence in the other columns.
Solitary cases were more numerous in families with but one or two per bedroom
(27 per cent.) and less frequent in families with three, four and five per bedroom,
(23 per cent., 18 per cent., and 20 per cent., respectively). The families of six per
bedroom form such a small group that here again they should not be considered.
Multiple cases become progressively more numerous as the number of
individuals per bedroom increases (14 per cent. in families of one per bedroom,
29 per cent. in two per bedroom, 41 per cent. in three, 51 to 52 per cent. in four,
and 45 per cent. in five). Fifty-eight per cent. of families with a maximum of one
per bedroom, 43 per cent. with two per bedroom, 35 per cent. with three, 31 per
cent. with four and 35 per cent. with five had no influenza at all.
But here again, the fact that crowded families are usually large families
interferes with drawing any conclusions. A family with four per bed room would
generally be larger than one with two per bed room.
Frost observed that, considering the ratio of incidence in total white
populations irrespective of housing as 100, and after adjusting all groups to a
uniform sex and age distribution, the ratio where there were more than 1.5
rooms per person was 77, from 1 to 1.5 rooms per person the ratio was 94, and
for individuals averaging less than one room per person it was 117. The attack
rate showed a consistent increase as the number of rooms per person
decreased.
Woolley observed, “Housing, if one includes in the term overcrowding, has
surely been an important factor in spreading the epidemic. Whether it has had
any appreciable effect upon the incidence of complications is a question. The
epidemic has certainly gone faster and was over sooner because of the crowding;
the hospital was filled sooner than it should have been as a result of the rapidity
of spread of the disease, and overcrowding of the hospital occurred when with a
less rapid spread it would not have occurred; but whether the number of
fatalities or the number of pneumonias was greater than they should have been
with less crowded conditions may be doubted.”
TABLE VII.
Relationship between crowding and number of cases in the family.
(Influenza appeared more frequently in crowded households and such families
more frequently had multiple cases.)
Families with maximum per bed room of one.
(58.23 per cent. of these had no influenza.)
Two
Invaded Invaded in Total
Invaded or
Cases Total in 1918– both families
in 1920. more
developing such 19. epidemics. invaded.
cases.
in family. families.
Per Per Per Per Per
No. No. No. No.
cent. cent. cent. cent. cent.
1 85 55 17.68 37 11.89 7 2.25 311 27.33
2 32 26 8.36 16 5.14 10 3.22 10.28
3 9 8 2.57 2 0.64 1 0.32 2.88 } 14.44
4 4 3 0.96 4 1.28 3 0.96 1.28
5 0 0
6 0
7 0
8 0
2 per bed room.
1 254 169 18.27 112 12.11 27 2.92 925 27.46
2 135 112 12.11 64 6.92 41 4.43 14.59
3 79 65 7.03 38 4.11 24 2.59 8.54
4 40 35 3.78 16 1.73 11 1.18 4.32
} 29.17
5 11 9 0.97 8 0.81 6 0.64 1.18
6 3 3 0.32 0 0.0 0 0.0 0.32
7 2 2 0.22 1 0.11 1 0.11 0.22
8 0 0
3 per bed room.
1 136 104 17.84 50 8.58 18 3.08 583 23.33
2 103 77 13.21 55 9.43 29 4.97 17.67
3 59 51 8.75 29 4.97 21 3.60 10.12
4 43 40 6.86 16 2.76 13 2.23 7.37
} 41.33
5 22 22 3.77 9 1.54 9 1.54 3.77
6 12 12 2.06 5 0.86 5 0.86 2.06
7 2 2 0.34 0 0 0.34
8 0
4 per bed room.
1 31 24 13.64 10 5.68 3 1.70 176 17.61
2 22 19 10.80 13 7.39 10 5.68 12.50 } 51.60
3 37 32 18.18 25 14.20 20 11.36 20.92
4 14 11 6.25 6 3.41 3 1.70 9.09
5 9 9 5.12 4 2.27 4 2.27 5.12
6 4 3 1.70 2 1.19 1 0.59 2.27
7 3 3 1.70 0 0 1.70
8 0
5 per bed room.
(35 per cent. had none.)
1 8 6 15.00 4 10.00 2 5.00 40 20.00
2 6 5 12.50 4 10.00 3 7.25 15.00
3 3 2 5.00 2 5.00 1 2.50 7.50
4 2 1 2.50 2 5.00 1 2.50 5.00
}
5 4 2 5.00 3 7.50 1 2.50 10.00
45.00
6 2 2 5.00 2 5.00 2 5.00 5.00
7 0
8 1 0 0.0 1 2.50 0 0.0 2.50
6 per bed room.
(50 per cent. had none.)
1 2 1 10.00 1 10.00 0 0.0 10 20.00
2 1 1 10.00 1 10.00 1 10.00 10.00 }
3 2 1 10.00 1 10.00 0 0.0 20.00 30.00
4 0
5 0
6 0
7 0
8 0
The housing methods in the cantonments and even in the tent camps resulted
in a degree of congestion and close physical contact among individuals that was
attained in no civil communities with the possible exception of some institutions.
In cantonments the number of men in individual rooms ranged from 30 to 100
and even under the best circumstances there was very evident close crowding. An
individual in any of these large rooms contracting a contagious disease had
opportunities to spread it by contact and by droplet infection not only to one or
two others, as in the case of the average family, but to a large group of the men in
the same room. A vicious circle was thus formed which tended to propagate the
disease throughout any camp with utmost rapidity. Brewer has compared the
influenza incidence rate in the principal white organizations at Camp
Humphreys with the floor space allowed each man in the respective
organizations, and concludes that, “It is not proper or just to attribute the
differences shown, alone to the amount of floor space allowed each organization,
but it certainly points very strongly to the fact that the incidence of the disease
varied with the density of the population, although not with mathematical
regularity.” Brewer cites regiments which although housed alike showed definite
variation in the influenza incidence. This merely shows that other factors also
play a part. Thus, in one instance, the difference in the two regiments was in
length of service. Brewer also found that among the white troops the incidence of
pneumonia appears to vary with the density of the population.
V. C. Vaughan has reported on the relationship between incidence in tents and
in barracks at Camp Custer. From this one observation it would appear that the
incidence is little changed under the two conditions.
“During September and October, 1918, a study was made on the relationship, if
any, of influenza to methods of living. Of the command, 3,633 were in tents. The
morbidity per thousand in these was 129. There were in barracks 36,055. The
morbidity per thousand among those was 275. At first glance the lower morbidity
of those in tents is striking, but going further into the matter it was found that
the entire morbidity of the Quartermaster Corps was very low. Of the Depot
Brigade 2,881 were in tents, with a morbidity of 128 per thousand, while 3,824
were in barracks, with a morbidity of 134 per thousand.”
Howard and Love offer three reasons why during the last four months of 1918
the deaths from influenza and pneumonia in the Army in the United States ran at
a rate nearly three times as high as that among our troops in France: First, that
the troops in the United States were recent recruits and therefore more
susceptible to disease; second, that probably many of the troops in France who
had seen much longer service had had the disease in mild form in the early
spring; and, third, that the method of housing was entirely different in France.
There the men were spread over a wide territory and whenever in rest area they
were billeted in houses rather than crowded into barracks. Furthermore, they
were living much more in the open. It was found that in commands of the Service
of Supply, where troops were housed in barracks with a large number of men to a
single room, the epidemic ran much the same course with high mortality, as it
did in the cantonments in the United States. The percentage of infection and the
fatalities from influenza and pneumonia in France were much greater among
troops of the S. O. S. than among troops at the front.
Domestic cleanliness.—We have studied the relationship between influenza
incidence and the cleanliness of the household by the same method used in
studying overcrowding. In Table VIII we have classified according to cleanliness
and according to the number of cases developing in each family. We have had
four subdivisions, “very clean,” “clean,” “dirty,” and “very dirty.” There is greater
opportunity for erroneous results in this table than in the one preceding because
the standards of cleanliness are difficult to define. As a matter of fact we are
guided entirely by the inspector’s own impression of each household, as she
examined it during her visits. The following is an excerpt from the instructions
given each inspector on this subject:
“A few words on this subject may describe much. State of cleanliness of the
individual, slovenly condition, dust and dirt, foulness of air noticed on first
entering, condition of children, of kitchen sink, etc., should be noticed, and
good or bad features recorded. In the poorer districts not a few families will be
found in which the cleanliness, considering the surroundings, is quite
laudable. Of particular importance are amount of daylight, ventilation, care of
bathroom and toilet, garbage, whether windows are kept open at night.”
On the basis of these returns we have classified the families as indicated, but
each inspector was governed to a certain extent by the average cleanliness of her
district, and it is difficult to compare the cleanest tenement with any of the
districts of well-to-do individuals. We will therefore probably find it more
profitable and more nearly accurate to combine the groups and classify them
only as “clean” and “dirty.”
TABLE VIII.
Relationship between cleanliness and number of cases in family.
(Clean families were invaded less frequently and had solitary cases more often than
did dirty households.)
Very clean.
(47.62 per cent. had none.)
Cases in Total Per Per Per
’18. ’20. Both. Total. Per cent.
families. families. cent. cent. cent.
1 124 72 15.65 50 10.87 8 1.74 460 26.96
2 53 41 8.91 27 5.87 15 3.25 11.52
3 37 33 7.17 13 2.82 9 1.95 8.04
4 18 16 3.48 8 1.74 6 1.30 3.91 }
5 4 3 0.65 2 0.43 1 0.21 0.87 25.42
6 3 3 0.65 0 0.0 0 0.0 0.65
7 2 2 0.43 1 0.21 1 0.21 0.43
8 0 0 0 0
Clean.
Per Per Per
Cases. Families. ’18. ’20. Both. Total. Per cent.
cent. cent. cent.
1 301 212 18.45 120 10.44 31 2.70 1149 26.19
2 177 143 12.45 91 7.92 57 4.96 15.40
3 101 83 7.22 52 4.53 34 2.96 8.79
4 52 47 4.09 20 1.74 15 1.26 4.53 }
5 30 29 2.52 17 1.48 16 1.22 2.61 32.29
6 8 7 0.61 3 0.26 2 0.17 0.70
7 3 3 0.26 0 0.0 0 0.0 0.26
8 0 0 0 0
Dirty.
Cases in Total Per Per Per
’18. ’20. Both. Total. Per cent.
families. families. cent. cent. cent.
1 79 59 17.40 36 10.62 16 4.72 339 23.30
2 58 48 14.16 29 8.55 19 5.61 17.11
3 37 31 9.14 22 6.49 17 5.01 10.91
4 26 22 6.49 12 3.54 8 2.36 7.67
}
5 6 5 1.79 4 1.18 3 0.94 1.77
39.81
6 7 7 2.06 4 1.18 4 1.18 2.06
7 0 0 0 0
8 1 0 0.0 1 0.29 0 0.0 0.29
Very dirty.
1 22 16 14.95 8 7.47 2 1.85 107 20.56
2 11 8 7.47 6 5.10 3 2.80 10.28 }
3 14 12 11.21 10 9.35 7 6.54 13.08 40.18
4 7 5 4.67 4 3.73 2 1.85 6.54
5 6 6 5.10 1 0.93 0 0.0 5.61
6 3 3 2.80 2 1.85 2 1.85 2.80
7 2 2 1.85 0 0.0 0 0.0 1.87
8 0 0 0 0
But even without combining in this way, the table shows us that for both years
27 per cent. of the very clean families, 26 per cent. of the clean, 23 per cent. of
the dirty and 21 per cent. of the very dirty, had but one case, while 25 per cent. of
the very clean, 32 per cent. of the clean, 40 per cent. of the dirty, and 40 per cent.
of the very dirty, had multiple cases.
The cleaner the family the less is the likelihood of multiple cases.
It is rather difficult to find concrete examples of the influence of domestic
habits and environment in the 1918 pandemic. The remarkably high incidence
among the natives of India and among the American Indians might by some be
attributed to unfavorable environment. Lynch and Cumming obtained records
from a large number of institutions and from business concerns having their own
records, and discovered that the influenza incidence was higher in those
institutions where dish washing was done manually than in those in which
mechanical washing was performed. They appear to conclude that the difference
in the two methods of washing dishes was the cause for the greater incidence in
influenza, thus bearing out their theory of the propagation of influenza chiefly
through eating utensils. On the contrary it is possible that the presence of the
mechanical washer is an indication of advanced methods, greater care in the
kitchen, and better hygiene probably not only in the kitchen and dining room,
but throughout the institution.
Economic status.—Although in our survey information has been obtained
regarding the economic status of the various families we would not stress this
phase of our subject. Obviously the amount of money an individual has in his
bank will not directly influence the amount of influenza he will have in his home.
As nearly an accurate classification by wealth is by the separation into the
districts, Districts I and III being very poor, District II poor, Districts IV and V
moderate, and VI well-to-do. From Chart XXVI we see no definite relationship
between influenza incidence and economic status.
Dr. Niven has had similar experiences. He remarks that the disease does not
appear to have affected especially any class or section of the community. Rich
and poor suffered alike. Inquiry in some towns shows that the epidemic not
infrequently started in the well-to-do districts and only later involved the poorer
and less prosperous areas.
We cannot state with any degree of accuracy in what section of Boston the
1920 recurrence first began. The sections studied are for relatively small portions
of the city, and it is possible or probable that the original increase was in some
area outside of our districts. In the districts studied the earliest increase in
reported cases was from the section of the city known as Dorchester (Districts IV
and V), where there was some increase in December, 1919. The latest definite
increase was in the Irish district of South Boston. Geographically these two areas
are quite near. The relative insusceptibility of the Irish population is probably a
much more important factor in the difference.
Frost found after classifying the white population canvassed in Little Rock and
San Antonio according to economic status, and adjusting the incidence rate in
each group to a uniform sex and age distribution, that the ratios of incidence in
each economic group to incidence in total white population did show an increase
with increasing poverty. “Notwithstanding that the classification according to
economic status is a very loose one, based solely on the judgment of inspectors
with widely different standards, a considerably higher incidence is shown in the
lower as compared to the higher economic group.”
Parsons, in 1891, discussed the influence of poverty, but believed that it is the
concomitants of poverty which were the cause of the higher incidence among the
poor.
“Sanitary conditions do not seem to have had any influence in determining the
occurrence of influenza, and what share they have had in determining its extent
or fatality cannot yet be decided. On the occasion of the last great epidemic, Dr.
Peacock concluded, ‘The more common predisponents to disease, e.g., defective
drainage, want of cleanliness, overcrowding, impure air, deficient clothing,
innutritious or too scanty food, powerfully conduce to the prevalence and fatality
of influenza.’ And Dr. Farr showed that in the last six weeks of 1847, while in the
least unhealthy districts of London the annual rate of mortality was raised from a
mean rate of twenty per 1,000 to thirty-eight, in the unhealthiest districts it was
raised from a mean rate of twenty-seven to sixty-one.
“That overcrowding and impure air must have a powerful influence in aiding
the development of the epidemic follows from what we have seen of its greater
prevalence among persons associated together in a confined space; and though
rich and poor have alike been sufferers from the epidemic, and even royal
personages have been fatally attacked by it, it cannot be doubted that poverty
must have in many cases conduced to a fatal issue in persons, who, if placed
under more favorable circumstances, might have recovered, seeing that it often
involves not only inferior conditions of lodgment, but also want of appropriate
food, of sufficient warmth and clothing, and of ability to take the needed rest.”
Distribution of the disease through the household.—During the autumn and
winter epidemic of 1918 there was considerable discussion, and particularly were
there popular newspaper reports of entire families being taken ill with influenza,
sometimes all on the same day. This was less true of 1920. But few of us are
personally acquainted with such instances and at best they must have been
relatively rare.
Among 1,236 families with influenza in either epidemic we found only 94 or
7.6 per cent. in which the entire family contracted the disease. No family
consisting of over seven individuals was reported as having all the members of
the family sick in either epidemic. Over two-thirds of the families with even
numbers of individuals (464 out of 605) suffered the illness of less than half of
the household. One quarter of all families of more than one (539 out of 2,107)
had but one case per family. Over a third of all families of over two individuals
(745 out of 2,006) had two or less cases per household. As a rule there were at
least one and usually several individuals in each household who did not
contract influenza.
That as a rule the disease did not appear explosively in a family; but that cases
developed successively, is indicated by the fact that out of 577 families
contracting influenza in the epidemic of 1920 the cases were all of simultaneous
development in but fifteen. In thirteen of these, two individuals fell ill on the
same day and no subsequent cases developed. In the other two families three
individuals came down on the first day and no other cases developed. In addition
there were, out of the 577 families, fourteen in which there were two or more
cases developing on the first day of the invasion, but which were followed on
subsequent days by later cases in the same family. Again, there were eleven
families in which two or more cases occurred simultaneously at an interval of
one or more days after the development of a single prior case.
We may say that as a rule in the 1920 epidemic, cases of influenza developed
in families successively and not simultaneously. In only 29, or 5 per cent. of the
families contracting the disease in 1920, did more than one case develop on the
first day of the appearance of the disease in the family.
A certain difficulty in determining the date of onset is that we must rely upon
the patient’s statement. One individual may have been sick for hours or days
before a second member coming down with the disease called forth recognition
of the fact that they both had it.
Unfortunately we are not able to give similar statistics for the 1918–19
epidemic. Our investigation occurred so long after the epidemic that specific
dates of onset of the disease would have been entirely unreliable. The nearest
date we have attempted to obtain was the month of the attack.
Dr. A. L. Mason states that 63 cases came under his observation in the
epidemic of 1889 as occurring in groups in families. In but six instances were two
persons attacked on the same day. The average interval between cases in the
same household was four days. Sometimes a week or more elapsed. Whole
families were never stricken at once.
Parsons in 1891 concluded from the results of questionaires sent to physicians
that in the first spread, 1889–90, there was an interval between cases in
individual households just as we have described. Among the replies to his
questionaires nine described intervals of one day and under, six described
intervals of two days, three of three days, three of four days, and four replies
described intervals of more than four days.
Leichtenstern observed likewise: “In large families the contagious character of
influenza is evidenced by the fact that the other members of the family become
sick one after the other following the first case. This rule of succession is most
easily seen in the early or late period of an epidemic and is less noticeable at the
height, where the opportunity for all the members of the family to acquire the
influenza outside the home is enormous. This latter fact explains why, when all
sicken at once, the disease appears to be miasmatic in origin. There are many
examples where other members of a family living with a sick individual remained
unaffected. Parsons reports such cases, and this was so frequently the case that
some British physicians state that it is the rule that there is but one case in a
family or that the cases are widely separated in time. This was only partly true
during the period of the pandemic and was very frequent in the epidemic
following it. In this respect influenza acts like the common contagious diseases,
diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, etc., while the difference lies in the short
incubation period and the very high contagiousness of the disease.”
That West, in England, had observed the same phenomenon is indicated by
the following quotation: “How is it, for instance, that one member of a household
may be picked out and the others escape, though they are susceptible, as is
shown by their acquiring the disease shortly after in some other way?”
Again Leichtenstern wrote: “It is noteworthy that influenza on ships usually
did not occur explosively, but spread gradually, and on ships usually lasted
several weeks, as on the Bellerophon, from the 27th of March to the 30th of
April; on the Canada from the 11th of April to the 24th of May; on the Comus
from the 10th of April to the 3d of May.
“The German Marine Report states, ‘Everywhere on the ships the disease
began not suddenly but gradually.’ The frigate Schwalbe first had a large number
of cases only on the 6th day after the beginning of the epidemic. There are,
however, some exceptions, where the disease has begun suddenly with the
greatest violence on ships as on land. Such was true of the frigate Stag which on
the 3d of April, 1833, neared the influenza infected coast of Devonshire, and as it
came under the land wind the epidemic suddenly broke out with great violence.
Within two hours forty men took sick. Within six hours the number had
increased to sixty. Within twenty-four hours 160 men were sick. As Parkes has
remarked the evidence is insufficient that there had been no communication
with the coast. There have been other examples of sudden outbreaks on ships, as
on a Dutch frigate in the harbor of Mangkassar, where 144 men out of 340 took
sick in a few days (1856); on the Canopus (1837) in the harbor of Plymouth,
where on the 15th of February three-fourths of the men took sick with influenza.”
Garvie, in reporting his personal experiences with influenza in 1918 in an
industrial area in England, experiences not based on statistical study, concludes
that there are two types of cases, the sporadic case which occurs mainly among
the wage-earning members of the family and has little tendency to affect other
members of the household, and second, the type of case where a large number of
individuals in the household are affected. He called this the “household wave.” If
we interpret him aright he really means that there are either single or multiple
cases, and that the single cases are more apt to occur in the wage-earner, the
individual who is more exposed on the outside of the household. He also believes
that the household wave is more severe in character than the so-called sporadic
case, and is accompanied by a greater number of complications.
Armstrong, in his survey in Framingham, examined influenza convalescents.
He found that of these 10 per cent. were in families in which no other cases had
developed, and 87 per cent. were in families where one or more additional cases
had occurred. In three per cent. information was lacking.
It is important in studying the literature on this subject to distinguish between
definitely established fact and less definite description. Thus one is still left in
some doubt when one reads in a London letter in the Journal of the American
Medical Association for 1915 concerning the epidemic in London at that time
that, “whenever it has seized an individual it has usually run through the entire
household. Whole offices have succumbed.”
The first case in the family.—Chart XXVII shows clearly that in both
epidemics in our experience the wage-earner was much more frequently the first
case in a family than was any other occupation. The individuals whose
occupations kept them at home were second. Infants, as was to be expected, were
recorded as being “first case” in the smallest number of instances.
In 1889 the distribution was practically the same. Parsons found that out of
125 households the first case was a bread-winner in 96; a housekeeper in nine; a
child at school in thirteen; a child not at school in two families. In the last five
families the first case was in adults, occupation not given. This order is identical
with our own. Neither our own observations nor those of Parsons consider the
relative proportions of wage earners in the population as a whole. The results are
nevertheless suggestive.
H. F. Vaughan reached comparable results for the 1920 epidemic in Detroit.
During the first few weeks the age groups from 20 to 29 showed a relatively
much more frequent influenza incidence than did children up to ten years. In
later weeks of the epidemic there was a relative increase in the incidence among
children and decrease among young adults. He concluded that the disease first
attacks the young adult and from this group it extends into the home.
In the Local Government Board Report for 1891, H. H. Murphy distinguishes
three groups or ways in which the disease may be brought into the family. The
examples will be found to be characteristic for any epidemic and for any country:
Group A.—Cases of single exposure.
“Household 1.—Mr. Q. goes to London daily. Was ill with influenza on
December 25th. No other case in this house till January 15th.
“Household 2.—Mrs. A. called on Mr. Q. on December 31st, and had a few
minutes’ conversation with him. She was taken ill on January 3d. There was a
Christmas family gathering at this house, and this is how the other members
were affected: Mr. B., January 6th; Miss C., Mrs. D., and Master D., January 8th;
Mr. J., January 10th; Mr. H., January 11th.
CHART XXVII.
“Household 3.—Miss M. went to a party January 3d. She had a few

minutes’ conversation with a young lady who said she was suffering
from influenza. Miss M. had a characteristic attack on the 6th of
January.
“Household 4.—Mr. G. goes to London daily; taken ill January 5th.
Mrs. N. visited him for a short time on January 5th, and was taken ill
January 10th.”
Group B.—Where disease was brought from a distance into a
previously healthy household.
“Household 8.—Mrs. R. G., living in the north of London, came
here on a visit December 17th. On the 19th she was taken ill with
influenza, the first case that I knew of in this neighborhood. Mr. C.
G., on the 23d, servant on the 26th, Mrs. G. 31st, and Mr. G. January
9th.
“Household 9.—Mr. I. lives at his business place in London, taken
ill December 20th with influenza. His family reside here. Boy C.
visited his father for a few days, and came back ill on January 4th.

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Local Invisibility, Postcolonial

Feminisms Laura Fantone

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary

Restaging Feminisms Elaine Aston

The Postcolonial World Jyotsna G. Singh

Postsecular Feminisms: Religion and Gender in

Social Movements and Political Activism in Contemporary

Women's Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures 1st

A Companion of Feminisms for Digital Design and

More information about this series at

Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953884

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover Image © Nancy Hom

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Writing the acknowledgments for this book is a great task. It allows me to

1 Introduction: Visuality, Gender and Asian America 1

2 Asian American Art for the People 25

3 Traces and Visions of In-Betweenness 63

4 AAWAA: Visibility, Pan-Asian Identity and the Limits

5 Red and Gold Washing 139

6 Opacities: Local Venues, Cosmopolitan Imaginaries 181

Fig. 2.1 Working Women, poster by Nancy Hom 26

Introduction: Visuality, Gender

The persistent questioning of the insider’s and the outsider’s position in

© The Author(s) 2018 1

There can be no such thing as a collective definition of the constituency

Margo Machida, an incredibly talented art historian, ended her seminal

Reading Higa’s and ShiPu Wang’s insights led me to connect the

“Interstitial Subjects” also gives an interesting reading of the 1990s’

biographical standpoint and only pursue research topics where biographical,

Creativity and objectivity seem to run into conflict.

Through these inspiring words I started to think of circularity, of writing

Following Trinh’s ethical and aesthetic positions, dwelling in the readings

events I registered a certain “identity fatigue” expressed by younger Asian

Moreover, their art was aimed at creating a feminist community across

Contours of the Research

Chinese art, as a key locus where questions of value and cosmopolitanism

Lisa Lowe was likewise a crucial inspiration with regards to Asian

Despite various waves of discriminatory laws, Chinese and Japanese

backgrounds, I also discuss the work of Hung Liu, an accomplished

Organization of the Chapters

writings, I offer the analogy of “border writing” (a term first coined by

“Household 3.—Miss M. went to a party January 3d. She had a few

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