Loving Luxury: The Cultural Economy of the Japanese American Home, 1920s
- Degree Grantor:
- University of California, Santa Barbara. History
- Degree Supervisor:
- Paul Spickard
- Place of Publication:
- [Santa Barbara, Calif.]
- Publisher:
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- Creation Date:
- 2013
- Issued Date:
- 2013
- Topics:
- Gender Studies, Asian American Studies, and History, United States
- Keywords:
- Race,
Gender,
Domesticity,
American Culture,
Japanese American, and
Middle class - Genres:
- Online resources and Dissertations, Academic
- Dissertation:
- Ph.D.--University of California, Santa Barbara, 2013
- Description:
In the early 20th century, immigrant Japanese communities experienced heavy anti-immigrant sentiment through land laws, housing disenfranchisement, and exclusion. This dissertation examines how immigrant Japanese communities in Los Angeles cultivated respectable middle-class lifestyles in order to gain national inclusion. Utilizing Survey of Race Relations interviews, newspapers, papers of community organizations, and early 20th century social science research, this dissertation reveals how Japanese Americans responded to anti-immigrant sentiment by creating and building a material culture of American luxury in the home. Out of a growing consumer-driven market economy that greatly appealed to white middle-class standards of living, a new value system emerged within the Japanese American home. This dissertation introduces the new value system as a cultural economy, where practices around the home, individual manners, and family-oriented lifestyles became cultural measurements for national inclusion and exclusion as well as social prestige and hierarchy. Japanese Americans grew a profound commitment to middle-class respectability through newly gendered associations to labor as well as meaningful accumulation of economic success measurable in the stuff of homes.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (234 pages)
- Format:
- Text
- Collection(s):
- UCSB electronic theses and dissertations
- Other Versions:
- http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3559811
- ARK:
- ark:/48907/f3cr5rfm
- ISBN:
- 9781303052385
- Catalog System Number:
- 990039788030203776
- Copyright:
- Chrissy Lau, 2012
- Rights:
- In Copyright
- Copyright Holder:
- Chrissy Lau
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