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Out of Place serves as a record for the last three years of my practice, tracing the ideas that informed my work, braiding together the strands of conflicting ideas and research on the Salton Sea, plastic waste, dust, and how we are tethered to invisible labor and wastescapes. This paper is a patchwork, a quilt of my weavings with personal narratives, drawing upon Discard studies, Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, autotheory, and artists across disciplines to resituate my Asian American identity. This paper follows the trail of waste and debris, re-routed and re-formed, expressing the entanglement of our lives with non-human beings and the environment.

Come, Fur(r)es, Dance! is a devised, hybrid lecture-performance performed on the 26th, 27th, and 28th of May 2023, in UCSC’s eXperimental Theater. It is the final iteration in a series of performative experiments I used to better understand the ways experiences of masculinity are navigated, manipulated, and remade in communities within social VR (virtual reality). Created with the help of three devising artists, a team of student designers, a technical crew, and the larger UCSC arts community, Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! uses puppetry, dance, live interviews, and storytelling performed across virtual- and meat-space. The work focuses on the legacy of military development in the embodied experience of VR users, the desires that traverse the gap between users' identity presentations in and out of VR, and directly engages with a Waifu-themed MilSim community that calls themselves the British Armed Forces. To facilitate the rehearsals and performance of Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance!, I developed a distributed signal management system for a flexible, mediated stage ecology. This thesis situates the performance within the social, artistic, and personal context from which Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! arose and reflects on the insights and challenges from throughout its making. First, I explore the discoveries unearthed by the performance surrounding virtual masculinities and the drives behind certain social formations in VR. Then, I discuss my strategy of critique within the structure and aesthetic logic of Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance!. After, I reflect on the rehearsal practices that created the performance, outline two technical innovations that made it possible, and situate the performance within an artistic field engaged with related concerns. Finally, I connect this work to my personal history. The end of the thesis includes an archival script from the first performance and a separate reflection on technical challenges.

Becoming “Hawaiian”: World War II War Heroes and the Rise of Japanese American Power, 1941-1963 examines the most celebrated Asian American war heroes in US history—the Japanese American WWII GIs—to reveal how those soldiers from Hawai‘i became racialized and legitimated as “Hawaiian” war heroes. I introduce a concept of “Hawaiian” racialization as a process by which various racial and ethnic communities ascribed qualities and characteristics of Hawai‘i, such as exotic, friendly, and feminine, onto the non-native men while the soldiers themselves actively created an heroic “Hawaiian” identity. During WWII from their mobilization to their return home from battle, the soldiers were racialized and celebrated as “Hawaiian” war heroes in the US South, in the Japanese American incarceration camps, in liberal white spaces across the US mainland, in Hawai‘i, and internationally in the European campaign. This resulted in cementing an image of “Hawaiian” war heroes as worthy representatives of the Territory and Japanese America to both US mainland and local audiences. I show that this process supported these men’s stakes as inheritors and as future patriarchal leaders of Hawai‘i, Japanese America, and Asian America in the postwar. The heroic racialization facilitated the passage of Hawai‘i Statehood in 1959 and the successful election of two “Hawaiian” war heroes into Congress in 1963. Using extensive multi-site archival research, my historical analysis relies on racial, gendered, and sexuality theories and frameworks from ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, feminist studies, and Asian American studies. This project illustrates Asian Americans creating a celebratory American identity through their racialization as indigenous. The power of non-natives to become the “new” natives is central to US Empire, which supports foundational claims to land, home, family, and nation. My research historicizes Asian American alignment with US Empire, spotlights a power dynamic between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and reveals how Japanese Americans legitimated themselves as “Hawaiians” through the vehicle of the US war hero.

Efforts to “greenshift” (Backe) digital games have been hindered, in part, by a gap between game development practices and critical game studies. To date, plant modeling for games has largely focused on imitating visual patterns rather than implementing dynamic ecological processes, which has shaped and ultimately limited the arguments that games are able to make about the natural world. Propagate, an individual-based plant growth plugin for Unreal Engine, draws from both ecological modeling and game criticism to deepen the relationship between play and ecology. The project offers a speculative approach to cultivating persistent digital environments that vary over time, are delicately interconnected, and exist in dialogue with players. Approaching game worlds as living, animate environments instead of painstakingly crafted backdrops is a step towards redistributing narrative focus and agency from players to the spaces they inhabit.

This dissertation focuses on the formation of multiethnic Pan-Asianism in modern art in Manchuria under the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. Responding to the rapidly changing political conditions from the era of the informal empire (1906–⁠1932) to the Manchukuo period (1932–1945), artists of settler and local communities sought to transform artistic practice by bringing their colonial and native identities into the state-endorsed visual productions. Rather than viewing the art of Manchukuo as a dark valley of wartime stagnation or as a confrontation/assimilation between the colonized and the colonizer, my approach is to recover the historical moment when the notion of transnational modernity in art was shaped, contested, and reappropriated not only by state actors but by unstable, multi-dimensional social relations. I pay special attention to the state art exhibitions in Manchukuo as the last piece of Japan’s intra-imperial salon network involving colonial Korea and Taiwan, which exposed and reproduced the subjugation and dynamics of intersectional identities: race, ethnicity, genealogy, gender, and class. Case studies throughout four chapters demonstrate how the field of power in the art scene shifted from “cosmopolitan” Dalian to “ultra-modern” Changchun after the birth of Manchukuo in 1932, and how artists selectively claimed their Asiatic traditional and modern identities amid the political shift. The first chapter examines the development of metropolitan art productions in Dalian shaped by settler communities under powerful railway imperialism and local government by appropriating visual spectacles of Chinese labor and ethnic culture. The second chapter explores the deployment of the state art exhibition in Changchun and the anti-state exhibition in Fengtian, which revealed multifaceted interactions between Japanese and Chinese. The third chapter provides a case study of settler artist Kai Mihachirō (1903–1979) and his research on Manchurian folklore and folk arts in demonstrating how Manchukuo’s local characters were appropriated by Japanese settlers and the state in classifying, collecting, and curating races. In the fourth chapter, I address Manchukuo’s machine aesthetics, featured in the state art exhibitions, as an embodiment of Pan-Asian modernity and Japanese imperialism engendered by advanced technology and science, which became mobilized as wartime rhetoric.

During the American Progressive Era, discourses of progress were co-constructed with racialized ideas about habitation. Communal, matriarchal, semi-nomadic, and self-built dwellings and their racialized inhabitants were positioned as antagonists to a single-family, heteropatriarchal, Anglo-American ideal. As associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Craftsman, Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival style bungalows that defined Los Angeles’ suburbs presented an illusion of self-made, simple living in connection with nature and frontier ideologies. Though purportedly democratic, the development of the suburbs involved the conversion of Indigenous lands into private property. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples, Black migrants and ethnic Mexicans were funneled into worker housing while employed in the construction and maintenance of a domestic sphere that secured social and financial capital for beneficiaries of Whiteness. The dissertation focuses on three sites where this occurred that have since been erased in the physical landscape, as much as in the public imaginary: 1) The Pacific Electric Railway Company’s labor camps, home to Mexican workers who built and maintained Henry Huntington’s exclusive Pasadena suburbs and resorts; 2) The homes built and maintained by students of the Sherman Institute, an Indian Boarding School in Riverside, California for the vocational training of Indigenous youth; 3) The bungalows of the industrial suburbs marketed to Black and unskilled employees of the Los Angeles Investment Company, a home-building enterprise that went on to build racially restricted, residential subdivisions in southwestern Los Angeles. In each case, laborers were racially targeted and housed in overcrowded, unsanitary, and flimsily built structures that materially foretold their demise and future redevelopment. This research challenges conceptions of the “slums” familiarized by neighborhood surveys, by exposing how their production was instrumental to the construction and maintenance of the suburbs. The chapters of this dissertation devote themselves to the designed details of these hidden histories, as emerging from three distinct labor camp, domestic service, and industrial suburbs. Though historically unique in their racial, material, geographic, and social composition, when considered together, the three sites demonstrate a commitment to settling labor and race through the uneven development of the domestic sphere.

Whether they know it or not, many views of Chinese legal history continue to rely on the idea that Chinese law became thoroughly Confucian thousands of years ago and has since resisted all efforts to adjust that underlying philosophy. This “Confucianization” hypothesis represents a consequential misunderstanding: in the US, it adds fuel both to increasingly dangerous Sino-American hostilities and anti-Asian violence, while in China it underpins the government’s ethno-nationalist expansionism in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. This dissertation begins by examining the historical roots and some of the present-day effects of this view.A key assertion of the Confucianization hypothesis is that Chinese law was never significantly influenced by any of the “non-Chinese” groups who governed the territory administered today by the People’s Republic of China. In fact, supporters of this idea claim, Chinese culture in general and law in particular was so attractive to these outside groups that they adopted it almost wholesale. A prime example offered as evidence of this picture of largely untroubled cultural homogeneity is the Northern Wei 北魏 (386-535), a dynasty founded by a formerly nomadic group which conquered and then ruled China for a century and a half. In a speech several years ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping 習近平 singled out the Northern Wei and its adoption of Chinese practices as proof of the unique power and worth of Chinese culture.I challenge such claims by examining two major texts relating to Northern Wei law: the administrative and legal treatises in the History of Wei 魏書, a government-sponsored history written in the sixth century by Wei Shou 魏收 (506-572). Many of the most reductionist views of Chinese legal history draw on these texts, while many of the scholars focusing on the ethnic and cultural complexity of Northern Wei (contra the Confucianization hypothesis) have turned away from the History of Wei, leaving it primarily to those with the most polemical ends. I argue that these texts actually reflect a diversity of theory and practice far beyond what is generally recognized, and that the origins of important features of imperial Chinese law and administration can be found in the synthesis of approaches these treatises record. By focusing on that diversity, this dissertation hopes to revive interest in works that offer the potential to further complicate some of the simplistic but still-influential attitudes to both the Northern Wei and to Chinese history as a whole.

This dissertation extends the investigation of the utility and function of abstract graphic music notation, through scholarly and creative practical research. Graphic notation is often situated in an ephemeral current of aleatoric music– a gig; a momentary and impulsive transaction between composer and performer, with a focus on spontaneous interpretation. Analysis of graphic notation generally comprises artists’ statements, historicization, and intrigue for this novel and relatively obscure genre of composing. As graphic notation continues to emerge within myriad subcategories of creative music, as well as contemporary art contexts, pedagogical, and neurological research, it is important to survey its modern provisions, affordances, and socio-cultural outcomes.In this project, I first examine existing research into graphic notation, and briefly trace its emergence in contemporary music since the mid-20th century, to demonstrate how it has and continues to address the creative and technical needs of composer- performers. I touch upon other scientific domains, specifically music education. vii Examples of graphically notated works are then cited and analyzed for their musical performance and/or art exhibition. From a semiotic perspective, I measure the interpretation and meaning-making of abstracted notational symbols. As a visual language, I look closely at the space surrounding its ever-evolving vocabulary. I theorize about both qualitative and quantitative valuation of interstices in the syntax of graphic notation passages. From the dynamic positioning to the contrasts in color, texture, shape, and size between abstract characters, transformational relationships are equally important for interpretation by improvising musicians. Citing successful exhibitions in the art world, I investigate the appearance of graphic notation in galleries and museums by composers and conceptual artists alike, particularly the subsequent impact on music’s ontological status and cultural reach among an expanding audience. This scholarly framework sets the tone for the autoethnographic account of my practical research experiments during my doctoral tenure. The creative activity for this dissertation comprised multiple ways of using graphic notation in practice, ranging from semi-permanent art exhibitions, which doubled as performance environments, to a large- scale concert of ensemble scores which were spontaneously generated by manipulating commercial software and graphic design techniques as an improvisational and interactive form of composition and conducting.

This project employs multiple methods to explore how shifting periods of autonomy during the Portuguese Middle Ages (c. 500-1500 AD) impacted the social and biological fabric of everyday life and post-mortem bodily integrity in religiously distinct communities. The archaeological materials from Santarém, Portugal offer an opportunity to facilitate a comparative approach, as many of the excavated cemetery sites within the municipality are a palimpsest, and contain members of distinct religious and temporal communities. This dissertation prioritizes two cemetery sites: Avenida 5 de Outubro (S.Av5Out; n = 164 burials) and Largo Cândido dos Reis (S.LCR; n = 622 burials) which contain the human skeletal remains of Islamic (c. 8th – 12th centuries, C.E.) and Christian (c. 12th – 16th centuries, C.E.) city residents. This project examines how religious identity might explain some of the variation within and between medieval communities through an investigation of both lived experience (lifeways) and death, dying, and burial treatment (deathways). Lifeways are examined through three major axes: 1) oral health and disease, 2) growth and development, and 3) cortical bone maintenance and loss. The data overall suggest minor differences between Islamic and Christian sub-samples, though Christians exhibited reduced stature, increased odds of some indicators of non-specific stress (porotic hyperostosis and periostosis), and dental pathological lesions. Deathways are similarly examined along three major axes: 1) post-hoc archaeothanatology, 2) macrotaphonomic indicators (preservation, erosion, weathering), and 3) microtaphonomy (histotaphonomy). Islamic and Christian burials were found to be highly different in terms of construction, with Islamic graves significantly narrower and shallower than their Christian counterparts. Islamic skeletons were also less represented, and significantly less preserved than their Christian counterparts, regardless of age and/or sex. The results of this dissertation are part of an emerging pattern that the Christian conquests (canonically termed “Reconquista”) may well have been drastic in their restructuring and urbanizing of the Iberian Peninsula, for both the living and the dead. By examining both lifeways and deathways, this approach and accompanying results demonstrate synthesizing both bioarchaeological assessments of livelihood and funerary taphonomic assessments of deadlihood can reveal more textured understanding of past communities and how the living and the dead become intertwined in urban spaces.

The first trustees of Kamehameha Schools (KS), a group of five White, pro-annexationist entrepreneurs, attempted to engineer social solutions for the territory’s problem with Native Hawaiian youth. They proposed to cure rural and urban youth perceived to have unfit minds and unhealthy bodies. The trustees, administrators, and teachers enacted a curriculum designed to transform the ways Native youth thought about themselves and the world around them; worked in the modern, capitalist economic system; and lived with their families in their own homes. This project of deracination was built on a curriculum of military discipline, the inculcation of a Protestant work ethic, and the proper performance of masculinity and femininity. Bernice Pauahi established KS during a period of tremendous change as the booming sugar plantation economy led to dispossession of Natives from their land, competition with immigrant labor, and public policy which stripped Native Hawaiian monarchs of political power. These settler colonial forces complicated constructions of ability and disability, which were ascribed unevenly on subjugated peoples. Moreover, colonialism introduced foreign diseases which decimated the Native Hawaiian population, leading to the popular perception that Natives were an unhealthy, unfit, dying people. This dissertation is an institutional history of KS, exploring its evolution from an industrial boarding school to a modern college-preparatory institution for Native Hawaiians. It uncovers the varied methods KS used to solve the “Native problem,” and create “fit” Natives who knew how to “properly” think, work, and live.