Overview

"After World War II, Japanese Americans in Hawai'i sought to carve a positive niche of public citizenship in the community. In 1953, members of the Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce and their wives created a beauty contest, the Cherry Blossom Festival (CBF) Queen Pageant, which quickly became an annual spectacle for the growing urban population of Honolulu. """"Crowning the Nice Girl"""" analyzes the pageant through its decades of development to the present within multiple frameworks of gender, class, and race/ethnicity. Drawing on extensive archival research; interviews with CBF queens, contestants, and organizers; and participant observation in the Fiftieth Annual Festival as a volunteer, Christine Yano paints a complex portrait of not only a beauty pageant, but also a community. The study begins with the subject of beauty pageants in general and Asian American beauty pageants in particular, interrogating the issues they raise, embedding them within their histories, and examining them as part of a global culture that has taken its model from the Miss America contest. Yano follows the pageant throughout the decades into the 1990s, adding corresponding """"herstories"""" - extensive narratives drawn from interviews with CBF queens. She concludes by framing issues of race, ethnicity, spectacle, and community within the intertwined themes of niceness and banality."

Full Product Details

Author:   Christine R. Yano
Publisher:   University of Hawai'i Press
Imprint:   University of Hawai'i Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.00cm , Height: 2.70cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.711kg
ISBN:  

9780824830076

ISBN 10:   0824830075
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   30 June 2006
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Christine R. Yano is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i.

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