Christopher B Patterson
Biographic Data
| ID | 640557 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher B Patterson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher B |
| FAMILY NAME | Patterson |
| SIGNATURE | PATTERSON C B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3094-8498 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Made in Asia/America
Made in Asia/America explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games, ranging from Death Stranding to Animal Crossing, and five roundtables with twenty Asian/American game makers examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition. Shifting away from Eurocent…
Introduction to Y-Dang's Refugee Lifeworlds
This year's Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize is awarded posthumously to the scholar Y-Dang Troeung for her 2023 book Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, an excerpt of which we are honoured to reprint in the journal. Professor Troeung's work is introduced by her husband, Christopher B. Patterson
In Memoriam
In MemoriamY-Dang Troeung (張依蘭) (ទ្រឿងអ៊ីដាង) (1980–2022) Christopher B. Patterson (and the still-surviving chorus) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 87] I am writing this memoriam fifty-three days after the death of my wife, my partner, my soulmate, my editor, my collaborator, and my co-parent, Y-Dang Troeung. It is four days after the forty-ninth day, when we buried Y-Dang's ashes in Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery with a …
Brown Theory
This article conceives of a transpacific brownness in relation to other forms of brown to produce a storied manifest for brown theory. By activating “the brown transpacific” as an epistemological paradigm that navigates the disciplinary logics of colonial encounters, this article attempts to untangle a story of how some people in Asia went from resembling a wild and uncontainable threat to a form of brownness that became necessary for the reprodu…
Making Queer Asiatic Worlds
This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Usin…
Pluralism, Transition, and the Anglophone; and Just an American Darker than the Rest
This excerpt from Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific asks how South East Asian writing in English can be analyzed in conjunction with texts from its North American diasporas to reread forms of global multiculturalism within a longer genealogy of "pluralist governmentality:" an art of government that expects individuals to visibly express their difference via given group identities, and in doing so, to represent imperia…
Open World Empire
Finalist, 2021 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem …
Open World Empire
Video games vastly outpace all other entertainment media in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products, yet their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before them, vi…
Queer, brown, migrant
This paper treats the documentaries Sunday Beauty Queen (2017) and The Helper (2017) to explore how domestic workers in Hong Kong are represented as forcibly queered, forced by circumstance to operate on the queer time of non-normative gender roles, rather than the ‘natural’ straight time of maternity and unpaid domestic labour for their own family. Popular media, including documentaries, see this queering as a violent act, one at the heart of th…
Organic and Inorganic Chinas
Cold War discourses reconceived of Chinese cultures as two Chinas, one of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the other of the “other China” (Taiwan), or “Greater China” (Hong Kong, Singapore). Today, this discourse has extended to reimagine Chineseness as either “inorganic” (signifying one-party rule and social engineering) or as “organic” (signifying colonial hybridity and laissez-faire capitalism). We explore three texts about Hong Kong—…
Asian Americans and Digital Games
Asian Americans have frequently been associated with video games. As designers they are considered overrepresented, and specific groups appear to dominate depictions of the game designer, from South Asian and Chinese immigrants working for Microsoft and Silicon Valley to auteur designers from Japan, Taiwan, and Iran, who often find themselves with celebrity status in both America and Asia. As players, Asian Americans have been depicted as e-sport…
Global Asian American Popular Cultures
A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media. Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints-such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce-have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of "Asian" and "Asian American" are counterbalanced w…
A View from the Bottom
Orientalist representations of the Asian male body as effeminate, soft, or childlike have permeated Western society to the point that artistic reactions that promote Asian males as tough and aggressive have become easily celebrated for their resistance to American imperial culture. While the fame of martial artists such as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan have generated hardened stereotypes of Asian American men, their forms of aggressive masculinity ha…
Heroes of the Open (Third) World
Heroes of the Open (Third) World:Killing as Pleasure in Ubisoft's Far Cry Series Christopher B. Patterson (bio) From the back of a decommissioned army truck, I observe the white crescent peaks of Kyrat, a fictional war-torn country modeled after Nepal. The beauty of the landscape is disrupted by border guards armed with AK-47s, who toss my United States passport in the mud before mercilessly gunning down my travel companions. Their despotic leade…
Role-Playing the Multiculturalist Umpire
This article explores the shared game mechanics seen throughout BioWare games, especially their Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as systems that invoke multiculturalist values and teach liberal tolerance. In both BioWare series, the player is set on a course to manage ethnic bodies into a racially determined division of labor (as military force), assuming the neutral position of a "multiculturalist umpire." I investigate Mass Effect's loyalty m…
The Filipino American in Spaces of Liberal Tolerance
This article investigates how Peter Bacho's Cebu (1991) interprets the Pacific Northwest as a space of liberal tolerance from the point of view of the Filipino migrant. It thus reads Cebu as a social satire that exposes the gaze of the liberal, tolerant reader and opens up new ways of seeing how diasporic ties to reciprocity and social debt affect the Asian migrant in spaces of liberal tolerance. Using the works of Herbert Marcuse, Wendy Brown, a…
Global Imaginaries and Global Capital
The unnamed narrator in Lawrence Chua's novel Gold by the Inch is multiply queered. He appears to the reader as a gay Thai/Malay migrant of Chinese descent living in the United States. As a traveler, his encounters with episodes of sexual desire lead him to different notions of belonging as his race, class, and sexuality travel with him, marking him as an out sider from one space to another. Likewise, every instance of mobility challenges his ide…
Role-Playing the Multiculturalist Umpire
This article explores the shared game mechanics seen throughout BioWare games, especially their Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as systems that invoke multiculturalist values and teach liberal tolerance. In both BioWare series, the player is set on a course to manage ethnic bodies into a racially determined division of labor (as military force), assuming the neutral position of a "multiculturalist umpire." I investigate Mass Effect's loyalty m…
Brown Theory
This article conceives of a transpacific brownness in relation to other forms of brown to produce a storied manifest for brown theory. By activating “the brown transpacific” as an epistemological paradigm that navigates the disciplinary logics of colonial encounters, this article attempts to untangle a story of how some people in Asia went from resembling a wild and uncontainable threat to a form of brownness that became necessary for the reprodu…
Heroes of the Open (Third) World
Heroes of the Open (Third) World:Killing as Pleasure in Ubisoft's Far Cry Series Christopher B. Patterson (bio) From the back of a decommissioned army truck, I observe the white crescent peaks of Kyrat, a fictional war-torn country modeled after Nepal. The beauty of the landscape is disrupted by border guards armed with AK-47s, who toss my United States passport in the mud before mercilessly gunning down my travel companions. Their despotic leade…
Global Imaginaries and Global Capital
The unnamed narrator in Lawrence Chua's novel Gold by the Inch is multiply queered. He appears to the reader as a gay Thai/Malay migrant of Chinese descent living in the United States. As a traveler, his encounters with episodes of sexual desire lead him to different notions of belonging as his race, class, and sexuality travel with him, marking him as an out sider from one space to another. Likewise, every instance of mobility challenges his ide…
The Filipino American in Spaces of Liberal Tolerance
This article investigates how Peter Bacho's Cebu (1991) interprets the Pacific Northwest as a space of liberal tolerance from the point of view of the Filipino migrant. It thus reads Cebu as a social satire that exposes the gaze of the liberal, tolerant reader and opens up new ways of seeing how diasporic ties to reciprocity and social debt affect the Asian migrant in spaces of liberal tolerance. Using the works of Herbert Marcuse, Wendy Brown, a…
Role-Playing the Multiculturalist Umpire
This article explores the shared game mechanics seen throughout BioWare games, especially their Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as systems that invoke multiculturalist values and teach liberal tolerance. In both BioWare series, the player is set on a course to manage ethnic bodies into a racially determined division of labor (as military force), assuming the neutral position of a "multiculturalist umpire." I investigate Mass Effect's loyalty m…
Global Asian American Popular Cultures
A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media. Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints-such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce-have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of "Asian" and "Asian American" are counterbalanced w…
A View from the Bottom
Orientalist representations of the Asian male body as effeminate, soft, or childlike have permeated Western society to the point that artistic reactions that promote Asian males as tough and aggressive have become easily celebrated for their resistance to American imperial culture. While the fame of martial artists such as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan have generated hardened stereotypes of Asian American men, their forms of aggressive masculinity ha…
Heroes of the Open (Third) World
Heroes of the Open (Third) World:Killing as Pleasure in Ubisoft's Far Cry Series Christopher B. Patterson (bio) From the back of a decommissioned army truck, I observe the white crescent peaks of Kyrat, a fictional war-torn country modeled after Nepal. The beauty of the landscape is disrupted by border guards armed with AK-47s, who toss my United States passport in the mud before mercilessly gunning down my travel companions. Their despotic leade…
Asian Americans and Digital Games
Asian Americans have frequently been associated with video games. As designers they are considered overrepresented, and specific groups appear to dominate depictions of the game designer, from South Asian and Chinese immigrants working for Microsoft and Silicon Valley to auteur designers from Japan, Taiwan, and Iran, who often find themselves with celebrity status in both America and Asia. As players, Asian Americans have been depicted as e-sport…
Queer, brown, migrant
This paper treats the documentaries Sunday Beauty Queen (2017) and The Helper (2017) to explore how domestic workers in Hong Kong are represented as forcibly queered, forced by circumstance to operate on the queer time of non-normative gender roles, rather than the ‘natural’ straight time of maternity and unpaid domestic labour for their own family. Popular media, including documentaries, see this queering as a violent act, one at the heart of th…
Organic and Inorganic Chinas
Cold War discourses reconceived of Chinese cultures as two Chinas, one of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the other of the “other China” (Taiwan), or “Greater China” (Hong Kong, Singapore). Today, this discourse has extended to reimagine Chineseness as either “inorganic” (signifying one-party rule and social engineering) or as “organic” (signifying colonial hybridity and laissez-faire capitalism). We explore three texts about Hong Kong—…
Open World Empire
Finalist, 2021 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem …
Open World Empire
Video games vastly outpace all other entertainment media in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products, yet their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before them, vi…
Pluralism, Transition, and the Anglophone; and Just an American Darker than the Rest
This excerpt from Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific asks how South East Asian writing in English can be analyzed in conjunction with texts from its North American diasporas to reread forms of global multiculturalism within a longer genealogy of "pluralist governmentality:" an art of government that expects individuals to visibly express their difference via given group identities, and in doing so, to represent imperia…
Making Queer Asiatic Worlds
This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Usin…
Introduction to Y-Dang's Refugee Lifeworlds
This year's Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize is awarded posthumously to the scholar Y-Dang Troeung for her 2023 book Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, an excerpt of which we are honoured to reprint in the journal. Professor Troeung's work is introduced by her husband, Christopher B. Patterson
In Memoriam
In MemoriamY-Dang Troeung (張依蘭) (ទ្រឿងអ៊ីដាង) (1980–2022) Christopher B. Patterson (and the still-surviving chorus) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 87] I am writing this memoriam fifty-three days after the death of my wife, my partner, my soulmate, my editor, my collaborator, and my co-parent, Y-Dang Troeung. It is four days after the forty-ninth day, when we buried Y-Dang's ashes in Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery with a …
Brown Theory
This article conceives of a transpacific brownness in relation to other forms of brown to produce a storied manifest for brown theory. By activating “the brown transpacific” as an epistemological paradigm that navigates the disciplinary logics of colonial encounters, this article attempts to untangle a story of how some people in Asia went from resembling a wild and uncontainable threat to a form of brownness that became necessary for the reprodu…
Made in Asia/America
Made in Asia/America explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games, ranging from Death Stranding to Animal Crossing, and five roundtables with twenty Asian/American game makers examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition. Shifting away from Eurocent…
History (11 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Political science (7 works) · Asian American and Pacific Histories (6 works) · Digital Games and Media (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (5 works) · Law (5 works)