Argument to Empower a Diminished Artist or Misguided Analysis of a Pushover?

Cheyne Fujimoto
Blog 8
Discussion on "Crossroads"

In the excerpt, Valverde describes and partially analyzes an artistic Vietnamese American immigrant's experience in the United States through the artist's macro and microscopic social experiences within her family as well as how the Vietnamese American community perceived her political views in a multitude of ways. While potentially interesting as a footnote or even a full paragraph, the ideas in the excerpt were very forcibly expanded into a piece that came across as somewhat boring, repetitive, and overly reliant on sympathetic reactions from the reader rather than as a real academic inquiry.

Particularly interestingly is how Valverde quickly victimizes the artist, Chau Huynh, as some sort of exposed and vulnerable Southeast Asian female. For example, her misuse of "cyberbullying" as evidence of a "maelstrom of discontent" was a fairly typical example of the faults of Valverde's analysis. Perhaps anyone on who has spent at least an hour on the internet could observe that this is normal for absolutely any political statement of any form; why Valverde could overlook this is perhaps due to her reflected experiences from the infamous tenure battle. In some sense, by creating an uproar, Chau was successful as an artist although Valverde fails to acknowledge this.

I was shocked to learn that this was considered material to be included in a scholarly journal. The information is Wikipedian at best (although with a very biased interpretation unlike Wikipedia) and contains far too many umbrella terms like "social landscape" and "cultural and political identity". Despite the fact that the excerpt was muddled by a few instances shoddy, poorly-interpreted information, I was pleased to see that Valverde was capable of presenting an idea without delving into irrelevant preaching against a damning Big Brother.

Question: What was the primary goal of this article if not to inform a reader?

The image above is a picture of a "trollface" which is from the well-known meme Rage Comics. It is representative of what Valverde describes as "cyberbullying" which is better described as "trolling". Trolling is highly distinct in that its objective is to ridicule in an objective fashion as to demean another internet denizen. This is opposed to cyberbullying which is what children in middle school do to each other by calling each other stupid or ugly.