La Trobe

"But You Are Still a Monkey": American Born Chinese and Racial Self-Acceptance

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-06-30, 05:51 authored by Mike Cadden
Mike Cadden's "'But You Are Still a Monkey': American Born Chinese and Racial Self-Acceptance" calls into question the wide acknowledgement of Gene Luen Yang's young adult graphic novel, American Born Chinese, as a positive model of ethnic identity. This call for reassessment surfaces and questions passive assumptions about traditionally privileged subject positions (e.g. whiteness, maleness), suggesting that perhaps such ideologies are more powerful and have more currency than progressive and forward-thinking scholars and educators would like to admit.

History

Journal

The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's Literature

ISSN

1551-5680

Volume

17

Issue

2

Publisher

La Trobe University

Section Title

Alice's Academy

Author Biography

Mike Cadden is a professor of English and director of childhood studies at Missouri Western State University where he teaches classes in children's and young adult literature. He has published extensively in these areas, served as president of the Children's Literature Association, and in 2008 received the Missouri Governor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Date Created

2014-05-07

Rights Statement

Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.

Data source

OJS data migration 2025: https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/477

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