Natalia Molina traces the relationship between public health in Los Angeles and compares the experiences of Chinese to that of Japanese and Mexican residents in the city in the period between 1879-1939.Taken together these works remind us that Chinatown was only one of the many districts that composed Los Angeles’s core in the first half of the twentieth century, and that the actions of Chinese people must be understood in relationship to the other people and ethnic groups that lived in this section of the city. Perhaps the most interesting work done by an historian on Los Angeles Chinatown has been the work of Isabella Quintana who highlights interactions between Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans in the plaza area between 1871 and 1938 focusing on the racialized and gendered nature of space. In her essay, “Making Do, Making Home: Borders and the Worlds of Chinatown and Sonoratown in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles,” Quintana explores the architecture of Chinese and Mexican homes in the Plaza area to “imagine social worlds created by women that presented alternative ways of living to those dictated by colonialism, industrialization, exclusion, and segregation in Los Angeles.”Given a paucity of first-hand accounts by Chinese and Mexican women during the period,10 liter pot Quintana shows how it is possible to understand the interactions between women from these two groups by looking closely at architectural records.
Old Chinatown, New Chinatown, and China City were located adjacent to the Los Angeles Plaza in one of the most diverse sections of Los Angeles. Nonetheless all three districts came to be seen as Chinatowns by those outside the Chinese American community. The process which marked these three communities were marked Chinese in the popular imagination despite the demographic reality of this part of the city can only be understood when we begin to explore Chinatown’s place in the popular imagination. Over the last century, representations of Chinatown have become an important site through which whites as well as other non-Asian Americans envision Asia and Asian people. In many ways, Elaine Kim’s observation about depictions of Chinese people in Anglo-American literature as a whole holds especially true for Chinatown in particular. Kim writes that, “many depictions of Chinese have been generalized to Asians, particularly since Westerners have found it difficult to distinguish among East Asiannationalities.”Certainly, the racialization of Chinatown has had a profound influence not only on the way whites perceive Chinese American communities but also on the way whites perceive many Asian American communities other than Chinatown. While there exists a substantial amount of scholarly work on the representation of Chinatowns in various works of literary fiction, scholarship that explores the place of Chinatown in popular imagination more generally are much less frequent. Two of the most important studies are to engage the relationship between Orientalism and Chinatown are Anthony Lee’s Picturing Chinatown and Kay Anderson’s Vancouver Chinatown. Anthony Lee’s Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco explores the “history of imaginings” of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the period between 1850s and the 1950s, as represented through photography, paintings, and performance.
While the last two chapters do deal with ways in which Chinese Americans represented themselves through art, representations made by Chinese Americans are not the primary focus of Lee’s study. As Lee states in his introduction, outside of these last two chapters, his book “has precious little to say about the representations of Chinatown by its actual inhabitants.”What Lee is more interested in is recovering, “something of the pressure exerted on the art by the daily lives and experiences of Chinatown’s inhabitants.”Lee sees these artistic representations of Chinatown as being generated by “unequal social and political relations between Chinese and non-Chinese” and thus believes these works ultimately tell us more about larger white society than they are about Chinatown itself. Equally important for understanding the relationship between Chinatown as place and Chinatown as an idea is geographer Kay Anderson’s Vancouver Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Chinatown, 1875-1980. Drawing on the concept of hegemony advanced by Antonio Gramsci, Anderson states that Chinatown, “has been a historically specific idea, a cultural concept rooted in the symbolic system of those with the power to define…”Anderson posits that Chinatown is at its heart related to a set of racial and ethnic ideas held by whites about a particular place. She writes that Chinatown “was not a neutral term, referring somehow unproblematically to the physical presence of China in Vancouver. Rather it was an evaluative term ascribed by Europeans no matter how the residents of the territory might have defined themselves.”
The works of both Anderson and Lee have been deeply influential on my present study and yet my goal in the present study is to complicate the idea that Chinatown is a product of the white imagination and that writing about Orientalism in Chinatown should focus primarily on the representations and actions of whites leaders and cultural producers. The focus that scholars of American Orientalism have placed on actions and cultural productions produced by white Americans is no doubt a legacy of Said’s original work. Said’s 1978 text Orientalism focuses entirely on the writings of Europeans, and yet in his theoretical elaboration of Orientalism, Said lays the groundwork for understanding the ways in which this discourse could be contested. In fashioning this theory of Orientalism, Said draws on two theorists with significantly different understandings of power: Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. Drawing from Foucault, Said defines Orientalism as a discourse. Said writes that, “no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action opposed by Orientalism.” He elaborates that Orientalism did not determine what could be said about the Orient but rather that Orientalist “interests” were always involved in discussions of the Orient.But Said breaks with Foucault in one important way. Said writes, “Yet unlike Michel Foucault,10 liter drainage collection pot to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism.”This is an important ontological distinction that allows him to theorize the way the actions of individual authors created this discourse.In advancing my theory of Chinese American Orientalism, I argue that the Chinese American merchant class utilized North American Chinatowns to articulate their own distinct cultural representation of China. This should not simply be seen as an act of “self-Orientalism.” Chinese American merchants and others in the Chinese American community did not simply reproduce dominant ideas about China as presented in European and American literature and culture. Rather, Chinese American Orientalism was a distinct cultural formation that functioned for a moment counter-hegemonically. Because Chinese American Orientalism functioned within the larger framework of Orientlalism, Chinese Americans were not free to present Chinatown to tourists anyway they wished. But what they could do was subvert dominant expectations of the community in subtle ways, while still representing the district as a site of Otherness. While Chinese American Orientalism was deeply linked to visual culture, it manifested itself materially in Chinatowns across North America. Examples of Chinese American Orientalism include the architecture that came to define so many North American Chinatowns, Chinese American cuisine such as Egg Foo Yung and fortune cookies, and the embodied performances of race, gender, and nation enacted by Chinese American merchants and others in Chinatown. Chinese American Orientalism drew on all of the senses of the visiting tourist.Tourists did not simply watch Chinese Americans perform ethnicity from a distance.
In Chinatown, tourists could taste, smell, touch, hear, and see the version of the Orient presented to them by the merchant class. Tactile, visual, and edible, Chinese American Orientalism was also in a way political. Chinese American Orientalism presented a unified non-threatening image of China as a commodity, that appealed to white sensibilities enough to make a profit but did so in a way that did not replicate the worst aspects of Yellow Peril iconography that had left so many in the community disenfranchised.It is one of the building blocks of all forms of life. Commercially, carbon is essential to modern civilization through its multitude of applications such as a power source in the form of coal and hydrocarbons, a raw material for essential components like steel, polymers etc. to name a few. Carbon exists in the form of different allotropes such as graphite, diamond etc. Each allotrope differs from another in their physical properties. Depending on the application, different allotropes of carbon utilized as applicable. In the field of research, the recently discovered allotropes such as fullerenes, graphene, and nanotubes are being studied extensively due to their interesting physical properties. The discovery of carbon nanotubes by S.Ijima in 1991 initiated intense research interest in them. The research over a decade infers that CNT exhibit rare amalgamation of mechanical strength, stiffness and low density with exceptional transport properties. These attributes have made CNT an ideal choice for multifunctional materials that combine the best of CNTs with other materials such as polymers, ceramics, and metals. Thus, CNTs are blended with other materials to obtain tailored materials for various applications such as transistors, as hydrogen storing material, as probes and sensors; in lightweight bicycles, antifouling coating of ship hulls, electrostatic discharge shield on satellites, artificial muscles and actuators etc. Actuators are utilized in a wide variety of actuation application in various fields such as robotics, artificial muscles, micro-electro-mechanical-systems and micro-optomechanical-system. It is achieved by converting different types of energy to mechanical energy to move or control a mechanism or a system. On a macroscopic scale, actuators can be powered using materials such as piezoelectric materials, conducting polymers, shape memory alloys etc. The process is quite efficient as well. However, on a micro- and nanoscale, such materials are not suitable. Critical issues such as scalability into nanoscales, high performance and ease of operation for implementation in nanotechnology and biomedical impedes their applications severely. Under such circumstances, substitutes such as metallic nanoparticles, nanowires, and CNTs could be used instead. Nanotubes and nanowires have been used to configure dynamic systems like cantilever beams, linear and torsional actuators on a nanoscale level in laboratory conditions. Nanostructures, particularly those made of CNT, exhibit actuation to applied external stimuli such as heat, electric voltage, and light. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the photo mechanical properties of the CNT-based composite. To this end, the dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 2 discusses the general background of carbon nanotubes and Reactive Ethylene Terpolymer , the polymer matrix. Chapter 3 explores the process of fabrication of the composite in a detailed manner. Chapter 4 discussed the experiments conducted to investigate the photo mechanical actuation and discuss the results of the experiment. Chapter 5 suggests a mechanism describing the photo mechanical actuation process. Chapter 6 concludes the dissertation with a summary of the study.MWCNT structure is slightly different from that of SWCNT. Instead of just one nanotube, the structure of MWCNT consists of multiple tubules nested within each other. The outer diameter is usually in the range of 20 to 30 nm depending on the number of walls within a nanotube. The electronic properties of the MWCNT depend on theouter most tubule resulting in either a metallic or semiconductor-like behavior depending on the chirality of the outermost tubule. Since its discovery, CNT was expected to have superlative mechanical properties comparable to that of graphene. Computational simulations conducted by Overney et al. also provided similar results predicting Young’s modulus to be 1500 GPa. The first mechanical tests were conducted on MWCNT in 1997 by Wong et al using atomic force microscope which yielded Young’s modulus of 1.28 TPa and average bending strength of 14 GPa. However, generally accepted value Young’s modulus was measured by Yu et al. in 2000 obtained through measuring stress-strain measurements of an MWCNT pinned at one end inside an electron microscope. Young’s modulus was measured between 270 – 950 GPa. The outermost layer of MWCNT failed at applied tensile loads ranging between 11 and 63 GPa at strains up to 12% . Using the same method, Yu et al. could measure Young’s modulus for SWNT to be in the range 370 – 1470 TPa and tensile strength to be between 10 and 52 GPa.