American History Unbound : Asians and Pacific Islanders by 
Asian America : A Primary Source Reader by
An essential collection that brings together the core primary texts of the Asian American experience in one volume An essential volume for the growing academic discipline of Asian American studies, this collection of core primary texts draws from a wide range of fields, from law to visual culture to politics, covering key historical and cultural developments that enable students to engage directly with the Asian American experience over the past century. The primary sources, organized around keywords, often concern multiple hemispheres and movements, making this compendium valuable for a number of historical, ethnic, and cultural study undergraduate programs.
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics by
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American "settler complicities" and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.
Asians and Pacific Islanders in American Football : Historical and Contemporary Experiences by
This book sheds light on experiences relatively underrepresented in academic and non-academic sport history. It examines how Asian and Pacific Islander peoples used American football to maintain a sense of community while encountering racial exclusion, labor exploitation, and colonialism. Through their participation and spectatorship in American football, Asian and Pacific Islander people crossed treacherous cultural frontiers to construct what sociologist Elijah Anderson has called a cosmopolitan canopy under which Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people of diverse racial and ethnic identities interacted with at least a semblance of respect and equity. And perhaps a surprising number of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have excelled in college and even professional football before the 1960s. Finally, acknowledging the impressive influx of elite Pacific Islander gridders who surfaced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is vital to note as well the racialized nativism shadowing the lives of these athletes.
Criminalization/Assimilation : Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film by
Criminalization/Assimilation traces how Classical Hollywood films constructed America's image of Chinese Americans from their criminalization as unwanted immigrants to their eventual acceptance when assimilated citizens, exploiting both America's yellow peril fears about Chinese immigration and its fascination with Chinatowns. Philippa Gates examines Hollywood's responses to social issues in Chinatown communities, primarily immigration, racism, drug trafficking, and prostitution, as well as the impact of industry factors including the Production Code and star system on the treatment of those subjects. Looking at over 200 films, Gates reveals the variety of racial representations within American film in the first half of the twentieth century and brings to light not only lost and forgotten films but also the contributions of Asian American actors whose presence onscreen offered important alternatives to Hollywood's yellowface fabrications of Chinese identity and a resistance to Hollywood's Orientalist narratives.
The First Fifteen : How Asian American Women Became Federal Judges by
In 1998, an Asian woman first joined the ranks of federal judges with lifetime appointments. It took ten years for the second Asian woman to be appointed. Since then, however, over a dozen more Asian women have received lifetime federal judicial appointments. This book tells the stories of the first fifteen. In the process, it recounts remarkable tales of Asian women overcoming adversity and achieving the American dream, despite being the daughters of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants. Yet The First Fifteen also explores how far Asian Americans and women still have to go before the federal judiciary reflects America as a whole. In a candid series of interviews, these judges reflect upon the personal and professional experiences that led them to this distinguished position, as well as the nerve-wracking political process of being nominated and confirmed for an Article III judgeship. By sharing their diverse stories, The First Fifteen paints a nuanced portrait of how Asian American women are beginning to have a voice in determining American justice.
Forever Struggle : Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston's Chinatown, 1880–2018 by
Chinatown has a long history in Boston. Though little documented, it represents the city's most sustained neighborhood effort to survive during eras of hostility and urban transformation. It has been wounded and transformed, slowly ceding ground; at the same time, its residents and organizations have gained a more prominent voice over their community's fate. In writing about Boston Chinatown's long history, Michael Liu, a lifelong activist and scholar of the community, charts its journey and efforts for survival?from its emergence during a time of immigration and deep xenophobia to the highway construction and urban renewal projects that threatened the neighborhood after World War II to its more recent efforts to keep commercial developers at bay. At the ground level, Liu depicts its people, organizations, internal battles, and varied and complex strategies against land-taking by outside institutions and public authorities. The documented courage, resilience, and ingenuity of this low-income immigrant neighborhood of color have earned it a place amongst our urban narratives. Chinatown has much to teach us about neighborhood agency, the power of organizing, and the prospects of such neighborhoods in rapidly growing and changing cities.
Global Asian American Popular Cultures by
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 within global popular culture. Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering new and critical analyses of popular cultures that account for emerging textual fields, global producers, technologies of distribution, and trans-medial circulation, this ground-breaking collectionexplores the mainstream and the margins of popular culture.
Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater by
Asian American literature is one of the most recent forms of ethnic literature and is already becoming one of the most prominent, given the large number of writers, the growing ethnic population from the region, the general receptivity of this body of work, and the quality of the authors. In recent decades, there has been an exponential growth in their output and much Asian American literature has now achieved new levels of popular success and critical acclaim. Nurtured by rich and long literary traditions from the vast continent of Asia, this literature is poised between the ancient and the modern, between the East and West, and between the oral and the written. The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater covers the activities in this burgeoning field. First, its history is traced year by year from 1887 to the present, in a chronology, and the introduction provides a good overview. The most important section is the dictionary, with over 600 substantial and cross-referenced entries on authors, books, and genres as well as more general ones describing the historical background, cultural features, techniques and major theatres and clubs. More reading can be found through an extensive bibliography with general works and those on specific authors. The book is thus a good place to get started, or to expanded one's horizons, about a branch of American literature that can only grow in importance.
Hmong in Wisconsin by
Unknown to many Americans at the time, the Hmong helped the US government fight Communists in Laos during the Secret War of the 1960s and 1970s, a parallel conflict to the Vietnam War. When Saigon fell and allies withdrew, the surviving Hmong fled for their lives, spending years in Thai refugee camps before being relocated to the United States and other countries. Many of these families found homes in Wisconsin, which now has the third largest Hmong population in the country, following California and Minnesota. As one of the most recent cultural groups to arrive in the Badger State, the Hmong have worked hard to establish a new life here, building support systems to preserve traditions and to help one another as they enrolled in schools, started businesses, and strived for independence. Told with a mixture of scholarly research, interviews, and personal experience of the author, this latest addition to the popular People of Wisconsin series shares the Hmong's varied stories of survival and hope as they have become an important part of Wisconsin communities.
Inscrutable Belongings : Queer Asian North American Fiction by
Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational--they are directly tied to lived experience.
John Okada : The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy by
No-No Boy, John Okada's only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and, upon release from federal prison after the war, is cast out by his divided community. In 1957, the novel faced a similar rejection until it was rediscovered and reissued in 1976 to become a celebrated classic of American literature. As a result of Okada's untimely death at age forty-seven, the author's life and other works have remained obscure. This compelling collection offers the first full-length examination of Okada's development as an artist, placing recently discovered writing by Okada alongside essays that reassess his lasting legacy. Meticulously researched biographical details, insight from friends and relatives, and a trove of intimate photographs illuminate Okada's early life in Seattle, military service, and careers as a public librarian and a technical writer in the aerospace industry. This volume is an essential companion to No-No Boy.
Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts : Marvel, Diversity and the 21st Century Superhero by
Marvel is one of the hottest media companies in the world right now, and its beloved superheroes are all over film, television and comic books. Yet rather than simply cashing in on the popularity of iconic white male characters like Peter Parker, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, Marvel has consciously diversified its lineup of superheroes, courting controversy in the process. Panthers, Hulks, and Ironhearts offers the first comprehensive study of how Marvel has reimagined what a superhero might look like in the twenty-first century. It examines how they have revitalized older characters like Black Panther and Luke Cage, while creating new ones like Latina superhero Miss America. Furthermore, it considers the mixed fan responses to Marvel's recasting of certain "legacy heroes," including a Pakistani-American Ms. Marvel, a Korean-American Hulk, and a whole rainbow of multiverse Spidermen. If the superhero comic is a quintessentially American creation, then how might the increasing diversification of Marvel's superhero lineup reveal a fundamental shift in our understanding of American identity? This timely study answers those questions and considers what Marvel's comics, TV series, and films might teach us about stereotyping, Orientalism, repatriation, whitewashing, and identification.
Quiet Odyssey : A Pioneer Korean Woman in America by
Mary Paik Lee left her native country in 1905, traveling with her parents as a political refugee after Japan imposed control over Korea. Her father worked in the sugar plantations of Hawaii briefly before taking his family to California. They shared the poverty-stricken existence endured by thousands of Asian immigrants in the early twentieth century, working as farm laborers, cooks, janitors, and miners. Lee recounts racism on the playground and the ravages of mercury mining on her father's health, but also entrepreneurial successes and hardships surmounted with grace. With a new foreword by David K. Yoo, this edition reintroduces Quiet Odyssey to readers interested in Asian American history and immigration studies. The volume includes thirty illustrations and a comprehensive introduction and bibliographic essay by respected scholar Sucheng Chan, who collaborated closely with Lee to edit the biography and ensure the work was true to the author's intended vision. This award-winning book provides a compelling firsthand account of early Korean American history and continues to be an essential work in Asian American studies.
Reppin' : Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice by
From hip-hop artists in the Marshall Islands to innovative multimedia producers in Vanuatu to racial justice writers in Utah, Pacific Islander youth are using radical expression to transform their communities. Exploring multiple perspectives about Pacific Islander youth cultures in such locations as Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Hawai'i, and Tonga, this cross-disciplinary volume foregrounds social justice methodologies and programs that confront the ongoing legacies of colonization, incarceration, and militarization. The ten essays in this collection also highlight the ways in which youth throughout Oceania and the diaspora have embraced digital technologies to communicate across national boundaries, mobilize sites of political resistance, and remix popular media. By centering Indigenous peoples' creativity and self-determination, Reppin' vividly illuminates the dynamic power of Pacific Islander youth to reshape the present and future of settler cities and other urban spaces in Oceania and beyond.
Setsuko's Secret : Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration by
As children, Shirley Ann Higuchi and her brothers knew Heart Mountain only as the place their parents met, imagining it as a great Stardust Ballroom in rural Wyoming. As they grew older, they would come to recognize the name as a source of great sadness and shame for their older family members, part of the generation of Japanese Americans forced into the hastily built concentration camp in the aftermath of Executive Order 9066. Only after a serious cancer diagnosis did Shirley's mother, Setsuko, share her vision for a museum at the site of the former camp, where she had been donating funds and volunteering in secret for many years. After Setsuko's death, Shirley skeptically accepted an invitation to visit the site, a journey that would forever change her life and introduce her to a part of her mother she never knew. Navigating the complicated terrain of the Japanese American experience, Shirley patched together Setsuko's story and came to understand the forces and generational trauma that shaped her own life. Moving seamlessly between family and communal history, Setsuko's Secret offers a clear window into the "camp life" that was rarely revealed to the children of the incarcerated. This volume powerfully insists that we reckon with the pain in our collective American past.
The Subject(s) of Human Rights : Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique by
Human rights violations have always been part of Asian American studies. From Chinese immigration restrictions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, yellow peril characterizations, and recent acts of deportation and Islamophobia, Asian Americans have consistently functioned as subordinated "subjects" of human rights violations. The Subject(s) of Human Rights brings together scholars from North America and Asia to recalibrate these human rights concerns from both sides of the Pacific.The essays in this collection provide a sharper understanding of how Asian/Americans have been subjected to human rights violations, how they act as subjects of history and agents of change, and how they produce knowledge around such subjects. The editors of and contributors to The Subject(s) of Human Rights examine refugee narratives, human trafficking, and citizenship issues in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. These themes further refract issues of American war-making, settler colonialism, military occupation, collateral damage, and displacement that relocate the imagined geographies of Asian America from the periphery to the center of human rights critique.
The Unsung Great : Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans by
From a title-winning boxer in Louisiana to a Broadway baritone in New York, Japanese Americans have long belied their popular representation as "quiet Americans." Showcasing the lives and achievements of relatively unknown but remarkable people in Nikkei history, scholar and journalist Greg Robinson reveals the diverse experiences of Japanese Americans and explores a wealth of themes, including mixed-race families, artistic pioneers, mass confinement, civil rights activism, and queer history. Drawn primarily from Robinson's popular writings in the San Francisco newspaper Nichi Bei Weekly and community website Discover Nikkei, The Unsung Great offers entertaining and compelling stories that challenge one-dimensional views of Japanese Americans. This collection breaks new ground by devoting attention to Nikkei beyond the West Coast--including the vibrant communities of New York and Chicago, as well as the little-known history of Japanese Americans in the US South. Expertly researched and accessibly written, The Unsung Great brings to light a constellation of varied and incredible life stories.
"May is Asian American - Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month – a celebration of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. AAPI Heritage commemoration was first proposed in 1977 to observe the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States (May 7, 1843), and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, constructed mainly by Chinese immigrant workers (May 10, 1869). In 1978, President Carter made it an annual week-long event and President George H.W. Bush extended the proclamation to include the entire month of May."--Natural Resources Conservation Service, Caribbean Area.