Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Reading List: Home

Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer.

Chinatown Pretty features beautiful portraits and heartwarming stories of trend-setting seniors across six Chinatowns.

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown. How did interracial families negotiate their identities within these societies when mixed-race marriage was taboo and "Eurasian" often a derisive term?

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In the eyes of mid-twentieth-century white America, "Aiiieeeee!" was the one-dimensional cry from Asian Americans, their singular expression of all emotions--it signified and perpetuated the idea of Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, self-hating, undesirable, and obedient. In this anthology first published in 1974, Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong reclaimed that shout, outlining the history of Asian American literature and boldly drawing the boundaries for what was truly Asian American and what was white puppetry.

Oral histories, research, and essays by Anthony Ajluni, Christian Beswick, Lia Bommarito, Sam Brown, Korine Brady, Natalie Eighmey, Keith Felpausch, Justin Fernando, Marlie Fraser, Laura Graham, Annie Hamaty, Peter Hanna, Kaiysha Johnson, Saga Kinning, Peyton Klochack, Sujin Lee, Riane Molloy, Hiroki Naito, Hope O'Dell, Alisha Phan, Carlos Rivera-Galvan, Caitlin Santer, Samuel Schrodt, Parker Selders, David Tran, Sydney Wagoner, Chloe Weigel, Linda Wu, [and] Renna Yang.

Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.

Whetu Moana is the first anthology of contemporary indigenous Polynesian poetry to be written in English and edited by Polynesians.

In Of Love and War Angela Wanhalla details the intimate relationships forged during wartime between women and U.S. servicemen stationed in the South Pacific, traces the fate of wartime marriages, and addresses consequences for the women and children left behind.

The 1898 annexation of Hawaii to the US is often framed as an inevitable step in American expansion--but it was never a foregone conclusion. By pairing the intimate and epic together in critical juxtaposition, Christen T. Sasaki reveals the unstable nature not just of the coup state but of the US empire itself. The attempt to create a US-backed white settler state in Hawaii sparked a turn-of-the-century debate about race-based nationalism and state-based sovereignty and jurisdiction that was contested on the global stage.

This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," commonly referring to medicinal plants.

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What if we saw indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration rather than as the passive objects of that exploration? What if, instead of conceiving of global exploration as an enterprise just of European men such as Columbus or Cook or Magellan, we thought of it as an enterprise of the people they "discovered"? What could such a new perspective reveal about geographical understanding and its place in struggles over power in the context of colonialism?

This groundbreaking anthology is the first to navigate the interconnections between the rhetorics and aesthetics of the Pacific. Like the bright and multifaceted constellation for which it is named, Huihui: Rhetorics and Aesthetics in the Pacific showcases a variety of genres and cross-genre forms--critical essays, poetry, short fiction, speeches, photography, and personal reflections--that explore a wide range of subjects, from Disney's Aulani Resort to the Bishop Museum, from tiki souvenirs to the Dusky Maiden stereotype, from military recruitment to colonial silencing, from healing lands to healing words and music, from decolonization to sovereignty.

A uniquely collaborative analysis of human adaptation to the Polynesian islands, told through oral histories, biophysical evidence, and historical records.

Women are significantly underrepresented in politics in the Pacific Islands, given that only one in twenty Pacific parliamentarians are female, compared to one in five globally. A common, but controversial, method of increasing the number of women in politics is the use of gender quotas, or measures designed to ensure a minimum level of women's representation. In those cases where quotas have been effective, they have managed to change the face of power in previously male-dominated political spheres.

This wayfinding set of essays, by acclaimed writer and critic Lana Lopesi, explores the overlap of being a woman and Sāmoan. Writing on ancestral ideas of womanhood appears alongside contemporary reflections on women's experiences and the Pacific. These essays lead into the messy and the sticky, the whispered conversations and the unspoken.

Tradition holds that when you come across a body of fresh water in a secluded area and everything is eerily still, the plants are yellowed, and the water covered with a greenish-yellow froth, you have stumbled across the home of a mo'o. Leave quickly lest the mo'o make itself known to you! Revered and reviled, reptiles have slithered, glided, crawled, and climbed their way through the human imagination and into prominent places in many cultures and belief systems around the world. Ka Po'e Mo'o Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities explores the fearsome and fascinating creatures known as mo'o that embody the life-giving and death-dealing properties of water.

Na Wahine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization documents the political lives of four wahine koa (courageous women): Moanike'ala Akaka, Maxine Kahaulelio, Terrilee Keko'olani-Raymond, and Loretta Ritte, who are leaders in Hawaiian movements of aloha 'aina. They narrate the ways they came into activism and talk about what enabled them to sustain their involvement for more than four decades.

Although Pacific history, society, and culture have been the subjects of much scholarly research and writing, the lives of Pacific Islanders in the diaspora (particularly in the U.S.) have received far less attention. The contributors to this volume of articles and essays compiled by the Pacific Islander Americans Research Project hope to rectify this oversight.

Sia Figiel's powerful, poetic skills weave together the voices of three generations of women from two Samoan families. Their dream worlds and realities intermingle, just as the histories of each generation run through the next. At the center of the novel is the Samoan woman's tattoo, the malu, believed to be brought from Fiji by Siamese twins. The ghosts of the twins watch over the women whose lives are stained by an unfinished tattoo. The shame and grief of not completing the tattoo ceremony go hand in hand with the shame and grief of illicit love and broken promises.