A compilation of recent Asian American acquisitions by the MSU Libraries.
100 questions and answers about Indian Americans
American Chinatown : a People's History of Five Neighborhoods
Angel Island : immigrant gateway to America
Asian America : Forming New Communities, Expanding Boundaries
Asian American Communities and Health : Context, Research, Policy, and Action
Asian American Studies Now : A Critical Reader
Asian Americans in New England : Culture and Community
Asian immigration to the United States
Asians in the ivory tower : dilemmas of racial inequality in American higher education
Beyond Yellow English : Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America
Bollywood Weddings : Dating, Engagement, and Marriage in Hindu America
Chains of Babylon : the Rise of Asian America
Charlie Chan : The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History
Chinese American Transnational Politics
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
Claiming Diaspora : Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America
Contemporary Chinese America : Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation
Culinary Fictions : Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture
The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies : Autonomy and Representation in the University
The Decolonized Eye : Filipino American Art and Performance
Driven Out : The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans
East eats West : writing in two hemispheres
Embodying Asian/American Sexualities
Emigrating from China to the United States : a comparison of different social experiences
Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today
Ends of Empire : Asian American Critique and the Cold War
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles : Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
Ghostlife of Third Cinema : Asian American Film and Video
Glass ceilings and Asian Americans : the new face of workplace barriers
Hip hop Desis : South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a global race consciousness
Hmong America : reconstructing community in diaspora
Hmong and American : from refugees to citizens
Recently acquired books in the MSU Libraries. Note : always check the online catalog for the latest information on location and status. If book says "in process", you can ask for it at the Circulation Desk.
100 Questions and Answers about East Asian Cultures. Joe Grimm and MSU School of Journalism. 55pp. Main Library and the Faculty Book Collection (1 West) E184.A75 M53 2014 : This guide has sections on East Asian cultures, languages, religions, social norms, politics, history, politics, families and food. The guide is intended for people in business, schools, places of worship, government, medicine, law enforcement, human resources and journalism-anywhere it is important to know more about communities. We intended this guide for individuals and for groups. Questions include: What are major differences between East and Southeast Asia? Is it OK to ask Asians "where are you from?" What is the difference between South Korea and North Korea? What type of governments do East Asian countries have? What is the difference between China and Taiwan? Is Hong Kong different from China? Does one culture dominate East Asia? Do Asians value group success more than individual success? Is collective orientation related to "family honor" in Asian culture? What does it mean to "save face" or "lose face?" Why do some East Asians apologize so often? What is the humility or modesty value? What are Asian customs for bowing? What are gift-giving traditions in East Asia? Are East Asians generally more reserved than Americans? Why do some Asians take "American" names? Why is everyone named Lee or Kim? What is feng shui? Why do Chinese wear white or black at funerals but red at weddings? There's Japanese kendo and judo, Korean taekwondo, and Chinese kung fu and tai chi. Does Asian culture encourage fighting? What are major holidays for East Asians? How do Asians celebrate the Lunar New Year? What is the meaning of different animal years and the Chinese Zodiac? Are there beliefs about certain numbers in East Asia? What are manga and anime? What is Hello Kitty and what is "kawaii?" What is "hallyu," or the Korean wave? Did karaoke begin in Asia? What is behind the emphasis on respect for elders? Do Asian parents try to control their children's lives? What is China's "one-child policy?" Why do some East Asians value males more than females? Do East Asians get divorced and, if so, is it looked down upon? Is intermarriage discouraged? Does knowing one East Asian language make it easier to learn another? What are the major languages in China? Is it difficult for East Asians to learn English? Some East Asians seem to speak loudly and some seem quiet. Why?
100 questions and answers about Indian Americans / Joe Grimm and the MSU School of Journalism. S. L. : David Crumm Media LCC, 2013. Main Library and the Faculty Book Collection (1 West) E184.E2 M53 2013 : This guide to Indians in America has sections on India history, population, religion, language, culture, food, gender, family, education, work and politics. It includes Hinduism, Sikhism.
Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends : Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California / Charlotte Brooks. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2009. 329pp. Main Library HD7288.76.U52 B76 2009 : Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of California’s urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities....Against the backdrop of cold war efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter group’s access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a “model minority,” whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans’ early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs. As Brooks tells this multifaceted story, she draws on a broad range of sources in multiple languages, giving voice to an array of community leaders, journalists, activists, and homeowners—and insightfully conveying the complexity of racialized housing in a multiracial society.
American Chinatown : a People's History of Five Neighborhoods / Bonnie Tsui. New York : Free Press, 2009. 262pp. Main Library E184.C5 T834 2009 : CHINATOWN, U.S.A.: a state of mind, a world within a world, a neighborhood that exists in more cities than you might imagine. Every day, Americans find "something different" in Chinatown's narrow lanes and overflowing markets, tasting exotic delicacies from a world apart or bartering for a trinket on the street -- all without ever leaving the country. It's a place that's foreign yet familiar, by now quite well known on the Western cultural radar, but splitting the difference still gives many visitors to Chinatown the sense, above all, that things are not what they seem -- something everyone in popular culture, from Charlie Chan to Jack Nicholson, has been telling us for decades. And it's true that few visitors realize just how much goes on beneath the surface of this vibrant microcosm, a place with its own deeply felt history and stories of national cultural significance.,,,But Chinatown is not a place that needs solving; it's a place that needs a more specific telling. In American Chinatown, acclaimed travel writer Bonnie Tsui takes an affectionate and attentive look at the neighborhood that has bewitched her since childhood, when she eagerly awaited her grandfather's return from the fortune-cookie factory. Tsui visits the country's four most famous Chinatowns -- San Francisco (the oldest), New York (the biggest), Los Angeles (the film icon), Honolulu (the crossroads) -- and makes her final, fascinating stop in Las Vegas (the newest; this Chinatown began as a mall); in her explorations, she focuses on the remarkable experiences of ordinary people, everyone from first-to fifth-generation Chinese Americans. American Chinatown breaks down the enigma of Chinatown by offering narrative glimpses: intriguing characters who reveal the realities and the unexpected details of Chinatown life that American audiences haven't heard. There are beauty queens, celebrity chefs, immigrant garment workers; there are high school kids who are changing inner-city life in San Francisco, Chinese extras who played key roles in 1940s Hollywood, new arrivals who go straight to dealer school in Las Vegas hoping to find their fortunes in their own vision of "gold mountain." Tsui's investigations run everywhere, from mom-and-pop fortune-cookie factories to the mall, leaving no stone unturned....By interweaving her personal impressions with the experiences of those living in these unique communities, Tsui beautifully captures their vivid stories, giving readers a deeper look into what "Chinatown" means to its inhabitants, what each community takes on from its American home, and what their experience means to America at large. For anyone who has ever wandered through Chinatown and wondered what it was all about, and for Americans wanting to understand the changing face of their own country, American Chinatown is an all-access pass.
American inquisition : the hunt for Japanese American disloyalty in World War II / Eric L. Muller. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2007. 197pp. Main Library D769.8.A6 M85 2007 : When the U.S. government forced 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps in 1942, it created administrative tribunals to pass judgment on who was loyal and who was disloyal. Muller relates the untold story of exactly how military and civilian bureaucrats judged these tens of thousands of American citizens during wartime. This is the only study of the Japanese American internment to examine the complex inner workings of the most draconian system of loyalty screening that the American government has ever deployed against its own citizens. At a time when our nation again finds itself beset by worries about an "enemy within" considered identifiable by race or religion, this volume offers crucial lessons from a recent and disastrous history.
Angel Island : immigrant gateway to America / Erika Lee & Judy Yung. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010. 394pp. Main Library JV6926.A65 L44 2010 : "From 1910 to 1940, over half a million people sailed through the Golden Gate, hoping to start a new life in America. But they did not all disembark in San Francisco; instead, most were ferried across the bay to the Angel Island Immigration Station. For many, this was the real gateway to the United States. For others, it was a prison and their final destination, before being sent home. In this landmark book, historians Erika Lee and Judy Yung (both descendants of immigrants detained on the island) provide the first comprehensive history of the Angel Island Immigration Station. Drawing on extensive new research, including immigration records, oral histories, and inscriptions on the barrack walls, the authors produce a sweeping yet intensely personal history of Chinese paper sons, Japanese picture brides, Korean students, South Asian political activists, Russian and Jewish refugees, Mexican families, Filipino repatriates, and many others from around the world. Their experiences on Angel Island reveal how America's discriminatory immigration policies changed the lives of immigrants and transformed the nation. A place of heartrending history and breathtaking beauty, the Angel Island Immigration Station is a National Historic Landmark, and like Ellis Island, it is recognized as one of the most important sites where America's immigration history was made. This fascinating history is ultimately about America itself and its complicated relationship to immigration, a story that continues today. Angel Island is the official publication commemorating the immigration station's 100th anniversary"
Asian America : Forming New Communities, Expanding Boundaries / edited by Huping Ling. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2009. 291pp. Main Library E184.A75 A816 2009 : Contents - Intra-group diversity : Asian American population dynamics and challenges of the twenty-first century / Min Zhou -- Ethnic solidarity, rebounding networks, and transnational culture : post-1965 Chinese American family / Haiming Liu -- Beyond a common ethnicity and culture : Chicagoland's Chinese American communities since 1945 / Ling Z. Arenson -- Transforming an ethnic community : Little Saigon, Orange County / Linda Trinh Võ -- Building a community center : Filipinas/os in San Francisco's Excelsior neighborhood / Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales -- Cultural community : a new model for Asian American community / Huping Ling -- Chinese week : building Chinese American community through festivity in metropolitan Phoenix / Wei Zeng and Wei Li -- Virtual community and the cultural imaginary of Chinese Americans / Yuan Shu -- Ethnic solidarity in a divided community : a study on bridging organizations in Koreatown / Angie Y. Chung -- The social construction of Chinese in Canada / Peter S. Li -- Recent mainland Chinese immigrants in Canada : trends and obstacles / Li Zong.
Asian American Communities and Health : Context, Research, Policy, and Action / Chau Trinh-Shevrin, Nadia Shilpi Islam, Mariano Jose Rey, editors ; foreword by Albert K. Yee ; afterword by David T. Takeuchi and Marjorie Kagawa Singer. San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass, c2009. 692pp. Main Library RA448.5.A83 A855 2009 : This ground-breaking textbook examines Asian American health from a public health perspective. It provides an overview of the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence the distribution of disease and illness in Asian American communities. The book explores the diversity within the Asian community with respect to health seeking behavior and knowledge, socioeconomic status, educational level, cultural traditions, and specific health care needs and issues. By examining the contextual factors that impact health, the book seeks to facilitate a meaningful dialogue and identify creative solutions for health disparities faced by racial and ethnic minority communities.
Asian American culture : from anime to tiger moms / Lan Dong, editor. Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2016. 2 volumes (xxxiii, 792 pages) E184.A75 A8265 2016 Online : "Providing comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms, including folk tradition, literature, religion, education, politics, sports, and popular culture, this two-volume work is an ideal resource for students and general readers that reveals the historical, regional, and ethnic diversity within specific traditions. -- Provides readers with a broad understanding of the variety and commonalities in Asian American culture, enabling a fuller comprehension of Asian American history, experience, and cultural expressions -- Offers comprehensive, in-depth, and accessibly written coverage that addresses a wide variety of Asian American cultural forms such as folk tradition, literature, religion, education, politics, sports, and popular culture -- Highlights differences among Asian American cultures and identifies important achievements through biographies of key figures as well as spotlights on historical events, legal cases, and significant artifacts in sidebars -- Presents sources for more information on the subjects discussed with Further Readings for each entry "
Asian American elders in the twenty-first century : key indicators of well-being / Ada C. Mui and Tazuko Shibusawa. New York : Columbia University Press, c2008. 208pp. HV1465 .M83 2008 : Asian Americans make up a diverse ethnic group in the Unites States and are among the fastest growing population of adults sixty-five years and older. Most Asian Americans are either first-generation immigrants who grew up in the United States or individuals who joined their American families later in life. Yet despite the significant presence of Asian Americans in this country, adequate resources tracking their health over the life span are surprisingly scarce. With this book, Ada C. Mui and Tazuko Shibusawa provide necessary data on the psychosocial well-being of Asian American elders. Focusing on the six largest Asian American groups (Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese), they address issues relating to methodology, physical and mental health, intergenerational relationships, informal support, acculturation, stress, economic well-being, productive aging, and the utilization of services, such as Medicare, food stamps, physician care, home health care, community-based outreach, and emergency rooms and hospitals. By linking research findings to policy, practice, and program recommendations, Mui and Shibusawa create a vital resource that can be used in multiple disciplines, including social work, public health, nursing, geriatric medicine, social policy, and other helping professions. No other text offers such a comprehensive and up-to-date portrait of the unique challenges facing Asian Americans as they age.
Asian American political action : suburban transformations / James S. Lai. Boulder, Colo. : Lynne Rienner Publishers, c2011. 279pp. E184.A75 L35 2011 : While studies of immigrant political behavior usually focus on urban areas, Lai (political science and ethnic studies, Santa Clara University) examines Asian American politics in terms of electoral success (and failure) in the suburbs. Looking at Asian American communities in locations as diverse as Wisconsin, California, Massachusetts, and Washington, the author shows how these communities have mobilized politically, and taken a permanent place in the politics of their area. A ground-breaking study, this book is essential to understanding the behavior of immigrant and ethnic communities in U.S. politics.
Asian American Studies Now : A Critical Reader / edited by Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2010. 672pp. Main Library E184.A75 A8419 2010 : Asian American Studies Now represents the changes occurring in Asian American communities and the world that require a reconsideration of how the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies is defined and taught. The editors have selected essays for the significance of their contribution and their clarity, brevity, and accessibility to readers with little to no prior knowledge of Asian American studies, and feature reprints of seminal articles and groundbreaking texts, as well as bold new scholarship.
Asian Americans and the Media / Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham. Cambridge ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2009. 235pp. Main Library P94.5.A762 U6 2009 : Asian Americans and the Media provides a concise, thoughtful, critical and cultural studies analysis of U.S. media representations of Asian Americans. The book also explores ways Asian Americans have resisted, responded to, and conceptualized the terrain of challenge and resistance to those representations, often through their own media productions....In this engaging and accessible book, Ono and Pham summarize key scholarship on Asian American media, as well as lay theoretical groundwork to help students, scholars and other interested readers understand historical and contemporary media representations of Asian Americans in traditional media, including print, film, music, radio, and television, as well as in newer media, primarily internet-situated. Since Asian Americans had little control over their representation in early U.S. media, historically dominant white society largely constructed Asian American media representations. In this context, the book draws attention to recurring patterns in media representation, as well as responses by Asian America. Today, Asian Americans are creating complex, sophisticated, and imaginative self-portraits within U.S. media, often equipped with powerful information and education about Asian Americans. Throughout, the book suggests media representations are best understood within historical, cultural, political, and social contexts, and envisions an even more active role in media for Asian Americans in the future
Asian Americans in New England : Culture and Community / edited by Monica Chiu. Durham, N.H. : University of New Hampshire Press ; Hanover, [N.H.] : Published by University Press of New England, c2009. 252pp. Main Library F15.A75 A85 2009 : This collection, the first to address Asian and Asian Americans' contributions to New England, highlights a broad range of Asian American communities and historical experiences. From the poignant writings of a young Chinese immigrant to the influence of hip-hop in a New Hampshire Lao community, this original and unique collection seeks to establish a regional template for the study of Asian American lives and art far from the West Coast. These essays provide not just a record of particular achievements but a full and vigorous engagement with Asian American culture along with an analysis of the depiction of Asian Americans in New England. This is an important and timely collection highlighting the creativity and diversity of one of the fastest-growing minority populations in the region.
Asian Americans in the twenty-first century : oral histories of first- to fourth-generation Americans from China, Japan, India, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Laos / [compiled by] Joann Faung Jean Lee. New York : New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2008. 277pp. Main Library E184.A75 A8434 2008 : A tribute to today's culturally diverse Asian-American population draws on interviews with individuals from all walks of life about their experiences and Asian-American identity, from a contributor to a landmark legal case affecting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to the complex relationship between African Americans and Koreans in Los Angeles.
Asian immigration to the United States / Philip Q. Yang. Cambridge : Polity, 2011. 274pp. Main Library E184.A75 Y36 2011 : This comprehensive book offers a unique and much-needed examination of Asian immigration to the United States, focusing on three central questions: What causes Asian immigration to the United States? How do post-1965 Asian immigrants impact American society? How do new Asian immigrants and their children adapt to American life? This is the first book that systematically delves into post-1965 Asian immigration to the United States. It covers a wide range of issues such as immigration trends; settlement patterns; types of immigrants; causes of immigration; immigrant transnationalism; undocumented immigration; the demographic, racial/ethnic, economic, sociocultural, and political impacts of Asian immigration; and patterns of adaptation. Importantly, the author develops a novel synthetic theory for explaining Asian immigration and demonstrates support for it in both historical and contemporary contexts. The book also provides a vast amount of the latest generalizable quantitative data on Asian immigration. Combining rigorous scholarship with engaging readability, Asian Immigration to the United States will be an invaluable text for college and graduate students of immigration, Asian American studies, and race and ethnicity, as well as an excellent reference book for scholars and policymakers.
Asian Pacific Americans in the United States Navy [electronic resource]. [Washington, D.C. : Naval History & Heritage Command : Diversity Directorate, Chief of Naval Personnel, 2011?] 1 online resource (13 p.). : ill. (some col.), ports. (some col.) Online resource D 221.2:AS 4/3 : Asian and Pacific Islander Americans have served in the U.S. Navy since the mid-19th Century. They also have worked for the U.S. Navy as civilians and have provided important services supporting fleet and shore commands.
Asians in the ivory tower : dilemmas of racial inequality in American higher education / Robert T. Teranishi ; foreword by Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco. New York : Teachers College Press, c2010. 192pp. Main Library LC2633.6 .T47 2010 : Highly respected scholar Robert Teranishi draws on his vast research to present this timely and compelling examination of the experience of Asian Americans in higher education. Asians in the Ivory Tower explores why and how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are important to our nation's higher education priorities and places the study of AAPI college participation within a broad set of conditions through which all students must navigate as they pursue higher education. Teranishi captures the intersections of individual agency, social conditions, and organizational structures as synergetic forces that result in a range of postsecondary outcomes for subpopulations within the larger body of AAPIs. Transcending narrow generalizations about this understudied population, this seminal book debunks false stereotypes about AAPI students and their educational trajectories; offers a unique empirical perspective on racial stratification in higher education through case studies that mix quantitative data with narratives of lived stories; examines the educational experiences and routes to college for AAPIs, and examines broader issues around racial inequality and debates about affirmative action; captures the nuances and complexity of race, offering theoretical perspectives that can be applied to other populations.
Begin here : reading Asian North American autobiographies of childhood / Rocío G. Davis. Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, c2007. 234pp. Main Library E184.A75 D38 2007 : An analytically innovative work, Begin Here widens the current critical focus of Asian North American literary studies by proposing an integrated thematic and narratological approach to the practice of autobiography. It demonstrates how Asian North American memoirs of childhood challenge the construction and performative potential of national experiences. This understanding influences theoretical approaches to ethnic life writing, expanding the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques and genre and raising complex questions about self-representation and the construction of cultural memory. By examining the artistic project of some fifty Asian North American writers who deploy their childhood narratives in the representation of the individual processes of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and national affiliation, this work provides a comprehensive overview of Asian North American autobiographies of childhood published over the last century. Importantly, it also attends to new ways of writing autobiographies, employing comics, blending verse, prose, diaries, and life writing for children, and using relational approaches to self-identification, among others....The book's focus is twofold: First, it analyzes the manner in which Asian North American writers rewrite the inherited scripts of childhood, reading the texts as generic engagements with North American autobiography and examining possible critical approaches. Second, the book examines the autobiographies' performative potential within a wider project of creating a community of readers to produce and preserve cultural memory. These two purposes overlap significantly and stress the need to address the cultural work enacted by these literary texts as well as recognize their specific aesthetic projects as mutually enhancing and intertwined purposes. The author argues that, by attending to the formal strategies of these Asian North American childhoods, we will discern clear community-building strategies as well as identity a powerful means to address the intersection of literary genre and cultural position within the renewed socio-cultural construction of childhood in contemporary American and Canadian societies.
Beyond Yellow English : Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America / edited by Angela Reyes, Adrienne Lo. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009. 401pp. Main Library P40.45.U5 B49 2009 : Beyond Yellow English is the first edited volume to examine issues of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished contributors-who represent a broad range of perspectives from anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education-focus on the analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the APA experience. Authors cover topics such as media representations of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and geographic locations across home, school, community, and performance sites.
Bollywood Weddings : Dating, Engagement, and Marriage in Hindu America / Kavita Ramdya. Lanham : Lexington Books, c2010. 99pp. Main Library BL1226.82.M3 R36 2010 : Bollywood Weddings examines how middle to upper class second-generation Indian-American Hindus negotiate wedding rituals, including the dating and engagement processes. Many of these couples are (in Ramdya's neologism) "occasional Hindus" who display their Hindu religious background only on important occasions such as the rite of passage that is marriage. These couples (and their extended families) negotiate two vastly different cultures and sets of values inside a community that has itself largely pre-determined how to mix American and Indian/Hindu elements into this ritual. As a rule, the first generation organizes the wedding, which is largely Hindu, and their children coordinate the American-style reception. Instead of choosing either India or America, or arriving at a compromise in between the two, this community takes a "both/and" approach, embracing both cultures simultaneously.
Chains of Babylon : the Rise of Asian America / Daryl J. Maeda. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 203pp. Main Library E184.A75 M34 2009 : Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of "Asian American" to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad....As revealed in Maeda's in-depth work, the Asian American movement contended that people of all Asian ethnicities in the United States shared a common relationship to oppression and exploitation with each other and with other nonwhite peoples. In the early stages of the civil rights era, the possibility of assimilation was held out to Asian Americans under a model minority myth. Maeda insists that it was only in the disruption of that myth for both African Americans and Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s that the full Asian American culture and movement he describes could emerge. Maeda challenges accounts of the post-1968 era as hopelessly divisive by examining how racial and cultural identity enabled Asian Americans to see eye-to-eye with and support other groups of color in their campaigns for social justice....Asian American opposition to the war in Vietnam, unlike that of the broader antiwar movement, was predicated on understanding it as a racial, specifically anti-Asian genocide. Throughout he argues that cultural critiques of racism and imperialism, the twin "chains of Babylon" of the title, informed the construction of a multiethnic Asian American identity committed to interracial and transnational solidarity.
Charlie Chan : The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History / Yunte Huang. New York : W.W. Norton, c2010. 354pp. Main Library HV7571.H3 H83 2010 : This is the first biography of the cinematic hero Charlie Chan, whose character was inspired by the real-life story of Chang Apana, a bullwhip-wielding, five-foot-tall Chinese immigrant detective whose raids on opium dens and gambling parlors made him into a legend. Emerging against the backdrop of racially riven early-twentieth-century Hawaii, Apana's bravado inspired mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers, a Harvard graduate, to write six best-selling Charlie Chan novels. The resulting Hollywood character was not a stereotypical “Chinaman” but a wisecracking sleuth with a knack for turning Oriental wisdom into soup-alley Chinatown blues. Yunte Huang's exploration of this remarkable story asks whether Chan is a “Yellow Uncle Tom” or a “swell dish of chop suey mystery.” Examining Charlie Chan in fact and fiction, Huang follows this untold story from the glittering beaches of Waikiki to the movie studios of Hollywood.
Chinese America : the untold story of America's oldest new community / Peter Kwong and Dušanka Miščević. New York : New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2005. 518pp. Main Library E184.C5 K88 2005 : A portrait of Chinese-American life documents the stories of Chinese pioneers who entered the country from the west coast in the mid-nineteenth century, illuminates the roles of Chinese-American transnationals who have shaped American multiculturalism, and considers the roles of Chinese Americans in immigration, globalization, and foreign policy.
Chinese American Transnational Politics / Him Mark Lai ; edited and with an introduction by Madeline Y. Hsu. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2010. 296pp. Main Library E184.C5 L338 2010 : Born and raised in San Francisco, Lai was trained as an engineer but blazed a trail in the field of Asian American studies. Long before the field had any academic standing, he amassed an unparalleled body of source material on Chinese America and drew on his own transnational heritage and Chinese patriotism to explore the global Chinese experience....In Chinese American Transnational Politics, Lai traces the shadowy history of Chinese leftism and the role of the Kuomintang of China in influencing affairs in America. With precision and insight, Lai penetrates the overly politicized portrayals of a history shaped by global alliances and enmities and the hard intolerance of the Cold War era. The result is a nuanced and singular account of how Chinese politics, migration to the United States, and Sino-U.S. relations were shaped by Chinese and Chinese American groups and organizations....Lai revised and expanded his writings over more than thirty years as changing political climates allowed for greater acceptance of leftist activities and access to previously confidential documents. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources and echoing the strong loyalties and mobility of the activists and idealists he depicts, Lai delivers the most comprehensive treatment of Chinese transnational politics to date.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 / John Soennichsen. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Greenwood, c2011. 179pp. Main Library E184.C5 S755 2011 : Part of a series highlighting important events in the multi-cultural history of the United States, this volume examines the events leading up to, and the aftermath of, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Written as a textbook and reference for high school students, this volume seeks to address in detail this important event in Asian American history that is often only cursorily examined in American History textbooks. The volume covers early Chinese immigration to America, the role of Chinese in the Gold Rush and railroad expansion, economic precursors to xenophobia, Dennis Kearney and the Anti-Chinese Movement and the drafting and implementation of the act itself. The work includes biographies of key figures, a collection of primary source documents and a glossary.
Choosing ethnicity, negotiating race : Korean adoptees in America / Mia Tuan and Jiannbin Lee Shiao. New York : Russell Sage Foundation, c2011. 213pp. Main Library HV875.64 .T83 2011 : Transnational adoption was once a rarity in the United States, but Americans have been choosing to adopt children from abroad with increasing frequency since the mid-twentieth century. Korean adoptees make up the largest share of international adoptions-25 percent of all children adopted from outside the United States -but they remain understudied among Asian American groups. What kind of identities do adoptees develop as members of American families and in a cultural climate that often views them as foreigners?
Chop suey : a cultural history of Chinese food in the United States / Andrew Coe. New York : Oxford University Press, 2009. 303pp. Main Library TX724.5.C5 C64 2009 : In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States-by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey, Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time.
It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine - and, for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels tile truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why Jewish Americans fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt them to our own deeply rooted culinary preferences....Andrew Coe's Chop Suey is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what constitutes American cuisine.
Choreographing Asian America / Yutian Wong. Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, c2010. 268pp. Main Library GV1588.6 .W66 2010 : Poised at the intersection of Asian American studies and dance studies, Choreographing Asian America is the first book-length examination of the role of Orientalist discourse in shaping Asian Americanist entanglements with U.S. modern dance history. Moving beyond the acknowledgement that modern dance has its roots in Orientalist appropriation, Yutian Wong considers the effect that invisible Orientalism has on the reception of work by Asian American choreographers and the conceptualization of Asian American performance as a category. Drawing on ethnographic and choreographic research methods, the author follows the work of Club O' Noodles--a Vietnamese American performance ensemble--to understand how Asian American artists respond to competing narratives of representation, aesthetics, and social activism that often frame the production of Asian American performance.
Claiming Diaspora : Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America / Su Zheng. Oxford [England] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010. 422pp. Fine Arts, Music Collection ML3560.C5 Z54 2010 : Claiming Diaspora explores the thriving contemporary musical culture of Asian/Chinese America. Ranging from traditional operas to modern instrumental music, from ethnic media networks to popular music, from Asian American jazz to the work of recent avant-garde composers, author Su Zheng reveals the rich and diverse musical activities among Chinese Americans and tells of the struggles and creative searches by Chinese Americans to gain a foothold in the American cultural terrain. In doing so, she not only tells their stories, but also examines the transnational and racialized experiences of this musical culture, challenging us to take a fresh look at the increasingly plural and complex nature of American cultural identity....Until recently, two intersected models have dominated studies of Asian American cultural expressions. The notion of "claiming America" has been a fundamental political strategy for the Asian American movement; while the Americanization model for European immigrants has minimized the impact of the "old country" on immigrant life and cultural expression. In Claiming Diaspora, Zheng critically analyzes the controversies surrounding these two models. She unveils the fluid and evolving nature of music in Chinese America, discussing current cultural struggles, while acknowledging an unavoidable connection to a history of Asian exclusion in the U.S. Furthermore, Zheng breaks from traditional approaches which have portrayed the music of non-Western people as rooted and immobile to examine the concept of "diaspora" in the context of Asian American experiences and cultural theories of space, place, and displacement. She calls into question the contested meaning of "Asian American" and "Asian American cultural identity" in cultural productions, and builds a comprehensive picture of community and cultural transformation in Chinese and Asian America....Zheng taps unpublished historical sources of immigrant narrative songs, extensive fieldwork in New York City and China, in-depth interviews in which musicians narrate their life stories and music experiences, and her own longstanding involvement as community member, musician, presenter, and cultural broker. The book delineates the introduction of each music genre from its homeland and its subsequent development in New York, and explains how Chinese Americans express their cultural longings and belongings. Ultimately, Zheng reveals how Chinese American musical activities both reflect and
contribute to local, national, and transnational cultural politics.
Claiming the oriental gateway : prewar Seattle and Japanese America / Shelley Sang-Hee Lee. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2011. 256pp. Main Library F899.S49 J348 2011 : In Claimining the Oriental Gateway, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee explores the various intersections of urbanization, ethnic identity, and internationalism in the experience of Japanese Americans in early-twentieth-century Seattle. She examines the development and self-image of the city by documenting how U.S. expansion, Asian trans-Pacific migration, and internationalism were manifested locally---and how these forces affected residents' relationships with one another and with their surroundings....Lee details the significant role that Japanese Americans---both immigrants and U.S.-born citizens---played in the social and civic life of the city as a means of "becoming American." Seattle embraced the idea of cosmopolitanism and boosted its role as a cultural and commercial "gateway to the Orient" as it also limited the ways in which Asian Americans could participate in the public schools, local art production, civic celebrations, and sports. Lee also looks at how Japan encouraged the notion of the "gateway" in its participation in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and the International Potlatch.
Concentration camps on the home front : Japanese Americans in the house of Jim Crow / John Howard. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008. 344pp. Main Library D769.8.A6 H69 2008 : Without trial and without due process, the United States government locked up nearly all of those citizens and longtime residents who were of Japanese descent during World War II. Ten concentration camps were set up across the country to confine over 120,000 inmates. Almost 20,000 of them were shipped to the only two camps in the segregated South—Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas—locations that put them right in the heart of a much older, long-festering system of racist oppression. The first history of these Arkansas camps, Concentration Camps on the Home Front is an eye-opening account of the inmates' experiences and a searing examination of American imperialism and racist hysteria....While the basic facts of Japanese-American incarceration are well known, John Howard's extensive research gives voice to those whose stories have been forgotten or ignored. He highlights the roles of women, first-generation immigrants, and those who forcefully resisted their incarceration by speaking out against dangerous working conditions and white racism. In addition to this overlooked history of dissent, Howard also exposes the government's aggressive campaign to Americanize the inmates and even convert them to Christianity. After the war ended, this movement culminated in the dispersal of the prisoners across the nation in a calculated effort to break up ethnic enclaves....Howard's re-creation of life in the camps is powerful, provocative, and disturbing. Concentration Camps on the Home Front rewrites a notorious chapter in American history—a shameful story that nonetheless speaks to the strength of human resilience in the face of even the most grievous injustices.
Contemporary Chinese America : Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation / Min Zhou ; foreword by Alejandro Portes. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2009. 310pp. Main Library E184.C5 Z474 2009 : The most comprehensive sociological investigation of the experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States—and of their offspring—in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The author, Min Zhou, is a well-known sociologist of the Chinese American experience. In this volume she collects her original research on a range of subjects, including the causes and consequences of emigration from China, demographic trends of Chinese Americans, patterns of residential mobility in the U.S., Chinese American “ethnoburbs,” immigrant entrepreneurship, ethnic enclave economies, gender and work, Chinese language media, Chinese schools, and intergenerational relations. The concluding chapter, “Rethinking Assimilation,” ponders the future for Chinese Americans. Also included are an extensive bibliography and a list of recommended documentary films.
Culinary Fictions : Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture / Anita Mannur. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2009 [c2010] 255pp. Main Library PN56.F59 M36 2009 : For South Asians, food regularly plays a role in how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and national identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted. "Culinary Fictions" provides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. When an immigrant mother in Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake", combines Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, onions, salt, lemon juice, and green chili peppers to create a dish similar to one found on Calcutta sidewalks, it not only evokes the character's Americanization, but also her nostalgia for India. Food, Anita Mannur writes, is a central part of the cultural imagination of diasporic populations, and "Culinary Fictions" maps how it figures in various expressive forms. Mannur examines the cultural production from the Anglo-American reaches of the South Asian diaspora. Using texts from novels - Chitra Divakaruni's "Mistress of Spices", and Shani Mootoo's "Cereus Blooms at Night" - to cookbooks such as Madhur Jaffrey's "Invitation to Indian Cooking" and Padma Lakshmi's "Easy Exotic", she illustrates how national identities are consolidated in culinary terms.
The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies : Autonomy and Representation in the University / Mark Chiang. New York : New York University Press, c2009. 251pp. Main Library E184.A75 C494 2009 : Contents - Introduction: Institutionalization and the crisis of representation -- From cultural politics to cultural capital -- Contradictions in the emergence of ethnic studies -- Disciplinarity and the political identity of Asian American studies -- The political economy of minority literature -- Asian American cultural capital and the crisis of legitimation.
The Decolonized Eye : Filipino American Art and Performance / Sarita Echavez See. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 210pp. Fine Arts Library, Arts Collection NX512.3.F55 S44 2009 : From the late 1980s to the present, artists of Filipino descent in the United States have produced a challenging and creative movement. In The Decolonized Eye, Sarita Echavez See shows how these artists have engaged with the complex aftermath of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines....Focusing on artists working in New York and California, See examines the overlapping artistic and aesthetic practices and concerns of filmmaker Angel Shaw, painter Manuel Ocampo, installation artist Paul Pfeiffer, comedian Rex Navarrete, performance artist Nicky Paraiso, and sculptor Reanne Estrada to explain the reasons for their strangely shadowy presence in American culture and scholarship. Offering an interpretation of their creations that accounts for their queer, decolonizing strategies of camp, mimesis, and humor, See reveals the conditions of possibility that constitute this contemporary archive....By analyzing art, performance, and visual culture, The Decolonized Eye illuminates the unexpected consequences of America's amnesia over its imperial history.
Driven Out : The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans / Jean Pfaelzer. New York : Random House, c2007. 400pp. Main Library F870.C5 P48 2007 : The brutal and systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese Americans in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century is a shocking–and virtually unexplored–chapter of American history. Driven Out unearths this forgotten episode in our nation’s past. Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of communities of thousands of Chinese residents–and how the victims bravely fought back.
In town after town, as races and classes were pitted against one another in the raw and anarchistic West, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives, were gathered up at gunpoint and marched out of town, sometimes thrown into railroad cars along the very tracks they had built....Here, in vivid detail, are unforgettable incidents such as the torching of the Chinatown in Antioch, California, after Chinese prostitutes were accused of giving seven young men syphilis, and a series of lynchings in Los Angeles bizarrely provoked by a Chinese wedding. From the port of Seattle to the mining towns in California’s Siskiyou Mountains to “Nigger Alley” in Los Angeles, the first Chinese Americans were hanged, purged, and banished. Chinatowns across the West were burned to the ground....But the Chinese fought back: They filed the first lawsuits for reparations in the United States, sued for the restoration of their property, prosecuted white vigilantes, demanded the right to own land, and, years before Brown v. Board of Education, won access to public education for their children. Chinese Americans organized strikes and vegetable boycotts in order to starve out towns that tried to expel them. They ordered arms from China and, with Winchester rifles and Colt revolvers, defended themselves. In 1893, more than 100,000 Chinese Americans refused the government’s order to wear photo identity cards to prove their legal status–the largest mass civil disobedience in United States history to that point....Driven Out features riveting characters, both heroic and villainous, white and Asian. Charles McGlashen, a newspaper editor, spearheaded a shift in the tactics of persecution, from brutality to legal boycotts of the Chinese, in order to mount a run for governor of California. Fred Bee, a creator of the Pony Express, became the Chinese consul and one of the few attorneys willing to defend the Chinese. Lum May, a dry goods store owner, saw his wife dragged from their home and driven insane. President Grover Cleveland, hoping that China’s 400,000 subjects would buy the United States out of its economic crisis, persuaded China to abandon the overseas Chinese in return for a trade treaty. Quen Hing Tong, a merchant, sought an injunction against the city of San Jose in an important precursor to today’s suits against racial profiling and police brutality....In Driven Out, Jean Pfaelzer sheds a harsh light on America’s past. This is a story of hitherto unknown racial pogroms, purges, roundups, and brutal terror, but also a record of valiant resistance and community. This deeply resonant and eye-opening work documents a significant and disturbing episode in American history.
East eats West : writing in two hemispheres / Andrew Lam. Berkeley, Calif. : Heyday Books, c2010. 170pp. Main Library E184.V53 L358 2010 : Lam, a Vietnamese-born editor and cofounder of an association of ethnic media outlets who travels between East Asia and the US as a journalist and writer, collects 21 personal essays on how the East and West have changed and are changing each other. Among the topics in the essays are living in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, learning English and immigrating to California, global culture, the changing culture of China, the American popularity of kung fu fighting in film, yoga, and pho, and reconciling the two worlds.
Embodying Asian/American Sexualities / edited by Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger. Lanham : Lexington Books, c2009. 188pp. Main Library E184.A75 E43 2009 : Embodying Asian/American Sexualities is an accessible reader designed for use in undergraduate and graduate American studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies classes as well as for a general public interested in related issues. It contains both overviews of the field and scholarly interventions into a range of topics, including history, literature, performance, and sociology.
Emigrating from China to the United States : a comparison of different social experiences / by Yushi (Boni) Li. Springfield, Ill. : Charles C Thomas, 2010. 235pp. Main Library HN59.2 .L5 2010 : In a supplementary textbook for an introductory sociology course, Li (sociology, Northern Kentucky U.) helps students associate experience in their daily lives with larger social forces, by using herself as a case study. She describes her own experience living in the US and China, and how events have influenced and impacted her social values, attitudes, and behavior. In general, she explains how she has been, and continues to be, resocialized and influenced by American and Chinese societies. Among the areas she discusses are society and social interaction, deviance, social stratification, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, family and family planning, religion, and urbanization.
Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today / Edith Wen-Chu Chen, Grace J. Yoo, editors. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Greenwood Press, c2010. 2 volumes. Main Library E184.A75 E53 2010 : This two-volume encyclopedia is a general reference work accessible to students at the high school level and above and to general readers. It will be useful as a starting point for research as well as an overview of issues for professionals who work in education or social and public services. The introductory essay addresses the diversity of Asian Americans and some entrenched myths about the "model minority," as well as rising concerns and the increased need for dialogue. Following are 151 essays, which, happily, are organized by theme rather than alphabetically (a cumbersome scheme inexplicably used in many references). The thematic arrangement simply offers a much more cohesive presentation. Grouping of the entries is in sections pertaining to diversity and demographics; economy and work; education; health; identity; immigration, refugees, and citizenship; law; media; politics; war; and youth, family, and the aged. Each section begins with an overview and concludes with a resource guide. Enhancing the contents are biographical sidebars, quotations, statistics, some b&w photos, and examination of the 2007 US Census Bureau's American Community Survey. General editors Wen-Chu Chen (Asian American studies, California State U., Northridge) and Grace J. Yoo (Asian American studies, San Francisco State U.) have overseen the efforts of a long list of section editors and contributors.
Ends of Empire : Asian American Critique and the Cold War / Jodi Kim. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2010. Main LibraryE184.A75 K54 2010 : Ends of Empire examines Asian American cultural production and its challenge to the dominant understanding of American imperialism, Cold War dynamics, and race and gender formation. Jodi Kim demonstrates the degree to which Asian American literature and film critique the record of U.S. imperial violence in Asia and provides a glimpse into the imperial and gendered racial logic of the Cold War. She unfolds this particularly entangled and enduring episode in the history of U.S. global hegemony—one that, contrary to leading interpretations of the Cold War as a simple bipolar rivalry, was significantly triangulated in Asia.The Asian American works analyzed here constitute a crucial body of what Kim reveals as transnational “Cold War compositions,” which are at once a geopolitical structuring, an ideological writing, and a cultural imagining. Arguing that these works reframe the U.S. Cold War as a project of gendered racial formation and imperialism as well as a production of knowledge, Ends of Empire offers an interdisciplinary investigation into the transnational dimensions of Asian America and its critical relationship to Cold War history.
Fortunate sons : the 120 Chinese boys who came to America, went to school, and revolutionized an ancient civilization / Liel Leibovitz & Matthew Miller. New York : W.W. Norton, c2011. 319pp. DS761.2 .L45 2011 : In 1872, The Qing Empire Sent 120 HOYS TO America in the hope that they would unlock the mysteries of Western innovation. They studied at New England's finest schools, befriended luminaries such as Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, and exchanged ideas with their American peers that would change the course of both nations. But when anti-Chinese fervor forced them back home, the young men faced a new set of obstacles, having to overcome a suspicious imperial court and a culture deeply resistant to change....Filled with colorful characters and vivid historical detail, Fortunate Sons unearths the dramatic stories of these young men who led China at the pivotal moment when it teetered between modernity and tradition. Faced with Japanese aggression and Western colonialism on the one hand and domestic unrest and rebellion on the other, these American-educated men helped to shape China's economy, diplomacy, and government, relying on one another as they struggled to bring peace and progress to a crumbling empire....Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller draw on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to tell this remarkable tale, weaving together the dramas of personal lives with the fascinating story of a nation's endeavor to become a world power. Shedding light on a crucial period in Chinese and American history, Fortunate Sons provides insight into the issues concerning both nations today, from China's struggle toward economic supremacy to its fraught relationship with the United States.
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles : Adventures in the World of Chinese Food / Jennifer 8. Lee. New York, NY : Twelve, 2008. 307pp. Browsing Collection (1 East) TX945.4 .L44 2008 : If you think McDonald's is the most ubiquitous restaurant experience in America, consider that there are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendys combined. New York Times reporter and Chinese-American (or American-born Chinese). In her search, Jennifer 8 Lee traces the history of Chinese-American experience through the lens of the food. In a compelling blend of sociology and history, Jenny Lee exposes the indentured servitude Chinese restaurants expect from illegal immigrant chefs, investigates the relationship between Jews and Chinese food, and weaves a personal narrative about her own relationship with Chinese food. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles speaks to the immigrant experience as a whole, and the way it has shaped our country.
Fugitive Visions : an Adoptee's Return to Korea / Jane Jeong Trenka. Saint Paul : Graywolf Press, 2009. 197pp. Main Library E184.K6 T74 2009 : Whenever she speaks to a stranger in her native Korea, Jane Jeong Trenka is forced to explain what she is. Japanese? Chinese? The answer—that she was adopted from Korea as a baby and grew up in the United States—is a source of grief, pride, and confusion....Trenka’s award-winning first book, The Language of Blood, told the story of her upbringing in a white family in rural Minnesota. Now, in this searching and provocative memoir, Trenka explores a new question: Can she make an adult life for herself in Korea? Despite numerous setbacks, Trenka resolves to learn the language and ways of her unfamiliar birth country....In navigating the myriad contradictions and disjunctions that have made up her life, Trenka turns to the lessons from her past—in particular, the concept of dissonance and harmony learned over her years as a musician. In Fugitive Visions, named after a composition by Prokofiev, Trenka has succeeded in braiding the disparate elements of her life into a recognizable and at times heartbreaking whole.
Ghostlife of Third Cinema : Asian American Film and Video / Glen M. Mimura. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2009. 192pp. Main Library PN1995.9.A77 M56 2009 : A deeply felt, carefully considered work on Asian American cinema and video, Mimura's delicate, concise study examines independent Asian American filmmaking with grace and authority. Mimura (film, media, and Asian American studies, Univ. of California, Irvine) moves through questions of Asian American identity and representation in the cinema, experimental cinema, and queer video practice, among other issues. One can hardly disagree that such films as Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing (1982) have been overlooked in the formation of the international filmic canon, or find fault with Mimura's analysis of Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), which set the stage for the racist stereotypes in US cinema in the years that followed. Many of the films Mimura examines have had limited circulation and challenge the supposedly "normative" values of contemporary society. Thus, in many ways, the title of this volume is sadly all too accurate; most of the films he discusses have only a "ghost life," if that, and one finishes the book wishing that these films were more readily available. Numerous frame blowups add to the value of the work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals.
Glass ceilings and Asian Americans : the new face of workplace barriers / Deborah Woo. Walnut Creek, Calif. : AltaMira Press, [2000], ©2000. 241pp. HD8081.A8 W66 2000 : Throughout the history of the United States, fluctuations in cultural diversity, immigration, and ethnic group status have been closely linked to shifts in the economy and labor market. Over three decades after the beginning of the civil rights movement, and in the midst of significant socioeconomic change at the end of this century, scholars search for new ways to describe the persistent roadblocks to upward mobility that women and people of color still encounter in the workforce. In Glass Ceilings and Asian Americans, Deborah Woo analyzes current scholarship and controversies on the glass ceiling and labor market discrimination in conjunction with the specific labor histories of Asian American ethnic groups. She then presents unique, in-depth studies of two current sites―a high tech firm and higher education―to argue that a glass ceiling does in fact exist for Asian Americans, both according to quantifiable data and to Asian American workers' own perceptions of their workplace experiences. Woo's studies make an important contribution to understanding the increasingly complex and subtle interactions between ethnicity and organizational cultures in today's economic institutions and labor markets.
Hip hop Desis : South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a global race consciousness / Nitasha Tamar Sharma. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2010. 351pp. Fine Arts Library, Music Collection (4 West) ML3918.R37 S53 2010 : Hip Hop Desis explores the aesthetics and politics of South Asian American (desi) hip hop artists. Nitasha Tamar Sharma argues that through their lives and lyrics, young “hip hop desis” express a global race consciousness that reflects both their sense of connection with Blacks as racialized minorities in the United States and their diasporic sensibility as part of a global community of South Asians. She emphasizes the role of appropriation and sampling in the ways that hip hop desis craft their identities, create art, and pursue social activism. Some desi artists produce what she calls “ethnic hip hop,” incorporating South Asian languages, instruments, and immigrant themes. Through ethnic hip hop, artists, including KB, Sammy, and Deejay Bella, express “alternative desiness,” challenging assumptions about their identities as South Asians, children of immigrants, minorities, and Americans. Hip hop desis also contest and seek to bridge perceived divisions between Blacks and South Asian Americans. By taking up themes considered irrelevant to many Asian Americans, desi performers, such as D’Lo, Chee Malabar of Himalayan Project, and Rawj of Feenom Circle, create a multiracial form of Black popular culture to fight racism and enact social change.
Historical dictionary of Asian American literature and theater / Wenying Xu. Lanham : Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012. 389pp. Main Library PS153.A84 X83 2012 : The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater covers the history of Asian American literature and theater through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on authors, books, and genres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this important topic.
Hmong America : reconstructing community in diaspora / Chia Youyee Vang. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2010. 200pp. Main Library E184.H55 V35 2010 : The first scholarly work to come from inside the Hmong community, Hmong America documents Chia Youyee Vang's own migration from Laos to Minnesota at age nine and the transformations she has witnessed in Hmong communities throughout the migration and settlement processes. Vang depicts Hmong experiences in Asia and examines aspects of community building in America to reveal how new Hmong identities have been formed and how they have challenged popular assumptions about race and ethnicity in multicultural America....With an approach that intermingles the archival research of a historian, the personal experiences of a refugee, and the participant-observer perspectives of a community insider, Vang constructs a nuanced and complex portrait of the more than 130,000 Hmong people who came to the United States as political refugees beginning in the mid-1970s. She offers critiques of previous representations of the Hmong community and provides the sociological underpinnings for a bold reassessment of Hmong history in the greater context of globalization. This new understanding redefines concepts of Hmong homogeneity and characterizes ordinary Hmong migrants not as passive victims but as dynamic actors who have exercised much power over their political and social destinies....While Vang focuses on the Hmong community in the Twin Cities, she also has conducted research in numerous Hmong enclaves in the United States and abroad. In addition to recounting historical events, she incorporates the voices of those who personally experienced and informed the development of ethnic and faith-based traditions, political mobilization around unequal treatment of Hmong Americans, and changing aesthetics and cultural politics regarding ethnic celebrations.
Hmong and American : from refugees to citizens / edited by Vincent K. Her and Mary Louise Buley-Meissner. St. Paul, MN : Minnesota Historical Society Press, c2012. 278pp. Main Library E184.H55 H555 2012 : Farmers in Laos, U.S. allies during the Vietnam War, refugees in Thailand, citizens of the Western world—the stories of the Hmong who now live in America have been told in detail through books and articles and oral histories over the past several decades. Like any immigrant group, members of the first generation may yearn for the past as they watch their children and grandchildren find their way in the dominant culture of their new home. For Hmong people born and educated in the United States, a definition of self often includes traditional practices and tight-knit family groups but also a distinctly Americanized point of view. How do Hmong Americans negotiate the expectations of these two very different cultures? ... In an engaging series of essays featuring a range of writing styles, leading scholars, educators, artists, and community activists explore themes of history, culture, gender, class, family, and sexual orientation, weaving their own stories into depictions of a Hmong American community where people continue to develop complex identities that are collectively shared but deeply personal as they help to redefine the multicultural America of today.
Hmong Americans in Michigan / Martha Aladiem Bloomfield. East Lansing, MI : Michigan State University Press, 2014. 101pp. Main Library F575.H55 B76 2014 : The Hmong people, originating from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, are unique among American immigrants because of their extraordinary history of migration; loyalty to one another; prolonged abuse, trauma, and suffering at the hands of those who dominated them; profound loss; and independence, as well as their amazing capacity to adapt and remain resilient over centuries. This introduction to their experience in Michigan discusses Hmong American history, culture, and more specifically how they left homelands filled with brutality and warfare to come to the United States since the mid-1970s. More than five thousand Hmong Americans live in Michigan, and many of them have faced numerous challenges as they have settled in the Midwest. How did these brave and innovative people adapt to strange new lives thousands of miles away from their homelands? How have they preserved their past through time and place, advanced their goals, and cultivated plans for their children and education? What are their lives like in the diaspora? As this book documents via personal interviews and extensive research, despite the tremendous losses they have suffered for many years, the Hmong people in Michigan continue to demonstrate courage and profound resilience.
I Have Tasted the Sweet Mangoes of Cebu / George Estrada. (on order for HST201 Kaibara for Fall 2016) : George Estrada's first book adds a whimsical new voice to the Asian American literature. I Have Tasted the Sweet Mangoes of Cebu takes readers on a star-crossed journey through the Philippines in search of his roots, the perfect love and the meaning of it all.His quest to win the heart of Liza, a beautiful, young woman he meets on the Internet, turns into a descent into delirium as Estrada tries to reconcile his Philippine passions and his Western mind.In the hilarious and sometimes painful flashback sequences, the author recounts his experiences as a journalist with The Oakland Tribune, a doctoral student at the University of Texas and a professor at Humboldt State University in Northern California. Now he needs to put all that intellectual training behind him and "go native" to win the woman of his dreams. The bittersweet ending will amaze and astound you.
Immigrant Ambassadors : Citizenship and Belonging in the Tibetan Diaspora / Julia Meredith Hess. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, c2009. 266pp. Main Library E184.T53 H47 2009 : The Tibetan diaspora began fifty years ago when the current Dalai Lama fled Lhasa and established a government-in-exile in India. For those fifty years, the vast majority of Tibetans have kept their stateless refugee status in India and Nepal as a reminder to themselves and the world that Tibet is under Chinese occupation and that they are committed to returning someday....In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that allowed 1,000 Tibetans and their families to immigrate to the United States; a decade later the total U.S. population includes some 10,000 Tibetans. Not only is the social fact of the migration—its historical and political contexts—of interest, but also how migration and resettlement in the U.S. reflect emergent identity formations among members of a stateless society....Immigrant Ambassadors examines Tibetan identity at a critical juncture in the diaspora's expansion, and argues that increased migration to the West is both facilitated and marked by changing understandings of what it means to be a twenty-first-century Tibetan—deterritorialized, activist, and cosmopolitan.
In pursuit of gold : Chinese American miners and merchants in the American West / Sue Fawn Chung. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c2011. 258pp. Main Library F847.E4 C47 2011 : Based on an impressive range of primary sources, including immigration records, census materials, and personal documents, this volume offers an account of the lives, occupations, and challenges of the Chinese Americans residing in mining towns in Eastern Oregon and Northeastern Nevada in the mid- to late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chung (history, U. of Nevada, Las Vegas) forms a fascinating story from a collection of mainly small fragments of information, describing in as much detail as possible what is known of individuals, their lives, careers, relations with the EuroAmericans, and relationship with their families back in China. Income, property value, and cost of living are presented whenever known, and the careers of the most successful Chinese Americans, including doctors and merchants, are described at length.
Indian Diaspora in the United States : Brain Drain or Gain? / Anjali Sahay. Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, c2009. 249pp. Main Library E184.E2 S24 2009 : Indian Diaspora in the United States takes a new perspective on the topic of brain drain, departing from the traditional literature to include discussions on brain gain and brain circulation using Indian migration to the United States as a case study. Sahay acknowledges that host country policies create the necessary conditions for brain drain to take place, but argues that source countries may also benefit from out-migration of their workers and students. These benefits are measured as remittances, investments, and savings associated with return, and social networking that links expatriates with their country of origin. Through success and visibility in host societies, diaspora workers further influence economic and political benefits for their home countries. This type of brain gain becomes an element of soft power for the source country in the long term.
The interethnic imagination : roots and passages in contemporary Asian American fiction / Caroline Rody. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009. 196pp. Main Library PS153.A84 R64 2009 : In the wake of all that is changing in local and global cultures--in patterns of migration, settlement, labor, and communications--a radical interaction has taken place that, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, has shifted our understanding of ethnicity away from 'ethnic in itself' to 'ethnic amidst a hybrid collective'. In light of this, Caroline Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming 'interethnic'. Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, The Interethnic Imagination offers sustained readings of three especially compelling examples: Chang-rae Lee's ambivalent evocations of blackness, whiteness, Koreanness, and the multicultural crowd in Native Speaker; Gish Jen's comic engagement with Jewishness in Mona in the Promised Land; and the transnational imagination of Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange. Two shorter "interchapters" and an epilogue extend the thematics of creative "in-betweenness" across the book's structure, elaborating crossover topics including Asian American fiction's complex engagement with African American culture; the cross-ethnic adoption of Jewishness by Asian American writers; and the history of mixed-race Asian American fictional characters.
The Intimate University : Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation / Nancy Abelmann. Durham : Duke University Press, 2009. 201pp. Main Library E184.K6 A24 2009 : The majority of the 30,000-plus undergraduates at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, including the large population of Korean Americans, come from nearby metropolitan Chicago. Among the campus's largest non-white ethnicities, Korean American students arrive at college hoping to realize the liberal ideals of the modern American university: to fulfill their potential regardless of their race, nation, or religion. Yet these ideals are compromised by racial segregation and stereotyping. In The Intimate University, Nancy Abelmann explores the tensions between the ideals of higher education and the particularities of race, family, and community through an ethnographic analysis of the experiences of Korean American undergraduates at the University of Illinois.
Japanese Americans : the Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group / Paul Spickard. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2009. 257pp. Main Library E184.J3 S7 2009 : Since 1855, nearly a half a million Japanese immigrants have settled in the United States, the majority arriving between 1890 and 1924 during the great wave of immigration to Hawai'i and the mainland. Today, more than one million Americans claim Japanese ancestry. They came to study and to work, and found jobs as farm laborers, cannery workers, and railroad workers. Many settled permanently, formed communities, and sent for family members in Japan. While they worked hard, established credit associations and other networks, and repeatedly distinguished themselves as entrepreneurs, they also encountered harsh discrimination. Nowhere was this more evident than on the West coast during World War II, when virtually the entire population of Japanese Americans was forced into internment camps solely on the basis of their ethnicity....In this concise history, Paul R. Spickard traces the struggles and achievements of Japanese Americans in claiming their place in American society. He outlines three forces shaping ethnic groups in general: shared interests, shared institutions, and shared culture, and chronicles the Japanese American experience within this framework, showing how these factors created and nurtured solidarity.
Japanese War Brides in America : An Oral History / Miki Ward Crawford, Katie Kaori Hayashi, and Shizuko Suenaga. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Praeger, c2010. 268pp. Main Library E184.J3 W29 2010 : Following the end of World War II, 500,000 American troops occupied every prefecture of Japan and interracial marriages occurred. The sudden influx of 50,000 Japanese war brides during 1946-1965 created social tension in the United States, while opening up one of the country's largest cross-cultural integrations. This book reveals the stories of 19 Japanese war brides whose assimilation into American culture forever influenced future generations, depicting love, strength, and perseverance in the face of incredible odds. The Japanese war brides hold a unique place in American history and have been called ambassadors to the United States. For the first time in English these women share their triumphs, sorrows, successes, and identity in a time when their own future was tainted by social segregation. This oral history focuses mainly on women's lives in the period following World War II and the occupation of Japan. It illuminates the cultural expectations, the situations brought about by the war, and the effects of the occupation, and also includes quotes from various war brides regarding this time. Chapter interviews are set up in chronological fashion and laid out in the following format: introduction of the war bride, how she met her husband, her initial travels to America, and life thereafter. Where needed, explanations, translations, and background history with references are provided.
Jim and Jap Crow : a cultural history of 1940s interracial America / Matthew M. Briones. Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2012. 285pp. Main Library D769.8.A6 K5433 2012 : Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy....Jim and Jap Crow follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia....Jim and Jap Crow looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.
Journeys to foreign selves : Asians and Asian Americans in a global era / Alan Roland. New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2011. 250pp. Main Library DS339.4 .R65 2011 : Drawing upon author's long-term psychoanalytical practice, research, and actual clinical data, this book examines the psychological ramifications of transnational immigration to Western countries and the continued influence of indigenous cultures on South Asian Diaspora. It explores new ways of understanding the psyche of migrants from the diverse cultures of South Asia and the universal norms applied in Western practice. To this end it embraces and critiques the categories that are more specific to this region, such as the magic-cosmic world of private destiny, reincarnation, astrology, and palmistry. By using more informed ways of understanding this exodus of people, the book attempts to find a new paradigm fusing spirituality with psychoanalysis.
Recently acquired books in the MSU Libraries. Note : always check the online catalog for the latest information on location and status. If book says "in process", you can ask for it at the Circulation Desk.
Learning to be Chinese American : community, education, and ethnic identity / Liang Du. Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, c2010. 141pp. Main Library E184.C5 D8 2010 : Learning to Be Chinese American aims at exploring the complicated identity production process among Chinese immigrants in the United States in relation to the rapidly changing global and local contexts. Based on original ethnographic material collected in an upper-middle class Chinese American community, the author argues for the need to move beyond the framework of traditional nation-state boundaries in order to examine the identity production process of contemporary Chinese Americans. In doing so, we can better understand how this particular group, in response to changing economic and social conditions, actively takes part in the production of their unique ethnic identities through local institutions such as community-based organizations and ethnic education. This book expands the scope of existing literature on identity production among immigrants of color in both empirical and methodological terms.
Leaving India : My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents / Minal Hajratwala. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 430pp. Main Library E184.G84 H35 2009 : An inspiring personal saga that explores the collisions of choice and history that led one unforgettable family to become immigrants In this groundbreaking work,Minal Hajratwala mixes history,memoir, and reportage to explore the questions facing not only her own Indian family but that of every immigrant: Where did we come from? Why did we leave? What did we give up and gain in the process?...Beginning with her great-grandfather Motiram’s original flight from British-occupied India to Fiji, where he rose from tailor to department store mogul,Hajratwala follows her ancestors across the twentieth century to explain how they came to be spread across five continents and nine countries....As she delves into the relationship between personal choice and the great historical forces—British colonialism, apartheid,Gandhi’s Salt March, and American immigration policy—that helped to shape her family’s experiences, Hajratwala brings to light for the very first time the story of the Indian diaspora....This luminous narrative by a child of immigrants offers a deeply intimate look at what it means to call more than one part of the world home.
Life behind the lobby : Indian American motel owners and the American dream / Pawan Dhingra. Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2012. 254pp. Main Library HD2358.5.U6 D45 2012 : Indian Americans own about half of all the motels in the United States. Even more remarkable, most of these motel owners come from the same region in India and—although they are not all related—seventy percent of them share the surname of Patel. Most of these motel owners arrived in the United States with few resources and, broadly speaking, they are self-employed, self-sufficient immigrants who have become successful—they live the American dream....However, framing this group as embodying the American dream has profound implications. It perpetuates the idea of American exceptionalism—that this nation creates opportunities for newcomers unattainable elsewhere—and also downplays the inequalities of race, gender, culture, and globalization immigrants continue to face. Despite their dominance in the motel industry, Indian American moteliers are concentrated in lower- and mid-budget markets. Life Behind the Lobby explains Indian Americans' simultaneous accomplishments and marginalization and takes a close look at their own role in sustaining that duality.
Little Saigons : Staying Vietnamese in America / Karin Aguilar-San Juan. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2009. 222pp. Main Library E184.V53 A35 2009 : Karin Aguilar-San Juan examines the contradictions of Vietnamese American community and identity in two emblematic yet different locales: Little Saigon in suburban Orange County, California (widely described as the capital of Vietnamese America) and the urban "Vietnamese town" of Fields Corner in Boston, Massachusetts. Their distinctive qualities challenge assumptions about identity and space, growth amid globalization, and processes of Americanization. With a comparative and race-cognizant approach, Aguilar-San Juan shows how places like Little Saigon and Fields Corner are sites for the simultaneous preservation and redefinition of Vietnamese identity. Intervening in debates about race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and suburbanization as a form of assimilation, this work elaborates on the significance of place as an integral element of community building and its role in defining Vietnamese American-ness. Staying Vietnamese, according to Aguilar-San Juan, is not about replicating life in Viet Nam. Rather, it involves moving toward a state of equilibrium that, though always in flux, allows refugees, immigrants, and their U.S.-born offspring to recalibrate their sense of self in order to become Vietnamese anew in places far from their presumed geographic home.
Living Our Religions : Hindu and Muslim South Asian American Women Narrate Their Experiences / [edited] by Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha ; with Shobha Hamal Gurung ... [et al.]. Sterling, VA : Kumarian Press, 2009. 341pp. Main Library E184.S69 L58 2009 : This edited collection adds to a growing literature on the topic of "lived religion"--religion as it is practiced by ordinary believers rather than history, theology, doctrine, or ideals presented by leaders and organizations. The book adds to that literature an assessment of narratives of religious practice and experience among South Asian American women; via that focus, it speaks to the topics of the immigrant experience and layered ethnicity of a growing subset of North Americans. Following an introduction, the book is divided into two sections. The first focuses on the experience of religious identity, gender, and ethnicity that intersects with the experiences of the authors within a third, largely Protestant, US culture. The second section explores the diversity of religious practice across South Asian American women, and the ways in which women resist, accommodate, and selectively transform gendered expectations within their respective communities. As is often the case with edited collections, the volume is stronger in describing the diversity of experience than in advancing theory. Still, it offers to broaden the literature on lived religion and gender within a less studied population, and it is a readable, interesting collection.
The lucky ones : one family and the extraordinary invention of Chinese America / Mae M. Ngai. Boston [Mass.] : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 299pp. Main Library F869.S39 C555 2010 (On reserve for JMC Class Spring 2014) : If you’re Irish American or African American or Eastern European Jewish American, there’s a rich literature to give you a sense of your family’s arrival-in-America story. Until now, that hasn’t been the case for Chinese Americans....From noted historian Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones uncovers the three-generational saga of the Tape family. It’s a sweeping story centered on patriarch Jeu Dip’s (Joseph Tape’s) self-invention as an immigration broker in post–gold rush, racially explosive San Francisco, and the extraordinary rise it enables. Ngai’s portrayal of the Tapes as the first of a brand-new social type—middle-class Chinese Americans, with touring cars, hunting dogs, and society weddings to broadcast it—will astonish....Again and again, Tape family history illuminates American history. Seven-year-old Mamie Tape attempts to integrate California schools, resulting in the landmark 1885 Tape v. Hurley. The family’s intimate involvement in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair reveals how the Chinese American culture brokers essentially invented Chinatown—and so Chinese culture—for American audiences. Finally, Mae Ngai reveals aspects—timely, haunting, and hopeful—of the lasting legacy of the immigrant experience for all Americans.
The Making of Asian America : a history / Erika Lee. New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, 2015. 519pp. Main Library E184.A75 L43 2015 : "The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured "coolies" who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as Amrerica's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"
The making of Asian America through political participation / Pei-te Lien. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2001. 293pp. Main Library E184.O6 L53 2001 : Asian Americans are widely believed to be passive and compliant participants in the U.S. political processOCoif they participate at all. In this ground-breaking book, Pei-te Lien maps the actions and strategies of Asian Americans as they negotiate a space in the American political arena. Professor Lien looks at political participation by Asian Americans prior to 1965 and then examines, at both organizational and mass politics levels, how race, ethnicity, and transnationalism help to construct a complex American electorate. She looks not only at rates of participation among Asian Americans as compared with blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and non-Hispanic whites, but also among specific groups of Asian AmericansOCoChinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Vietnamese. She also discusses how gender, socioeconomic class, and place of birth affect political participation. With documentation ranging from historical narrative to opinion survey data, Professor Lien creates a picture of a diverse group of politically active people who are intent on carving out a place for themselves in American political life."
Moving Images : Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration / Jasmine Alinder. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c2009. 207pp. Main Library D769.8.A6 A64 2009 : When the American government began impounding Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor, photography became a battleground. The control of the means of representation affected nearly every aspect of the incarceration, from the mug shots criminalizing Japanese Americans to the prohibition of cameras in the hands of inmates. The government also hired photographers to make an extensive record of the forced removal and incarceration. In this insightful study, Jasmine Alinder explores the photographic record of the imprisonment in war relocation centers such as Manzanar, Tule Lake, Jerome, and others. She investigates why photographs were made, how they were meant to function, and how they have been reproduced and interpreted subsequently by the popular press and museums in constructing versions of public history....Alinder provides calibrated readings of the photographs from this period, including works by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Manzanar camp inmate Toyo Miyatake (who constructed his own camera to document the complicated realities of camp life), and contemporary artists Patrick Nagatani and Masumi Hayashi. Illustrated with more than forty photographs, Moving Images reveals the significance of the camera in the process of incarceration as well as the construction of race, citizenship, and patriotism in this complex historical moment.
My Viet : Vietnamese American literature in English, 1962-present / edited by Michele Janette. Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, c2011. 250pp. Main Library PS508.V54 M9 2011 : For many Americans, "Vietnam" means a war rather than a country. With this collection of Vietnamese American literature in English, Janette (Kansas State Univ.) provides a much-needed corrective to this assumption. Written entirely from the Vietnamese perspective, these pieces offer readers the opportunity to forego the American point of view well documented in earlier collections such as The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems, ed. by H. Bruce Franklin (1996). Janette extends the work begun by Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu in their edited collection The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers (1995). In her well-written introduction, the editor offers a brief history of Vietnam and of Vietnamese American literature. The book itself is divided into two sections: "Tales of Witness" and "Tales of Imagination." The former includes first-person narrative accounts (most excerpted from longer works) of the Vietnamese diaspora. The latter section includes stories and excerpts from novels. Each selection has a comprehensive, helpful headnote on the author's experience. On whole, the book moves from memories of war to the remarkable achievement of Vietnamese American literature. An excellent choice for introducing students to this body of work.
New cosmopolitanisms : South Asians in the US / edited by Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2006. 172pp. Main Library E184.S69 N49 2006 : This book offers an in-depth look at the ways in which technology, travel, and globalization have altered traditional patterns of immigration for South Asians who live and work in the United States, and explains how their popular cultural practices and aesthetic desires are fulfilled. They are presented as the twenty-first century's ?new cosmopolitans”: flexible enough to adjust to globalization's economic, political, and cultural imperatives. They are thus uniquely adaptable to the mainstream cultures of the United States, but also vulnerable in a period when nationalism and security have become tools to maintain traditional power relations in a changing world.
The new face of Asian Pacific America : numbers, diversity & change in the 21st century / edited by Eric Lai & Dennis Arguelles. San Francisco : AsianWeek, with UCLA's Asian American Studies Center Press, in cooperation with the Organization of Chinese Americans and the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development, [2003], ©2003. 283pp. Main Library E184.S69 N49 2006 E184.O6 N3885 2003 : The most comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of the significant demographic and cultural changes of Asian Pacific America. Through informative essays and hundreds of photos, charts and graphics, this book provides the first demographic analysis of recently released census socioeconomic data on the rapidly growing and diverse Asian Pacific American population. The book is written by leading Asian American scholars, journalists, and community leaders from across the nation, and is published by Asian Week with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press.
Nisei daughter / Monica Stone. Boston : Little, Brown and Co., [1953] 238pp. Main Library E184.J3 S6 (On reserve for HST 201 Kaibara Fall 2016) : With charm, humor, and deep understanding, Monica Sone tells what it was like to grow up Japanese American on Seattle's waterfront in the 1930s and to be subjected to "relocation" during World War II. Along with over one hundred thousand other persons of Japanese ancestry ― most of whom were U.S. citizens ― Stone and her family were uprooted from their home and imprisoned in a camp. Her unique and personal account is a true classic of Asian American literature. Note : 1979 reprint available in Special Collections Radicalism Collection E184.J3 S6 1979
Paper son : one man's story / Tung Pok Chin with Winifred C. Chin ; with an introduction by K. Scott Wong. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2000. 147pp. Main Library E184.C5 P27 2000 (On reserve for HST201 Kaibara Fall 2016) : Tung Pok Chin was one of many Chinese immigrants who entered the US as a "paper son," claiming fictive kinship with Chinese already residing in America in order to circumvent discriminatory immigration laws. This rare, engaging, and often poignant firsthand chronicle of Chin's efforts to create a life for himself in the US while supporting his family in China effectively demonstrates how the continual fear of being exposed as a "paper son" and the changing social, international, and political developments from the 1930s through the 1950s fundamentally shaped Chin's opportunities and experiences. His brief memoir also provides glimpses of the everyday lives of Chinese American workers, the politics within New York's Chinese community, and the circumstances and expectations confronting those who remained in China. Heralded by K. Scott Wong's fine introduction, this clearly written and accessible autobiography constitutes a rich resource for faculty and students interested in US social history and immigration as well as Asian American studies, and is highly recommended for libraries developing comprehensive Asian American studies collection, or diversifying their collections in US social history, immigration, and labor.
Partly Colored : Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South / Leslie Bow. New York : New York University Press, c2010. 285pp. Main Library F220.A75 B69 2010 : Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit? ...By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation....Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.
Passage to the Real Self : the Development of Self Integration for Asian American Women / Inn Sook Lee. Lanham, Md. : University Press of America, c2009. 185pp. Main Library E184.A75 L44 2009 : Asian women, both in Asia and the United States, are in search of the courage to find and integrate their authentic real selves in a multicultural milieu. This book makes the argument that since Asian American women live in the periphery of the multicultural West, they need to strengthen the psychological process of self integration, assimilating neither to traditional cultural demands or those of the larger society. They desire self reliance, search for meaning in practicing love and justice for others, while living in a permanent pilgrimage between worlds....The passages identified in the self-integration process are conscientization, introspection, and integration. After much suffering under patriarchy, hierarchy, and rejection, Asian American women launch into conscientization and incorporate their evolving selves in introspection. They engage in self analysis, sociocultural analysis, and healing their codependent selves. The women finally achieve autonomous/synergetic selves and realign psychological aspects, develop inner strength and a deep spirituality at their core selves, thus embodying peace in their hearts.
A people's history of the Hmong / Paul Hillmer. St. Paul : Minnesota Historical Society Press, c2010. 327pp. Main Library DS509.5.H66 H55 2010 : A rich narrative history of the worldwide community of Hmong people, exploring their cultural practices, war and refugee camp experiences, and struggles and triumphs as citizens of new countries.
The poker bride : the first Chinese in the Wild West / Christopher Corbett. New York, NY : Atlantic Monthly Press : Distributed by Publishers Group West, c2010. 218pp. E184.C5 C67 2010 : When gold rush fever grips the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants come through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. In "The Poker Bride," Corbett uses a little-known legend from Idaho lore as a lens into this Chinese experience. During the Gold Rush, a young Chinese concubine arrived by horse in Idaho gold country, where a white gambler soon won her in a poker game. She became Polly Bemis, the winner's legal, beloved wife. Polly emerged into public view only in 1923, a tiny old woman on horseback, her identity and story known only to a few old-timers.
Praeger Handbook of Asian American Health : Taking Notice and Taking Action / edited by William B. Bateman, Noilyn Abesamis-Mendoza, Henrietta Ho-Asjoe. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Praeger/ABC-CLIO, c2009. 2 vols., 848pp. Main Library RA448.5.A83 P73 2009 : The fastest growing minority in the US is Asian Americans, and this two-volume set addresses their healthcare needs, which are impacted by genetics, actions, beliefs, family structures, socioeconomic status, health habits, and other factors. Noting that Asian Americans are inadequately represented in surveys and studies, Bateman (medicine, New York U.), Abesamis-Mendoza (health policy, Coalition for Asian American Children & Families), and Ho-Asjoe (Community Development Center for the Study of Asian American Health, New York U.) bring together chapters that discuss common health issues and diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, and mental health issues; how and why disparities in disease development and treatment exist; social factors like migration; and what changes need to be made to improve healthcare; as well as behavioral factors like diet, smoking, substance abuse, and traditional medical practices. Each section has chapters of voices from the community by practitioners involved directly in community and other programs. An index is provided in the second volume only.
Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present : the Orientalist Buddy Film / Brian Locke. New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 208pp. Main Library PN1995.9.M56 L63 2009 : This book charts the evolution, from the World War II period to the present day, of racial relationships and their repercussions in Hollywood films and examines a neglected sub-genre. “Not merely an overview of anti-Asian portrayals in mainstream cinema, Locke cogently argues that Asian villainy in popular film enables a national fantasy, the disavowal of institutional discrimination via the spectacle of reconciliation between white and black. This book explodes the myth of progressive Hollywood by revealing the ways in which racial inclusion comes at a cost—in this case, to Asian Americans. Refreshingly accessible, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen offers scholars, students, and general readers alike a sharp critical framework for understanding cross-racial representations in popular culture. Readers will no longer be able to view a mainstream buddy film with the same kind of racial innocence.”—Leslie Bow, Professor of English and Asian American Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature.
Racing Romance : Love, Power, and Desire Among Asian American/White Couples / Kumiko Nemoto. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c2009. 196pp. Main Library HQ1031 .N45 2009 : Racing Romance sheds light on the bonds between whites and Asian Americans, an important topic that has not garnered well-deserved attention until now. Using primary source narratives and interviews, Kumiko Nemoto addresses the contradictions and tensions-a result of race, class, and gender-that Asian Americans and whites experience. Racing Romance reveals how "progressive" interracial relationships remain shaped by the logic of patriarchy and gender inherent to the ideal of marriage, family, and nation in America, even as this ideal is juxtaposed with discourses of multiculturalism and color blindness.
Relative histories : mediating history in Asian American family memoirs / Rocío G. Davis. Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, c2011. 183pp. Main Library E184.A75 .D383 2011 : An analytically innovative work, Begin Here widens the current critical focus of Asian North American literary studies by proposing an integrated thematic and narratological approach to the practice of autobiography. It demonstrates how Asian North American memoirs of childhood challenge the construction and performative potential of national experiences. This understanding influences theoretical approaches to ethnic life writing, expanding the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques and genre and raising complex questions about self-representation and the construction of cultural memory.
Samurai among panthers : Richard Aoki on race, resistance, and a paradoxical life / Diane C. Fujino. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2012. 441pp. Main LibraryF870.J3 F87 2012 : An iconic figure of the Asian American movement, Richard Aoki (1938–2009) was also, as the most prominent non-Black member of the Black Panther Party, a key architect of Afro-Asian solidarity in the 1960s and ’70s. His life story exposes the personal side of political activism as it illuminates the history of ethnic nationalism and radical internationalism in America....A reflection of this interconnection, Samurai among Panthers weaves together two narratives: Aoki’s dramatic first-person chronicle and an interpretive history by a leading scholar of the Asian American movement, Diane C. Fujino. Aoki’s candid account of himself takes us from his early years in Japanese American internment camps to his political education on the streets of Oakland, to his emergence in the Black Panther Party. As his story unfolds, we see how his parents’ separation inside the camps and his father’s illegal activities shaped the development of Aoki’s politics. Fujino situates his life within the context of twentieth-century history—World War II, the Cold War, and the protests of the 1960s. She demonstrates how activism is both an accidental and an intentional endeavor and how a militant activist practice can also promote participatory democracy and social service....The result of these parallel voices and analysis in Samurai among Panthers is a complex—and sometimes contradictory—portrait of a singularly extraordinary activist and an expansion and deepening of our understanding of the history he lived.
Serve the people : making Asian America in the long sixties / Karen L. Ishizuka. London : Verso, 2016. 270pp. Main Library E184.A75 I84 2016 : "The political ferment of the 1960s produced not only the Civil Rights Movement but others in its wake: women's liberation, gay rights, Chicano power, and the Asian American Movement. Here is a definitive history of the social and cultural movement that knit a hugely disparate and isolated set of communities into a political identity - and along the way created a racial group out of marginalized people who had been uncomfortably lumped together as Orientals. The Asian American Movement was an unabashedly radical social movement, sprung from campuses and city ghettos and allied with Third World freedom struggles and the anti-Vietnam War movement, seen as a racist intervention in Asia. It also introduced to mainstream America a generation of now internationally famous artists, writers, and musicians, like novelist Maxine Hong Kingston. Karen Ishizuka's definitive history is based on years of research and more than 120 extensive interviews with movement leaders and participants. It's written in a vivid narrative style and illustrated with many striking images from guerrilla movement publications. 'Serve the people' is a book that fills out the full story of the Long Sixties."
The Snakehead : an Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream / Patrick Radden Keefe. New York : Doubleday, c2009. 414pp. Main Library HQ281 .K44 2009 : The rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss--Sister Ping--and the intricate human trafficking network she created from her business in New York City's Chinatown, together with a panoramic tale about the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death to realize their own version of the American dream.
The Storm of Our Lives : a Vietnamese Family's Boat Journey to Freedom / Tai Van Nguyen. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co., c2009. 165pp. Main Library E184.V53 N486 2009 : This memoir vividly describes the struggle of one Vietnamese family and their seven day ordeal to escape persecution from Communist Vietnam. One of more than 840,000 "boat people" to have fled the war ravaged country, the author describes his family's epic journey and the historical, cultural, social, economic, and political problems that led to his father's decision to take his family away from their homeland. Drawing on his Catholic faith, Nguyen attests to the hardship and dangers that confronted the family in their journey and that did not end after his father died and the five children were forced to continue alone.
Toward Filipino Self-Determination : Beyond Transnational Globalization / E. San Juan Jr. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2009. 184pp. Main Library E184.F4 S28 2009 : Granted formal independence in 1946, the Philippines serves as a battleground between the neoliberal project of capitalist globalization and the enduring aspiration of Filipinos for national self-determination. More than ten million Filipino workers-over one-tenth of the country's total population-work as contract workers in all parts of the world. How did this "model" colony of the United States devolve into an impoverished, war-torn neocolonial hinterland, a provider of cheap labor and raw materials for the rest of the world? In Toward Filipino Self-Determination, E. San Juan Jr. explores the historical, cultural, and political formation of the Filipino diaspora. By focusing on the work of significant Filipino intellectuals and activists, including Carlos Bulosan and Philip Vera Cruz, as well as the issues of gender and language for workers in the United States, San Juan provides a historical-materialist reading of social practices, discourses, and institutions that explain the contradictions characterizing Filipino life in both the United States and in the Philippines.
A tragedy of democracy : Japanese confinement in North America / Greg Robinson. New York : Columbia University Press, c2009. 397pp. Main Library D769.8.A6 R64 2009 : The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective....Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate....Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.
The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans / edited by Christian Collet and Pei-te Lien ; foreword by Don T. Nakanishi. Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2009. 235pp. Main Library E184.A75 T736 2009 : As America’s most ethnically diverse foreign-born population, Asian Americans can puzzle political observers. This volume’s multidisciplinary team of contributors employ a variety of methodologies—including quantitative, ethnographic, and historical—to illustrate how transnational ties between the U.S. and Asia have shaped, and are increasingly defining, Asian American politics in our multicultural society....Original essays by U.S.- and Asian-based scholars discuss Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese communities from Boston to Honolulu. The volume also shows how the grassroots activism of America’s “newest minority” both reflects and is instrumental in broader processes of political change throughout the Pacific. Addressing the call for more global approaches to racial and ethnic politics, contributors describe how Asian immigrants strategically navigate the hurdles to domestic incorporation and equality by turning their political sights and energies toward Asia. These essays convincingly demonstrate that Asian American political participation in the U.S. does not consist simply of domestic actions with domestic ends.
Vanishing Filipino Americans : The Bridge Generation / Peter Jamero. Lanham, Md. : University Press of America, Inc., 2011. 112pp. Main Library E184.F4 J36 2011 : Documentation of Filipino history in America is largely limited to the experiences of the Manong Generation that immigrated to the U.S. during the early 1900s. Jamero documents the experiences and contributions of the second-generation Filipino Americans-the Bridge Generation-addressing a significant void in the history of Filipinos in America.
The Viet Kieu in America : Personal Accounts of Postwar Immigrants From Vietnam / edited by Nghia M. Vo. Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co., 2009. 229pp. Main Library E184.V53 V53 2009 : Vietnamese make up one of the largest refugee populations in the United States, some arriving by boat in 1975 after the fall of Saigon and others coming in the 1990s. This collection of 22 essays by 14 authors illuminates Vietnamese-American culture, views of freedom and oppression, and the issues of relocation, assimilation and transition for two million people. It contains personal experiences of the Vietnam War, life under Communist rule, and escape to America.
Who we are : Asians / by the New Strategist editors. Ithaca, N.Y. : New Strategist, c2011. 2nd edition, 275pp. Main Library E184.A75 W46 2011 : Who We Are: Asians brings you the facts you need about the size and characteristics of the country s Asian population the fastest-growing segment of the consumer marketplace. Its 10 chapters examine their attitudes (a new chapter), education, health, housing, income, labor force status, living arrangements, population, spending, and time use....New to the second edition of Who We Are: Asians is a chapter on their attitudes about issues ranging from happiness and trust in others to religious beliefs, political identification, and support for gay marriage. The Population chapter includes 2010 census data showing the most accurate and up-to-date numbers nationally and by state. The Time Use chapter examines how Asians prioritize their time. Also included is the most recent information on the spending, incomes, labor force participation, educational attainment, school enrollment, and living arrangements of Asians.
Writing the ghetto : class, authorship, and the Asian American ethnic enclave / Yoonmee Chang. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2010. 238pp. Main Library PS508.A8 C53 2010 : In the United States, perhaps no minority group is considered as "model" or successful as the Asian American community. Rather than living in ominous "ghettoes," Asian Americans are described as residing in positive-sounding "ethnic enclaves." Writing the Ghetto helps clarify the hidden or unspoken class inequalities faced by Asian Americans, while insightfully analyzing the effect such notions have had on their literary voices....Yoonmee Chang examines the class structure of Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Tokyos, and Little Indias, arguing that ghettoization in these spaces is disguised. She maintains that Asian American literature both contributes to and challenges this masking through its marginalization by what she calls the "ethnographic imperative." Chang discusses texts from the late nineteenth century to the present, including those of Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton, Monica Sone, Fae Myenne Ng, Chang-rae Lee, S. Mitra Kalita, and Nam Le. These texts are situated in the contexts of the Chinese Exclusion Era, Japanese American internment during World War II, the globalization of Chinatown in the late twentieth century, the Vietnam War, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the contemporary emergence of the "ethnoburb."
Yellow peril! : an archive of anti-Asian fear / edited and introduced by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats. Brooklyn, NY : Verso, ©2014. 384pp. Main Library E184.A75 Y45 2014 : "The "yellow peril" is one of the most long-standing and pervasive racist ideas in Western culture--indeed, this book traces its history to the Enlightenment era. Yet while Fu Manchu evokes a fading historical memory, yellow peril ideology persists, animating, for example, campaign commercials from the 2012 presidential election. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, pop culture artifacts and political polemic. Written by two leading scholars and replete with paintings, photographs and images drawn from dime novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, polemical and pseudo-scholarly literature, and other pop culture ephemera, this book is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation"
We too sing America : South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh immigrants shape our multiracial future / Deepa Iyer. New York : The New Press, [2015] 229pp. E184.A1 I94 2015 : "Many of us can recall the targeting of South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh people in the wake of 9/11. We may be less aware, however, of the ongoing racism directed against these groups in the past decade and a half. In We Too Sing America, nationally renowned activist Deepa Iyer catalogs recent racial flashpoints, from the 2012 massacre at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the violent opposition to the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and to the Park 51 Community Center in Lower Manhattan. Iyer asks whether hate crimes should be considered domestic terrorism and explores the role of the state in perpetuating racism through detentions, national registration programs, police profiling, and constant surveillance. She looks at topics including Islamophobia in the Bible Belt; the "Bermuda Triangle" of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hysteria; and the energy of new reform movements, including those of "undocumented and unafraid" youth and Black Lives Matter. In a book that reframes the discussion of race in America, a brilliant young activist provides ideas from the front lines of post-9/11 America."
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I Have Tasted the Sweet Mangoes of Cebu (on order)
Immigrant Ambassadors : Citizenship and Belonging in the Tibetan Diaspora
In pursuit of gold : Chinese American miners and merchants in the American West
Indian Diaspora in the United States : Brain Drain or Gain?
The Intimate University : Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation
Japanese Americans : the Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group
Jim and Jap Crow : a cultural history of 1940s interracial America
Learning to be Chinese American : community, education, and ethnic identity
Leaving India : My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents
Life behind the lobby : Indian American motel owners and the American dream
Little Saigons : Staying Vietnamese in America
Living Our Religions : Hindu and Muslim South Asian American Women Narrate Their Experiences
The lucky ones : one family and the extraordinary invention of Chinese America
The Making of Asian America : a history
The making of Asian America through political participation
Moving Images : Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration
The new face of Asian Pacific America : numbers, diversity & change in the 21st century
Partly Colored : Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South
Passage to the Real Self : the Development of Self Integration for Asian American Women
Praeger Handbook of Asian American Health : Taking Notice and Taking Action
Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present : the Orientalist Buddy Film
Racing Romance : Love, Power, and Desire Among Asian American/White Couples
Relative histories : mediating history in Asian American family memoirs
Serve the people : making Asian America in the long sixties
The Storm of Our Lives : a Vietnamese Family's Boat Journey to Freedom
Toward Filipino Self-Determination : Beyond Transnational Globalization
The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans
Vanishing Filipino Americans : The Bridge Generation
The Viet Kieu in America : Personal Accounts of Postwar Immigrants From Vietnam
Yellow peril! : an archive of anti-Asian fear