Abstract: According to its mission statement, JAAS "seeks to define Asian American studies as a distinct, interdisciplinary scholarly pursuit and to integrate Asian American perspectives into the various disciplines that contribute to the development of the field." The editors, in drafting that statement, were well aware that Asian American studies has developed well beyond the bounds of its initial formulation and in directions unforeseen at the field's conception. We were also cognizant of the fact that Asian Americanists brought diverse training and orientations to their research. Hence, our primary purposes are to present the latest intellectual developments and multidisciplinary perspectives that make our field so ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: When comedian Margaret Cho appeared as a grim North Korean journalist with a thick accent and heavy makeup at the 2015 Golden Globe Awards, viewers swiftly registered their disappointment on social media and on the (web)pages of the Nation, Time, Salon, and KoreAm Journal. While criticizing Cho for performing in yellowface to stereotypes, writers of lengthier responses also reflected on the differences between this act and Cho's subversive standup comedy, and set their objections in the context of an awards show in which Cho was the only presenter of Asian descent.1 Although her performance as a North Korean member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the group responsible for the Golden Globes) recalled her ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Decades after the social movements of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) advanced the formation of interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, and sexuality across the United States, we are confronting the need to interrogate the limits and insidious effects of their institutionalization, including especially those processes that reduced struggles for racial justice to issues of representation. As has been wellestablished, institutionalization has been accompanied by the occlusion of redistributive social justice. For example, the establishment of ethnic literary studies has, albeit inadvertently, facilitated the consolidation of liberal multiculturalism, as the battle for systemic institutional change ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On December 7, 1941, the city of New York prepared for war. Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews made clear that "every possible step has been taken to protect [the] New York area from such an attack as surprised Pearl Harbor." "One of the first steps," the New York Times reported, was a roundup of Japanese residents.1 Just hours after the attack, more than one hundred armed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents supported by squads of local policemen swept across the city detaining Japanese New Yorkers through the evening and into the night. The Japanese Consulate at Rockefeller Center received the earliest attention. The consul general and staff members were taken to their homes by police officers and instructed ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In June 1966, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a brief story that narrated the Kim Sisters' performances at the Empire Room of the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago.1 Described as "a trio of ultra-talented Korean lasses" and "highly entertaining China dolls," the "bouncy and bubbling trio of button-nosed beauties rocked the rafters" as they opened the evening shows with their upbeat singing and instrumental talents.2 In addition to singing up a storm, the Kim Sisters played more than twenty instruments, which surprised and delighted the audience. They began each performance playing native instruments such as kayageum and janggoo and wearing traditional Korean dresses, before transitioning into a collection of American ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Changrae Lee's 2004 novel Aloft opens with Italian-American protagonist Jerry Battle surveying his suburban Long Island neighborhood from the comfort of his private seaplane. "From up here," the novel begins, "a half mile above Earth, everything looks perfect to me." A few pages later, Jerry flies over his own house, noting that the house is "forever unmistakable" because he "had a roofing contractor lay in slightly darker-shaded shingles in the form of a wide, squat X." This mark, he explains, was for the benefit of his ex-girlfriend Rita, "for she always asked me to point out our place from the air, which I did but to no use, as she could never quite find it anyway." Despite the fact that the "x" did not have its ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Keith Feldman's Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America is one of the first attempts to write a cultural and intellectual history of the United States' "special relationship" with Israel. Drawing on an impressive array of texts--journal writings, literature, poetry, newspapers and government documents—Feldman offers a detailed analysis of the investments in "Israel-Palestine" by a diverse set of constituencies, including: Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, civil rights liberals, black radicals, and neoconservative policy-makers. The meaning of "Israel-Palestine" has, Feldman argues, historically been complex, but such varied and at times conflicted views have been largely hidden by the ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Grace Hong's Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) crosses disciplinary (de)limitations to model an Asian American studies project in intersectional, coalitional, and comparative terms. Our pick was guided by a sense of where Hong's book takes us in the field, and we think the suggested direction, at once bold and broad-based, is an important one for our time; Asian America has always been, and must continue to be understood as a collective field in conjunction with black and brown bodies. By rethinking how we know what we think we know about the field using sources that do not "look Asian American," the book stands out for its departure from any ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The major intervention of Madeline Y. Hsu's The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015) is its reorientation of conventional wisdom in Asian American Studies regarding "exclusion." The familiar telling of this story is that the United States took a draconian approach to limiting the entry and settlement of workers from across the Pacific between 1875 (or, more commonly, 1882) and 1965.While this is not untrue, Hsu convincingly beckons us to reconsider this dominant paradigm by showing how the logic of "selection" has always operated alongside that of restriction. Stalwart proponents of selection—including missionaries, educators, internationalists ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The committee unanimously and enthusiastically selected Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou's The Asian American Achievement Paradox (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015) for the 2017 Asian American Studies Best Book Award in the Social Sciences. This theoretical breakthrough book offers rigorous empirical evidence, analytical sophistication, and remarkable intervention in national conversations about education, immigration, culture and inequality. Based on survey and interview data from one of the major data sets on second generation immigrants in the United States, Lee and Zhou lucidly integrate structural and cultural arguments to explain the high levels of economic and educational outcomes among Asian Americans. Focusing on ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The judges have enthusiastically selected Amanda Ngoho Reavey's Marilyn as the winner of the 2017 AAAS Award for Best Book in Creative Writing: Poetry. This collection is daring in its formal restlessness, traversing the genres of poetry, memoire, and essay and bringing together the lyric and the documentary (by means of language and photographs). It is also courageous in its clear-eyes exploration of the many complex aspects of transracial adoption and in its unblinking calling out of racism in its various forms, both personal and structural. Reavey details though poetic means painful and lonely experiences of feeling untethered but, equally, flashes of beauty and tenderness that inhere in various lived moments ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The judges have unanimously decided on The Sympathizer as the winner of this year's award. We were impressed with the book's originality, its intelligent cross-genre moves, and its thoughtful meditation on what identity and loyalties might mean in times of war and peace. Set in the postwar fallout between the U.S. and Vietnam, Nguyen's book cleverly weaves the threads of a refugee story with those of a spy novel, creating a remarkable hybrid text that requires us to think about where one's sympathies should lie in a world where characters' motives are as complex as the political situation they are in. As the novel engages the psychological process of its main character, an immigrant, soldier, and spy, readers are ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A few years ago, a friend sent me a card so striking that it is still up on my wall today. Taken from Canadian visual artist Meera Sethi's series Firangi Rang Barangi, Hindi for "colorful stranger," the card ("Pyaari") features a woman dressed in a bright green floral headscarf, a sari blouse, geometrically patterned blue pants, bright orange pumps, and a mix of jewelry all over her body. More accurately, the card depicts the clothing itself: the woman is visible only as a trace outline. Fashion here emerges not as adornment, but as constitutive of identity. In this case, the sartorial reveals a distinctly hybrid sense of self, a combination of North American sensibilities with Indian fabrics and adornments. It is ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: At its foundation, Christine Kim's The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America intervenes in the uncritical enfolding of Asian Canada into national and hemispheric discursive formations. This takes place not only through, as she makes clear, the logic of "Asian signifying a displacement, a diaspora always imagined as rooted elsewhere, and Canadian claiming a national fixity, a set of borders, and a banal kind of legitimacy" (25, italics original), but also in the superficial inclusion of Canada in Asian American studies.The Minor Intimacies of Race theorizes multiple senses of the "minor," a term Kim uses to designate not only what is secondary, repressed, and alienated, but also that which is ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the bibliographic essay of Paul Spickard's book, Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformation of an Ethnic Group, he reflected on the historiography of Japanese American Studies in 1994:[I]t is curious that one topic, Japanese American imprisonment in the World War II concentration camps, has commanded so much attention, that there are still so many topics left almost untouched, and that the range of theoretical perspectives among students of Japanese American history has been so limited. Clearly, there is still a great deal of work to be done.(191)Yasuko Takezawa and Gary Okihiro have answered that call in this volume on transpacific Japanese American studies. Japanese American studies has long ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species argues that disease control in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries extends the reach of U.S. empire into the control of biological life. Ahuja blends literary and visual analysis, archival research, and a spatial approach to power in an interdisciplinary tour de force that exemplifies the best of American studies scholarship. Geographically, the monograph moves across multiple sites of empire from Honolulu to Guantánamo Bay and from Panama City to Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico. In promoting both a transborder and transspecies approach to the relations between public health and empire, Bioinsecurities not only furthers our ... Read More PubDate: 2017-10-22T00:00:00-05:00
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