Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics by
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American ?settler complicities? and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.
Dragon Ladies by
'Groundbreaking....Dragon Ladies explores the emergence of a distinct Asian American feminist movement through the rich perspectives of well-known Asian American activists, writers, and artists who analyze personal experiences through a political lens.' Ms. MagazineThis book showcases the growing politicization of Asian American women and their emerging feminist movement. These prominent writers, artists, and activists draw on a wealth of personal experience and political analysis to address issues of immigration, work, health, domestic violence, sexuality, and the media. In doing so, they seize the power of their unique political perspectives and cultural backgrounds to transform the landscape of race, class, and gender in the United States.
East Meets Black by
East Meets Black examines the making and remaking of race and masculinity through the racialization of Asian and black men, confronting this important white stratagem to secure class and racial privilege, wealth, and status in the post-civil rights era. Indeed Asian and black men in neoliberal America are cast by white supremacy as oppositional. Through this opposition in the US racial hierarchy, Chong Chon-Smith argues that Asian and black men are positioned along binaries brain/body, diligent/lazy, nerd/criminal, culture/ genetics, student/convict, and technocrat/athlete--in what he terms "racial magnetism." Via this concept, East Meets Black traces the national conversations that oppose black and Asian masculinities, but also the Afro-Asian counterpoints in literature, film, popular sport, hip-hop music, performance arts, and internet subcultures. Chon-Smith highlights the spectacle and performance of baseball players such as Ichiro Suzuki within global multiculturalism and the racially coded controversy between Yao Ming and Shaquille O'Neal in transnational basketball. Further, he assesses the prominence of martial arts buddy films such as Romeo Must Die and Rush Hour that produce Afro-Asian solidarity in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Finally, Chon-Smith explores how the Afro-Asian cultural fusions in hip-hop open up possibilities for the creation of alternative subcultures, to disrupt myths of black pathology and the Asian model minority. In this first interdisciplinary book on Asian and black masculinities in literature and popular culture, Chon-Smith explores the inspiring, contradictory, hostile, resonant, and unarticulated ways in which the formation of Asian and black racial masculinity has affected contemporary America.
Elusive Citizenship by
Since the late nineteenth century, federal and state rules governing immigration and naturalization have placed persons of Asian ancestry outside the boundaries of formal membership. A review of leading cases in American constitutional law regarding Asians would suggest that initially, Asian immigrants tended to evade exclusionary laws through deliberate misrepresentations of their identities or through extralegal means. Eventually, many of these immigrants and their descendants came to accept prevailing legal norms governing their citizenship in the United States. In many cases, this involved embracing notions of white supremacy. John S. W. Park argues that American rules governing citizenship and belonging remain fundamentally unjust, even though they suggest the triumph of a "civil rights" vision, where all citizens share the same basic rights. By continuing to privilege members over non-members in ways that are politically popular, these rules mask injustices that violate principles of fairness. Importantly, Elusive Citizenship also suggests that politically and socially, full membership in American society remains closely linked with participation in exclusionary practices that isolate racial minorities in America.
Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience by
In Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience, Angelo N. Ancheta demonstrates how United States civil rights laws have been framed by a black-white model of race that typically ignores the experiences of other groups, including Asian Americans. When racial discourse is limited to antagonisms between black and white, Asian Americans often find themselves in a racial limbo, marginalized or unrecognized as full participants. Ancheta examines legal and social theories of racial discrimination, ethnic differences in the Asian American population, nativism, citizenship, language, school desegregation, and affirmative action. In the revised edition of this influential book, Ancheta also covers post-9/11 anti-Asian sentiment and racial profiling. He analyzes recent legal cases involving political empowerment, language rights, human trafficking, immigrant rights, and affirmative action in higher education-many of which move the country farther away from the ideals of racial justice. On a more positive note, he reports on the progress Asian Americans have made in the corporate sector, politics, the military, entertainment, and academia. A skillful mixture of legal theories, court cases, historical events, and personal insights, this revised edition brings fresh insights to U.S. civil rights from an Asian American perspective.
The Subject(s) of Human Rights by
Human rights violations have always been part of Asian American studies. From Chinese immigration restrictions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, yellow peril characterizations, and recent acts of deportation and Islamophobia, Asian Americans have consistently functioned as subordinated "subjects" of human rights violations. The Subject(s) of Human Rights brings together scholars from North America and Asia to recalibrate these human rights concerns from both sides of the Pacific.The essays in this collection provide a sharper understanding of how Asian/Americans have been subjected to human rights violations, how they act as subjects of history and agents of change, and how they produce knowledge around such subjects. The editors of and contributors to The Subject(s) of Human Rights examine refugee narratives, human trafficking, and citizenship issues in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. These themes further refract issues of American war-making, settler colonialism, military occupation, collateral damage, and displacement that relocate the imagined geographies of Asian America from the periphery to the center of human rights critique.
Asian American Panethnicity by 
American History Unbound by
A survey of U.S. history from its beginnings to the present, American History Unbound reveals our past through the lens of Asian American and Pacific Islander history. In so doing, it is a work of both history and anti-history, a narrative that fundamentally transforms and deepens our understanding of the United States. This text is accessible and filled with engaging stories and themes that draw attention to key theoretical and historical interpretations. Gary Y. Okihiro positions Asians and Pacific Islanders within a larger history of people of color in the United States and places the United States in the context of world history and oceanic worlds.
Aspiring to Home by
What does it mean to belong? How are twenty-first-century diasporic subjects fashioning identities and communities that bind them together? Aspiring to Home examines these questions with a focus on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Advancing a theory of locality to explain the means through which immigrants of varying regional, religious, and linguistic backgrounds experience what it means to belong, Bakirathi Mani shows how ethnicity is produced through the relationship between domestic racial formations and global movements of class and capital. Aspiring to Home focuses on popular cultural works created by first- and second-generation South Asians from 1999-2009, including those by author Jhumpa Lahiri and filmmaker Mira Nair, as well as public events such as the Miss India U.S.A. pageant and the Broadway musical Bombay Dreams. Analyzing these diverse productions through an interdisciplinary framework, Mani weaves literary readings with ethnography to unravel the constraints of form and genre that shape how we read diasporic popular culture.
Fierce Enigmas by
The two-hundred-year history of the United States' involvement in South Asia -- the key to understanding contemporary American policy in the region South Asia looms large in American foreign policy. Over the past two decades, we have spent billions of dollars and thousands of human lives in the region, to seemingly little effect. As Srinath Raghavan reveals in Fierce Enigmas, this should not surprise us. For 230 years, America's engagement with India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been characterized by short-term thinking and unintended consequences. Beginning with American traders in India in the eighteenth century, the region has become a locus for American efforts -- secular and religious -- to remake the world in its image. The definitive history of US involvement in South Asia, Fierce Enigmas is also a clarion call to fundamentally rethink our approach to the region.
How to Be South Asian in America by
A variety of immigrant narratives probe the dynamic process of South Asian Americanization
New Cosmopolitanisms by
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.
Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States by
Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States: Memories and Visions, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow provides various exploratory interpretations of Southeast Asian American subjectivities, communities, histories, creativities, and cultural expressions, as they are revealed, informed, or infused with visions, dreams, and or memories of self in relation to others, places, time, and events -- whether historically significant or quotidian. The interaction and interplay of visions, memories, and subjectivities is the focus of examination and interpretation, either directly or tangentially. Authors explore varieties of homes, religiosities, creativities, cultural forms and productions, and queer sexualities, utilizing critical ethnic and Asian American studies discourses coupled with other interdisciplinary approaches to provide new and alternative visions on Cambodian, Hmong, Filipino, Indonesian, Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese American subjects and their communities that link Southeast Asia to America in vexing, creative, and purposeful ways.
The State of Asian America by
'Every essay in the State of Asian America brings the reader to a new plateau of understanding....All the essays are thought-provoking, disturbing, and enlightening. Every writer is worth the read.' Korean QuarterlyThis is a series of essays that give voice to contemporary Asian-American activism, offering thoughtful, radical analyses on a range of pressing issues, including: the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, the protest against the Broadway musical Miss Saigon, anti-Asian and domestic violence, feminism, neo-conservatism, art and politics, the social construction of race, and the politics of Asian American Studies.
Unruly Immigrants by
In Unruly Immigrants, Monisha Das Gupta explores the innovative strategies that South Asian feminist, queer, and labor organizations in the United States have developed to assert claims to rights for immigrants without the privileges or security of citizenship. Since the 1980s many South Asian immigrants have found the India-centered "model minority" politics of previous generations inadequate to the task of redressing problems such as violence against women, homophobia, racism, and poverty. Thus they have devised new models of immigrant advocacy, seeking rights that are mobile rather than rooted in national membership, and advancing their claims as migrants rather than as citizens-to-be. Creating social justice organizations, they have inventively constructed a transnational complex of rights by drawing on local, national, and international laws to seek entitlements for their constituencies. Das Gupta offers an ethnography of seven South Asian organizations in the northeastern United States, looking at their development and politics as well as the conflicts that have emerged within the groups over questions of sexual, class, and political identities. She examines the ways that women's organizations have defined and responded to questions of domestic violence as they relate to women's immigration status; she describes the construction of a transnational South Asian queer identity and culture by people often marginalized by both mainstream South Asian and queer communities in the United States; and she draws attention to the efforts of labor groups who have sought economic justice for taxi drivers and domestic workers by confronting local policies that exploit cheap immigrant labor. Responding to the shortcomings of the state, their communities, and the larger social movements of which they are a part, these groups challenge the assumption that citizenship is the necessary basis of rights claims.
