New Books In Asian American Studies

In her new book, Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press, 2018), Ana Paulina Lee (Columbia University) analyzes representations of the Chinese in Brazilian culture to understand their significance for Brazilian nation-building in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Lee has assembled a multidisciplinary archive encompassing literature, visual culture, theater, popular music, and diplomatic correspondence. Although their numbers in Brazil were not as large as immigration from Japan, the Chinese were nevertheless portrayed as non-white, sexually deviant, and unfree labor—in sum, a threat to dominant ideologies of branqueamento (racial whitening) and mestiço nationalism. Attentive to events and perspectives on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, Lee makes a distinctive contribution to the growing literature on Asian American history and cultural studies beyond North America and the Caribbean.Ian Shin is an assistant professor of American culture at the University of Michigan.Learn

2018 has been a great year for books about sub-national government in the United States. The year ends with another to add to the list. Jessica Trounstine has written Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities(Cambridge University Press, 2018). Trounstine is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced.Segregation by Design draws on a century of data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments design policies that create race and class segregation. Trounstine maps the historical development of segregation and the ways that suburbanization has fit with patterns of residential segregation. Zoning laws and public goods have been used to advance the goal of some residents for racially segregated neighborhoods. She argues that local governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.

The process of colonialism seeks to demean Indigenous intellect and destroy Indigenous literary traditions. Reconstructing those legacies is thus an act of anti-colonial resistance. This is the impetus behind Noenoe K. Silva’s The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History (Duke University Press, 2017). Silva, Professor of Indigenous Politics at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, focuses on two writers from Hawai’i’s tumultuous late nineteenth and early twentieth century past. Joseph Poepoe and Joseph Kanepu’u both wrote extensively in Hawaiian language newspapers at a time when American colonial officials worked hard to stamp out the Hawaiian language. Their writing thus constitutes a rare archive of Native Hawaiian language, narrative forms such as mo’olelo, and concepts such as ‘aina. The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen is an argument against settler colonial power structures and an insistent reminder that Native societies across the world have intellectual histories of

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2018), Connie Chiang reveals hidden layers of the experiences of Japanese Americans interned by their government during the 1940s. Chiang, a professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College, argues that the non-human environment mediated every facet of the detainees lives from their labor to their recreation to the feelings of isolation and despondency they felt. Many of the thousands forcibly removed to incarceration camps had moved from the verdant Pacific coast to the stark deserts and mountains of the interior West. This movement from one climate to another profoundly influenced the meaning and experience of incarceration and provoked emotions ranging from sadness and betrayal to resilience and even occasion

Surprising to many, white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election at a higher rate than any candidate in the previous four presidential elections. At the same time, the Evangelical community is changing, becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. How will this new diversity change Evangelical politics, if at all? Such is the focus of Janelle Wong’s new book, Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018). Using a variety of survey data and original interviews, Wong shows that non-white Evangelicals are not nearly as conservative as their white Evangelical counterparts, yet they are more conservative on many issues than their racial and ethnic compatriots. The findings from the book contribute to studies of religion and politics as well as the study of immigrant and ethnic politics. Wong is professor of American Studies and Asian American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Ass

Jan M. Padios‘ new book A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Duke University Press, ) sheds light on the industry of offshore call centers in the Philippines, and attempts to understand the narratives cast upon call center workers as laborers whose main resource is their ability to relate to their Western-and specifically American-clientele. What does it mean when we see relatability as a national resource? How are Filipino workers reshaped by this seemingly benevolent industry? Dr. Padios attempts to tackle these questions through years of transnational research involving interviews and participation, and through understanding call center work within a longer history of American colonization and neoliberal policies that have shaped the contemporary Philippines.    Christopher B. Patterson teaches at the University of British Columbia, Social Justice Institute. He is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific and Stamped:

Today I talked with Kawika Guillermo, a creative scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. His book Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel (Westphalia Press, 2018) describes Skyler Faralan’s travels to Southeast Asia with $500 and a death wish. After months of wandering, he crosses paths with other dejected travelers: a short-fused NGO worker called Sophea; Arthur, a brazen expat abandoned by his wife and son; and Winston, an intellectual exile. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one Asian city to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place. Stamped will appeal to progressive-minded readers of literary fiction and travel writing, especially those with an interest in Asia or the Asian American experience.  Melody Yunzi Li is an Assistant Professor at University of Houston. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis,

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of anti-Asian racism as well as moments of sexism and nationalism within Chinese communities. Yet for Wong, the tensions and visibility of this figure also allows alternative and alternating forms of solidarity rooted in stepping back from ideologies of nation, race and gender. The sex worker thus allows us to see Chineseness and other forms of collectivity as an affective product, an attachment that mobilizes our emotions and frames how we see others as well as ourselves. By charting representations of the Chinese sex worker through histories of Pacific Crossing, Cold War era ideologies, and contemporary globalization, Wong’s book shows the multiple ways that sex work and prostitution have unsettled forms of collectivity, while providing new spaces for dwell

Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez‘s new book, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2018) traces how globalization, neoliberalism and new technology have reshaped migrant care work from the Philippines. The book is the result of five years of research interviewing migrant women and participating in their communities, as well as intermittent trips to the Philippines where Dr. Francisco-Menchavez spent time speaking with the families and extended families of migrant workers. Her book attempts to redefine notions of care and overseas employment that focus solely on the worker’s labor, and rather to understand a form of what she calls “multidirectional care,” which describes the ways in which “transnational family members activate multiple resources, people, and networks to redefine care work in the family” (23). Dr. Francisco-Menchavez explores this larger network of care to understand how migrant work affects gender roles and create

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017), Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe gather artists and scholars whose work disrupts, challenges, and reimagines ways of being Asian and Asian American. Through nine original artist interviews and seven critical essays, the editors showcase contemporary artists who queer our conceptions of surveillance, affect, mixed race, and Asian America itself. In doing so, the editors remain interested in the queer disturbances within artworks that respond to racism and state violence, while also forming solidarities based on critical understandings of shared oppression.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes: “I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.” Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurre

In Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Lon Kurashige emphasizes the contingencies that shaped the history of Asian restriction and exclusion in the United States from the 1840s to the 1980s. Two Faces of Exclusion answers the question, posed by another scholar, of why Asian exclusion took so long to achieve and was so uneven if racism was so total and overwhelming. Kurashige proposes that we think about anti-Asian racism as the result of a “perfect storm” that required the convergence of several vulnerabilities—most important among them the inability of Asians to become U.S. citizens—with fears about political, economic, and social contamination by Asians. Contesting the ebbs and flows of this storm were two camps that Kurashige calls the “exclusionists” and the “egalitarians,” which themselves evolved over time. Like other recent cutting-edge scholarship in the field of Asian American history, Two Faces of Exclusion

In Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American ‘Oriental’ (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Amy Sueyoshi argues that Americans did not always regard Chinese and Japanese in the U.S. as pan-ethnic “Orientals” in ways that are familiar to Asian Americans today. Rather, this conflation occurred against a backdrop of troubling stereotypes that enabled white Americans in turn-of-the-century San Francisco to explore changing ideas and practices of gender and sexuality. Sueyoshi uses a wide variety of sources including newspapers and magazines, morgue and court records, novels, plays, and oral history to reconstitute differing images of Chinese and Japanese American men and women, while at the same showing that their lives defied these misrepresentations. In this conversation, Sueyoshi shares insights from Discriminating Sex, and talks about her journey through academia and activism in pursuit of equity for queer Asian Americans both on and off the page. Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Po

The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. In The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America. The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and

Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S. global power after 1945. Man argues that the Cold War divide between communism and liberal democracy cast Asians into either bad or good—the bad being the Communists and Viet Cong, and the good being military servicemen channeled into American war zones. Following the labor circuits of Asian military workers and soldiers as they navigated an emergent Pacific world, Man reframes Asians as both U.S. citizens and as people from Asian countries like the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. Doing so, Man writes, allows us to understand how U.S. empire took hold through a murky process of decolonization that on its surface sought to create an “Asia for Asians” but actually legitimated and obscured U.S. state violence. At the same time, Man traces other forms of decolonization by Asian soldiers who sought freedom

Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (UNC Press, 2016) offers an important revision to this literature by examining legal and social responses to Japanese and South Asian mobility in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S. between 1896 and 1924. Atkinson argues that, while these various geographies shared similar ideologies and motivations for restricting Asian mobility, local conditions—for example, economic conditions, proximity to Asia, structures of political governance, and the number of real vs. prospective Asian migrants—were far more determinative of exclusionary campaigns and policies. The resulting imperial discord and international tensions constituted the “burden of white supremacy.” In this conversation, Atkinson shares insights from this complex history, as well

In Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Allison Varzally documents the history of Vietnamese adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Varzally adds to the growing literature on Southeast Asian Americans and on Asian international adoption by highlighting the distinctiveness of Vietnamese adoption for its liberal orientation and its expansive notion of kinship. Four chapters trace this history from its antiwar beginnings in the early Cold War; to Operation Babylift in 1975 and its controversial legal aftermath; to the federal legislation and social practices that shaped the “homecomings” of Amerasians in the 1980s; and, finally, to Vietnamese adoptees own attempts in the 1990s (and beyond) to find meaning in their journeys. Making ample use of oral history, Varzally tells stories that are both heart-rending and inspiring. They confirm that family formation was a central site

With the railroad’s arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether. In Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017), Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has tr

Christopher B. Patterson‘s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) reads English-language literary production from Southeast Asia and its diasporas in North America to recognize and reveal discourses of pluralist governance. Building upon established arguments that state-sponsored multiculturalism at home justifies imperialism abroad and that state-assigned ethnic identities in Southeast Asia are vestiges of colonial pluralism, Patterson studies minor literatures of the Transpacific as a mode of creative response to pluralist govermentality. In examining these cultural communities, he finds an alternative politics of identity in their literature that express a motif of “transition.” Engaging in these ceaseless processes of transition, which Patterson dubs “Transitive Cultures,” enables individuals to maintain mobility in hyper-controlled spaces. Instead of using a national paradigm, such as “Asian-American litera