New Books In Asian American Studies

The first story in Jamil Jan Kochai’s newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil’s book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion. Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorke

In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sho

Stay True (Doubleday: 2022), the new memoir from Hua Hsu, is a coming-of-age story about the writer’s time in the University of California in Berkeley, where he tries to become a writer–and becomes a bit of a music snob. He builds a close friendship with another Asian-American student, Ken, very different from Hua, about which he writes in the book: "All the previous times I had met poised, content people like Ken, they were white. It’s one of those obscure parts of an already obscure identity that Japanese American kids can seem like aliens to other Asians, untroubled, largely oblivious to feeling like outsiders." But Ken is killed in a robbery gone wrong, forcing Hua to grapple with the death of his friend. In this interview, Hua and I talk about his story in Stay True, including his unbelievably non-stereotypical parents, his dive into college music, and his attempt with Ken to put together an homage for the Berry Gordy-produced martial arts film, the Last Dragon. Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorke

In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai's latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai (Blair, 2022) explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality--always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power. These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

Today I will be talking to Carly Buxton about her book Unthinking collaboration: American Nisei in transwar Japan, which came out this year [2022] with the University of Hawaiʹi Press. Unthinking Collaboration uncovers the little-known history of Japanese Americans who spent World War II in Japan.  Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan during the war, could not leave but also, unlike their compatriots, were not interned. But, to survive many had to serve the Japanese state and act as Japanese during the war. When the war ended these same people were mobilized again, but now in the service of the American occupation. Weaving archival data with oral histories, personal narratives, material culture, and fiction, Unthinking Collaboration emphasizes the heterogeneity of Japanese immigrant experiences, and sheds light on broader issues of identity, race, and performance of individuals growing up in a bicultural or multicultural context. By distancing “collaboration” from its default elision with moral ju

During World War II, Elaine Black Yoneda, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, spent eight months in a concentration camp--not in Europe, but in California. She did this voluntarily and in solidarity, insisting on accompanying her husband, Karl, and their son, Tommy, when they were incarcerated at the Manzanar Relocation Center. Surprisingly, while in the camp, Elaine and Karl publicly supported the United States' decision to exclude Japanese Americans from the coast. Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration (Temple UP, 2021) is the first critical biography of this pioneering feminist and activist. Rachel Schreiber deftly traces Yoneda's life as she became invested in radical politics and interracial and interethnic activism. In her work for the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party, Yoneda rose to the rank of vice president. After their incarceration, Elaine and Karl became active in the campaigns to designate Manzanar a fed

In this episode, we discuss a special issue of The Journal of Asian American Studies: “Reckoning with the Interdiscipline.” This special issue, first conceived in 2018, reflects on fifty years since the 1968 West Coast institutionalization of ethnic studies as a distinct discipline, and forty years since the establishment of AAAS as an identifiable academic organization in 1979. With seventeen contributions from both established and early career scholars, the issue presents reflections on the trajectory of Asian American Studies as a field of study, and asks, “Is there a reason for Asian American studies? What are its preoccupations, its problems, and its possibilities in our present moment, more than fifty years on from our beginnings, in a time fraught with nativism and racial conflict? What ought Asian American studies be doing as we go forward?” This episode features interviews with two of the three special issue editors: Lily Anne Welty Tamai and Paul Spickard. The hosts were Donna Anderson and Tandee Wa

If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses--discourses, specifically, of race. Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as "other" due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Purported heathens have also contributed to the ongoing significance of the concept, promoting solidarity through their

The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX. "Every girl in Little League, every woman playing college sports, and every parent-including Michelle and myself-who watches their daughter on a field or in the classroom is forever grateful to the late Patsy Takemoto Mink."-President Barack Obama, on posthumously awarding Mink the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 Patsy Takemoto Mink was the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress. Fierce and Fearless is the first biography of this remarkable woman, who first won election to Congress in 1964 and went on to serve in the House for twenty-four years, her final term ending with her death in 2002. Mink was an advocate for girls and women, best known for her work shepherding and defending Title IX, the legislation that changed the face of education in America, making it possible for girls and women to participate in school sports, and in education more broa

Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon's Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Little Fires Everywhere has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. Recommended Books: Jason Mott, Hell of a Book Gab

In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press 2018), Dorinne Kondo brings together critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis and her critically keen awareness of the politics and potential of theatre production and reception to ask how theatre ‘makes, unmakes and remakes’ race. Building on over 20 years of experience as an ethnographer, dramaturg and playwriter, Kondo exposes the racial structures that are mutually constitutive of the theatre specifically, and the arts more generally. So doing, she attends to the economic forces and representational practices that have not only enabled the affective violence through which the theatre so often operates; she also draws attention to how these forces and practices can produce the grounds for theatre’s restorative and transformative potential. Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on cultural theory, performance,

Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou (University of Mississippi Press, 2022) by Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis provides insightful analysis of this paradox and a detailed, thorough history of the industry in Louisiana. Dried shrimp technology was part of the cultural heritage Pearl River Chinese immigrants introduced into the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century. As early as 1870, Chinese natives built shrimp-drying operations in Louisiana’s wetlands and exported the product to Asia through the port of San Francisco. This trade internationalized the shrimp industry. About three years before Louisiana’s Chinese community began their export endeavors, manufactured ice became available in New Orleans, and the Dunbar family introduced patented canning technology. The convergence of these ancient and modern technologies shaped the evolution of th

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territory’s population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. But this population, so crucial to Montana’s history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational elements—exoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their lived experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana (U of Nebraska Press, 2022) seeks to recover the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words and deepen understanding of Chinese experiences in Montana by using a global lens. Mark T. Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s through the 1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chines

Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so central to Samoan communities. For Samoan athletes, football is not just an opportunity for upward mobility; it is a way to contribute to, support, and represent their family, village, and nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and media analysis, Dr. Uperesa shows how the Samoan ascendancy in football is underpinned by the legacies of US empire and a set of imperial formations that mark Indigenous Pacific peoples as racialized subjects of US economic aid and development. Samoan players succeed by becoming entrepreneurs: building and commodifying their bodies and brands to enhance their football stock and market value. Uperesa offers

Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, her short fiction appears in The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online and Ploughshares. Her debut novel Disorientation is out now from Penguin Press (US) and Picador (UK). Her short story collection Where are You Realy From? is forthcoming from Penguin Press in spring 2024. Books Recommended in this Episode: Don Lee, The Collective Brandon Taylor, Real Life David Lodge, Changing Places Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by beco

In Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford University Press, 2022), sociologist Victoria Reyes combines her personal experiences with research findings to examine how academia creates conditional citizenship for its marginalized members. Reyes draws from her family background, experiences during routine university life, and academic scholarship to theorize the academic outsiders as those who "are constantly reminded that our presence in the academy is contingent and in constant flux" (10-11). She elaborates on how love and worth are assessed in the university and her experiences as a mother in the academy. The final chapter calls for academic justice and offers practical strategies to combat the academy's exclusionary practices. In this book Reyes contributes to important conversations in the university on the experiences of people of color, women, and those from marginalized backgrounds. This book will be of interest to those who experience the academy's conditional citizenship, those who

Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education (Teachers College Press, 2021) examines how racist political rhetoric has created damaging and dangerous conditions for Students of Color in schools and higher education institutions throughout the United States. The authors show how the election of the 45th president has resulted in a defining moment in U.S. history where racist discourses, reinforced by ideologies of white supremacy, have affected the educational experiences of our most vulnerable students. This volume situates the rhetoric of the Trump presidency within a broader historical narrative and provides recommendations for those who seek to advocate for anti-racism and social justice. As we enter the uncharted waters of a global pandemic and national racial reckoning, this will be invaluable reading for scholars, educators, and administrators who want to be part of the solution. Dr. Lindsay Pérez Huber is a professor of education at California State University-Long Beach as well as a visitin

In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (U Chicago Press, 2022), Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today. Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern

Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon stepped off a plane in Beijing: a visit that changed the course of China, the U.S., the Cold war and the world. The stories in Gish Jen’s newest story collection, Thank You Mr. Nixon: Stories (Knopf: 2022), covers stories spanning the fifty-year relationship since then, from a Chinese woman press-ganged into translating for her Western tour group, to an English professor struggling to teach the wealthy Chinese students at his university. Gish Jen is the author of one previous book of stories, five novels, and two works of nonfiction. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University. She and her husband split their time between Cambridge, Massachusett

In 1973, Billy Graham, "America's Pastor," held his largest ever "crusade." But he was not, as one might expect, in the American heartland, but in South Korea. Why there? Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire (Oxford UP, 2022) seeks not only to answer that question, but to retell the story of modern American evangelicalism through its relationship with South Korea. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the first "hot" war of the Cold War era, a new generation of white fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals forged networks with South Koreans that helped turn evangelical America into an empire. South Korean Protestants were used to bolster the image of the US as a non-imperial beacon of democratic hope, in spite of ongoing racial inequalities. At the same time, South Koreans used these racialized transpacific networks for their own purposes, seeking to reimagine their own place in the world order. They envisioned Korea as the "new emerging Christian kingdom," that would