Unsettled Visions : Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary by 
Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American Culture and History by
From the back cover:
In this classic book on the meaning of multiculturalism in larger American society, Gary Okihiro explores the significance of Asian American experiences from the perspectives of historical consciousness, race, gender, class, and culture.
While exploring anew the meanings of Asian American social history, Okihiro argues that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate today not from the so-called mainstream but from the margins, from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and the gay and lesbian community.
The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Modernist Literature and Art by 
Not Quite Not White : Losing and Finding Race in America by 
War Baby / Love Child : Mixed Race Asian American Art by 
Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by
From the back cover:
Using narrative history, personal recollection, & oral testimony, Takaki presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the canefields of Hawaii, of "picture brides" marrying strangers in the hope of becoming part of the American dream. He tells stories of Japanese Americans behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps during World War II, Hmong refugees tragically unable to adjust to Wisconsin's alien climate & culture, and Asian American students stigmatized by the stereotype of the "model minority."
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by
Threshold -- Telemachus -- Trojan -- Aubade with burning city -- A little closer to the edge -- Immigrant Haibun -- Always & forever -- My father writes from prison -- Headfirst -- In Newport I watch my father lay his cheek to a beached dolphin's wet back -- The gift -- Self-portrait as exit wounds -- Thanksgiving 2006 -- Homewrecker -- Of thee I sing -- Because it's summer -- Into the breach -- Anaphora as coping mechanism -- Seventh circle of earth -- On earth we're briefly gorgeous -- Eurydice -- Untitled (blue, green, and brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952 -- Queen under the hill -- Torso of air -- Prayer for the newly damned -- To my father/To my future son -- Deto(nation) -- Ode to masturbation -- Notebook fragments -- The smallest measure -- Daily bread -- Odysseus redux -- Logophobia -- Someday I'll love Ocean Vuong -- Devotion.
How to Cure a Ghost by
A poetry compilation recounting a woman's journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, confusion to clarity, and bitterness to forgiveness. Following in the footsteps of such category killers as Milk and Honey and Whiskey Words & a Shovel I, Fariha Róisín's poetry book is a collection of her thoughts as a young, queer, Muslim femme navigating the difficulties of her intersectionality. Simultaneously, this compilation unpacks the contentious relationship that exists between Róisín and her mother, her platonic and romantic heartbreaks, and the cognitive dissonance felt as a result of being so divided among her broad spectrum of identities. Fariha Róisín is an Australian-Canadian writer based in Brooklyn. Her writing often explores Muslim identity, race, pop culture, and film. It also examines the intersection of queerness and being a femme of color while navigating a white world.
Go Home! by
Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong.
Aspiring to Home by
Aspiring to Home explores South Asian immigrants as they create new ethnic identities through popular cultural works that bind together narratives of multicultural and postcolonial citizenship.
Orientalism, terrorism, indigenism: South Asian readings in postcolonialism by
Drawing from the latest developments in South Asian literary studies, this book examines the uses of postcolonial theory in understanding the structural transformations enabled by post-9/11 discourses of Orientalism and terrorism; the internal contradictions between South Asian approaches to postcolonialism (Subaltern Studies) and its European adaptations; and the resistance produced by the indigenization of local literary traditions in the work of select South Asian literary figures. The three sub-sections--"discourses," "disjunctures," and "indigenisms"--provide the conceptual space necessary for a thematic guidance of the respective arguments presented in this book.
South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010 by
The first major interpretation of recent South Asian diasporic writing in specifically transatlantic terms. Ruth Maxey offers readings of canonical and less well-known South Asian American and British Asian texts and key cinematic works. She explores the formal and thematic tendencies of the works, relating them to gender politics, the marketplace, and issues of literary value and historical change. The book engages with established debates, while intervening in new ways in transatlantic studies, postcolonial literary studies and Asian American cultural studies. Key features. Organised around four key themes: home & nation, travel & return, racial mixing and food & eating Writers studied range from Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali and Nadeem Aslam Engages with critics including Susan Koshy, Sukhdev Sandhu, Rajini Srikanth and James Procter Sources include articles from mainstream British, American and Asian newspapers such as New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Hindu Films studied include Mischief Night, Mississippi Masala, A Love Supreme and Praying with Anger
Biased: uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think, and do by 
When Home Won't Let You Stay : Migration Through Contemporary Art by 
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by
From Slate:
[T]he most remarkable, and often overlooked, quality of The Woman Warrior is that it is a book without a genre. At various times it has been described as a memoir, an autobiography, a novel, a manifesto; yet anyone who spends 10 minutes with it understands that none of these labels really apply. Not because Kingston sets out to exaggerate the "facts" of her own experience [...], but because she deliberately acknowledges that to write autobiography is to stand at the borderline between memory and invention. Like the "ghosts" in its subtitle (the word refers to the white Americans around whom Kingston grew up in Sacramento), The Woman Warrior stubbornly refuses to be either entirely fictive or entirely real.
The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday by
From the back cover:
In The Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body’s uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim’s study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, The Racial Mundane invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.
America Is in the Heart by
From the back cover:
First published in 1946, this autobiography of the well known Filipino poet describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant immigrant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.
Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art by
From the back cover:
Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes chronicles the blossoming of Asian American art and anticipates the growing democratization of American art and culture. Pairing work by twenty-four contemporary Asian American visual artists with responses provocatively drawn from cultural critics, other artists, activists, and intellectuals, this book explores themes of geographical movement, the sexuality of Asian bodies, colonization, miscegenation, hybrid forms of immigrant cultures, the loss of home, war, history, and memory.
Two faces of exclusion: the untold history of anti-Asian racism in the United States by
From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination.
Minor Feelings by
A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human. Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. She believes that "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality-- when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. -- adapted from jacket
Crying in H Mart by
"From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Michelle Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread."-- Provided by publisher.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by
A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, this book is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
The Namesake by
Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world -- conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. The Namesake brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations.
The Issei: the world of the first generation Japanese immigrants, 1885-1924 by
A portrait of the first Japanese immigrants, known as the Issei. Leaving behind a still-traditional, feudal society for the wide-open world of America, the Japanese were long barred from holding citizenship and regarded for many years as unassimilable. Their story is one of suffering and struggle that has produced a record of courage and perseverance.
Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: feminism, sexual politics, Asian American women's literature by
Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty" pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion.
Geisha of a Different Kind by
Through ethnographic observation of queer Asian American communities and Asian American drag shows, interviews with gay Asian American men, and a reading of current media and popular culture depictions of Asian Americans, Han argues that gay Asian American men, used to gender privilege within their own communities, must grapple with the idea that, as Asians, they have historically been feminized as a result of Western domination and colonization, and as a result, they are minorities within the gay community, which is itself marginalized within the overall American society.
Speak, Okinawa by
"A searing, deeply candid memoir about a young woman's journey to understanding her complicated parents--her father a Vietnam veteran, her mother an Okinawan war bride--and her own, fraught cultural heritage. Elizabeth's mother was working as a nightclub hostess on U.S.-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their only daughter. There, Elizabeth grew up with the trappings of a typical American childhood and adolescence. Yet, even though she felt almost no connection to her mother's distant home, she also felt out of place among her peers. Decades later, Elizabeth comes to recognize the shame and self-loathing that haunt both her and her mother, and attempts a form of reconciliation, not only to come to terms with the embattled dynamics of her family but also to reckon with the injustices that reverberate throughout the history of Okinawa and its people. Clear-eyed and profoundly humane, Speak, Okinawa is a startling accomplishment--a heartfelt exploration of identity, inheritance, forgiveness, and what it means to be an American"-- Provided by publisher.
The Sympathizer by
With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow,The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.
The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
America's Asia: racial form and American literature, 1893-1945 by
What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.
No-No Boy by
"In the aftermath of World War II, Ichiro, a Japanese American, returns home to Seattle to make a new start after two years in an internment camp and two years in prison for refusing to be drafted."-- Provided by publisher.
Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American film and video by
For Mimura, Asian American cinema is the spectral, ghostly return of the international film movement known as Third Cinema. Tracing contemporary Asian American cinema as a continuation of Third Cinema's radical enterprise of making marginalized subjects visible in the First World, Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, including Trinh T. Minh-ha's experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam; avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, and Janice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, and sexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang.
Identities in Motion: Asian American film and video by
This innovative book shows how Asian American filmmakers and videomakers frame and are framed by history--how they define and are defined by cinematic projections of Asian American identity. Combining close readings of films and videos, sophisticated cultural analyses, and detailed production histories that reveal the complex forces at play in the making and distributing of these movies, Identities in Motion offers an illuminating interpretative framework for assessing the extraordinary range of Asian American films produced in North America.
National Abjection: the Asian American body onstage by
National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness" through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection--a process that demands that Americanness be defined by the exclusion of Asian Americans, who are either cast as symbolic foreigners incapable of integration or Americanization or distorted into an "honorary" whiteness. She examines how Asian Americans become culturally visible on and off stage, revealing the ways Asian American theater companies and artists respond to the cultural implications of this abjection.
Yellow: stories by
In a wide range of moods from the hilarious to the poignant to the sublime, these stories are smart and sexy, wry and evocative. Novelistic in scope, they feature such memorable characters as Annie Yung, whose aching heart and passion for country music have her longing for a cowboy; Duncan Roh, a big-wave surfer trying to transcend his reputation as a womanizer; Patrick and Brian Fenny, two mixed-blooded boys deserted by their golfer dad; ex-fisherman Alan Fujitani, marooned in romantic widowerhood; and the wildly competitive "Oriental Hair Poets," Marcella Ahn and Caroline Yip, engaged in a battle of wits for the attention of Dean Kaneshiro, whose handcrafted chairs are museum pieces. The title novella, which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, spans twenty years, following Danny Kim from his disastrous foray into boxing as a teenager to his ascent into Boston society as a management consultant - poisoned not so much by racism as by his paranoia of it."--BOOK JACKET.
The Color of Success by
"The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--Peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood"-- Provided by publisher.
Unsettled Visions: contemporary Asian American artists and the social imaginary by
"In Unsettled Visions, the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural, and political contours of Asian America, and a renaissance in Asian American art and visual culture was well underway.
Machida conducted extensive interviews with ten artists working during this transformative period: women and men of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese descent, most of whom migrated to the United States. In dialogue with the artists, Machida illuminates and contextualizes the origins of and intent behind bodies of their work.
Unsettled Visions is an engrossing look at a vital art scene and a subtle account of the multiple, shifting meanings of "Asianness" in Asian American art."--BOOK JACKET.
