New Books In Asian American Studies

Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ), edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo, argue that Protestant Christianity has played an important role in how East Asians understood and adapted to the modern world. In particular, these articles focus on locating Christianity within East Asian political, economic, and social contexts and analyzing how Protestantism interacted with these different spheres of human activity. Articles in this anthology cover China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as Americans who claim descent from these nations, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, covering such diverse topics as Korean megachurches, Christianity and nationalism in wartime Japan, and social networks in south China. As such, this volume offers a great deal not only those who study Christianity, but to anyone interested in learning more about E

Martin Joseph Ponce‘s recently published book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012), traces the roots of Filipino literature to examine how it was shaped by forces of colonialism, imperialism, and migration. Rather than focusing on race and nation as main categories of analysis, Ponce uses a queer diasporic reading to consider the multiple audiences for Filipino literature. In doing so, he explores alternatives to the nation as the basis for an imagined community, and focuses instead on sexual politics and the transpacific tactics of reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Leilani Nishime‘s Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014) challenges the dominant U.S. cultural narrative that imagines multiracial people as symbols of a future United States where race has ceased to function as a viable category. Nishime considers how representations of mixed race people often negate the significance of race by seeing racial mixture as an unprecedented social development that can promise a future free of race. By reading an archive of visual pop-culture that includes the celebrity of Tiger Woods, the film series “The Matrix” and reality television, Nishime considers how various narratives of multiracial Asian Americans can rupture naturalized notions of racial difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 (University of California Press, 2013) situates this history within a broader frame of competing scientific, cultural, and political notions of racial hybridity as a detrimental or positive force, as a transformative power leading to racial degeneration or eugenic improvement. Placing special emphasis on the importance of self-narratives of some of the main figures of Teng’s account, Eurasian is built around the stories of families who lived through and contributed to early debates over Chinese-Western intermarriage in the US and China, tracing the histories of many of these families through the experiences of their children and the transformations they help shape, and understandi

Ellen D. Wu‘s The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2014) charts the complex emergence of the model minority myth in fashioning Asian American stereotypes throughout the twentieth century. Wu investigates how inclusion of Asian Americans rather than exclusion can still reproduce racist attitudes against Asian Americans as well as other communities of color. In doing so, professor Wu considers the model minority myth’s multiple points of emergence from the U.S. state, countries in Asia, and Asian American communities themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Thuy Linh Tu‘s The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (Duke University Press, 2010) considers the recent rise of Asian Americans working in New York’s fashion industry, and explores how Asian-inspired fashions speak to American anxieties concerning the growing economic and cultural power of Asian nation-states. Rather than see Asian American designers as either complicit or subversive to the growing trends of Asian chic, The Beautiful Generation investigates how these designers continue to change American perspectives of fashion by making relationships between the product and the manufacturing process more intimate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Rick Baldoz is the author of The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (NYU Press, 2011), which investigates the complex relationship between the U.S. and Filipinos. Unlike other Asian American groups, Filipinos were considered colonial subjects of the American empire, and therefore were granted more rights and were defined as national subjects. At the same time, these Filipinos and Filipinas were still perceived as aliens, and were characterized as sexually and morally deviant. Baldoz considers how American imperial ascendancy affected the identity of the Filipino and Filipina migrants in relation to Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Chinese migrants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Erin Khue Ninh is the author of Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York University Press, 2011), which in 2013, won the Literary Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Ingratitude investigates the figure of the daughter in Asian American literature, which has lately been dismissed as a figure that downplays political and historical conflict by fulfilling model minority achievement. Ninh responds to this view by seeing the immigrant family as a form of capitalist enterprise, and thus the Asian American daughter as a locus of conflicting power. Through literary analyses of texts by Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Evelyn Lau and others, Ninh explores the figure of the Asian American daughter as a debtor, whose obligation to the parents are always designated to fail, and whose rebellion comes in the form of sexual freedom and through the act of writing itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by

Julia H. Lee is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Interracial Encounters investigates the overlapping of African American and Asian American literature. By focusing on the diverse attitudes that blacks and Asian Americans had towards each other, Dr. Lee pushes against dominant conceptions of these groups as either totally cooperative or as totally antagonistic. Lee also explores how American nationalism was produced through this comparison, and shows how Afro-Asian representations allowed readers and writers to consider alliances outside of the American nation-state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Nicholas Hartlep is the author of The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success (Information Age, 2013). Dr. Hartlep is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Illinois State University Dr. Hartlep’s book, The Model Minority Stereotype, is a sourcebook of annotated bibliographies that offers summaries and sometimes critiques of Asian American scholarship dealing with the model minority stereotype. As the stereotype has continued to be a heated political and social issue among Asian Americans scholars, activists and people, it can be difficult to decipher the thousands of articles, chapters and theses written about it. By framing his project through an aggressive and forward-thinking lens, Dr. Hartlep traces the diverse history and themes pervading model minority scholarship, revealing their presumptions and contributions to the general field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.

While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and Dubai. Indeed, Filipina/o workers are ubiquitous around the globe, and may be the world’s first truly global labor force. In Robyn Rodriguez‘s new book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),Rodriguez explores labor brokerage as a global capitalist strategy wherein the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines. Rodriguez traces this trend in Filipina/o overseas workers, which has become one of the largest labor export systems in the world. Ultimately, she questions how and why citizens from the Philippines have come to be the most globalized workforce on

Read most any account of early Filipino America, and you’re likely to hear a story of roaming migrant bachelors who rarely settled. Yet if this was always the case, then how did third and forth generation Filipino/a Americans appear in the United States? In her sharply focused and elegantly written new book, Little Manila is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California (Duke University Press, 2013), Dawn B. Mabalon narrates a fifty year history of the Filipina/o settlement in Stockton, California’s Little Manila, the largest Filipino/a settlement in its time. In focusing on the Filipina women and the role of religion, family, and community, Mabalon’s study offers new and diverse conceptions of the early Filipino/a migrant. Her book reveals a space where sedentary Filipina/os started families, churches, unions and businesses, and where migratory Filipina/os came to relax, meet old friends, dance and gamble. Acting as a center of gravity for the emerging immigrant commun