New Books in Asian American Studies

Between 1901 and World War II, up to half of all U.S.-born Chinese Americans relocated to China in search of better lives due to the discrimination they faced in the United States. Charlotte Brooks tells the story of these emigres in American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901–1949 (University of California Press, 2019). Initially, Chinese American dual citizens found unprecedented professional opportunities as merchants and government officials in their ancestral homeland. However, shifting political conditions in China and hardening exclusionary policies in the U.S. narrowed their options in a world where they were considered neither Chinese nor American enough to receive the protection or respect of their governments. Faced with these constraints at a time of global depression and war, Chinese Americans made agonizing choices that led them down surprising paths—including, in some cases, as collaborators during the Japanese occupation of China. American Exodus challenges well-worn mythologies in the U.S. of upward mobility for immigrants, as well as celebratory and nationalist narratives in China about the overseas Chinese.Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (U California Press, 2023), Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a site for revealing how dominant ideas about sexuality are imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Karem Albrecht marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their interdependent networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Possible Histories conceptualizes this profession, and its place in narratives of Arab American history, as a "queer ecology" of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Associate Professor of American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also a core faculty member for the Arab and Muslim American Studies program. You can find her on Twitter: @ckaremalbrechtNajwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

The image of the US as leading a good war to establish liberal democracy and move towards racial equality dominate the discourses of the Cold War. In her work, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2020), Christine Hong attempts to debunk the idea of good war and warfare-welfare state that allowed women and racial minorities to participate in national politics by showing how the US government was able to launch total war that blurred the boundaries of home and abroad through the “principle of indistinction.” The supposed blurring of colorline through military desegregation and multilateral, multi-racial alliances hid fortification of the US empire as necropolitical war target broadened through indistinction of civilian, women, and children as possible enemies. The US counterinsurgency eroded democratizing, decolonizing movements abroad based on color lines, and rhetorical racial equality at home was accompanied by increased policing of “high-crime” areas where minorities resided. Hong theorizes a range of struggles such as Black freedom, Asian liberation, and decolonization as “homologous responses to unchecked US war and police power at home and abroad… [The] alignment, participation, and complicity with the US military… blurred the color line, giving a redemptive liberal veneer to US war politics in Asia and the Pacific” (8-9). Through rich analyses of literary texts of Ralph Ellison, Carlos Bulosan, and James Baldwin, Hong examines how POC authors contested the promise of liberal democracy while military-industrial complex and colonial violence sought to erase decolonizing struggles. Hong further draws attention to commercialization of hibakusha’s bodies as well as photographs of Miné Okubo to critique the construction of peace as American property. Hong’s groundbreaking work spans Asian American studies, critical Asian studies, and critical empire studies, challenging us to question the modernity that had been presented to us through seeming homogeneity of American liberal democratic ideals.Christine Hong is Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Asian American, Korean diaspora, U.S. war and empire, and comparative ethnic studies. She is also a board member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, an executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute, a coordinating committee member of the National Campaign to End the Korean War, and a member of the Working Group on Peace and Demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific. She is currently organizing a teaching initiative to end the Korean War.Da In Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include reproductive justice movement, care labor and migration, affect theory, citizenship, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Guest Padma Desai, an Indian woman with an academic journey from India to America, shares her story of breaking free from traditional constraints, navigating assimilation in American society, and achieving academic success. She reflects on her upbringing, culture shock at Harvard in the 1950s, and the impact of key figures on her journey.

Scott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism.As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practicing meditation, for example, than claiming Buddhist identity. A century ago, this would have been unthinkable. So how did Buddhism come to claim such a significant place in the American cultural landscape?The Making of American Buddhism (Oxford UP, 2023) offers an answer, showing how in the years on either side of World War II second-generation Japanese American Buddhists laid claim to an American identity inclusive of their religious identity. In the process they-and their allies-created a place for Buddhism in America. These sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants-known as “Nisei,” Japanese for “second-generation”-clustered around the Berkeley Bussei, a magazine published from 1939 to 1960. In the pages of the Bussei and elsewhere, these Nisei Buddhists argued that Buddhism was both what made them good Americans and what they had to contribute to America-a rational and scientific religion of peace.The Making of American Buddhism also details the behind-the-scenes labor that made Buddhist modernism possible. The Bussei was one among many projects that were embedded within Japanese American Buddhist communities and connected to national and transnational networks that shaped and allowed for the spread of modernist Buddhist ideas. In creating communities, publishing magazines, and hosting scholarly conventions and translation projects, Nisei Buddhists built the religious infrastructure that allowed the later Buddhist modernists, Beat poets, and white converts who are often credited with popularizing Buddhism to flourish. Nisei activists didn't invent American Buddhism, but they made it possible.Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Anne Giblin Gedacht’s Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) centers cross-border mobility in its narrative of the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book is a challenge to the stereotypical image of the Northeast as static and isolated. Focusing on Pacific migration―to Asia, North America, and the Philippines―Gedacht pieces together an account of how mobility and movement were instrumental in creating modern Tōhoku regional identities, and how this process was integral to Japan’s modern self-image. In this sense, Tōhoku Unbounded contributes to a growing body of literature exploring factors such as mobility and region in the construction of the modern world of nation-states.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Over the past several decades, the vibrant, multiethnic borough of Queens has seen growth in the community of Nepali migrants, many of whom are navigating the challenging bureaucratic process of asylum legalization. Surviving the Sanctuary City: Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York (U Washington Press, 2023) follows them through the institutional spaces of asylum offices, law firms, and human rights agencies to document the labor of seeking asylum. As an interpreter and a volunteer at a grassroots community center, anthropologist Tina Shrestha has witnessed how migrants must perform a particular kind of suffering that is legible to immigration judges and asylum officers. She demonstrates the lived contradictions asylum seekers face while producing their "suffering testimonials" and traces their attempts to overcome these contradictions through the Nepali notions of kaagaz banaune (making paper) and dukkha (suffering). Surviving the Sanctuary City asks what everyday survival among migrants and asylum seekers can tell us about the cultural logic of suffering within the confines of US borders. Through rich ethnographic detail and careful nuanced narratives, it puts the lives and perspectives of the Nepali migrant community at the center of the story. In so doing, Shrestha offers a fundamental rethinking of asylum seeking as a form of precarious labor and immigration enforcement in a rapidly changing US society.Tina Shrestha is a researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom (PM Press, 2022) tells a true story of mutiny on the high seas in which four hundred indentured Chinese men overthrew their captor, the Connecticut businessman and slave trader Leslie Bryson, taking a stand against an exploitative global enterprise. The laborers learned that Bryson’s claimed destination of San Francisco was a lie to trick them into deadly servitude in the dreaded guano islands of Peru. Reaching a dramatic tipping point, the mutineers rose up and killed Bryson and several of the ship's officers and then attempted to sail back to China.This book's centerpiece, a deft graphic account of the rebellion in the context of the “coolie trade” and the struggle to end traffic in human “cargo,” is supported by essays that spotlight the rebellion itself, how the subject of indentured Asian workers is being taught in classrooms, and how Chinese workers shaped the evolution of American music, particularly in the making of the first drum set. The Cargo Rebellion is a history from below that does justice to the memory of the hundreds of thousands of indentured workers and demonstrates how Asian migration to the Americas was rooted in slavery, colonialism, and the life-and-death struggle against servitude. Jason Chang is associate professor of history and Asian and Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. Benjamin Barson is assistant professor of music at Bucknell University. Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut, specializing in modern Japan, modern Korea, and international history. Kim Inthavong is a visual artist. She received her BA from the University of Madison–Wisconsin and is engaged in numerous arts projects. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Eram Alam talks with us about shortage. A political tool, rather than a natural lack, the concept of a shortage changes the flows of goods and people across borders and space. The concept of a doctor shortage was used in the US immigration reform of the 1960s to recruit discount elite labor from newly postcolonial nations, creating the downstream effect of shortages in their countries of origin. These recruiting practices remain in effect, with a US physician workforce that is approximately 25% international medical graduates, while domestic and international doctor shortages abound.Eram Alam is an assistant professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her book The Care of Foreigners studies the enduring consequences of post-colonial migration from Asia to the US. We’re so excited to read it when it comes out! In the meantime, you can read her article “Cold War Crises: Foreign Medical Graduates Respond to US Doctor Shortages, 1965–1975” Social History of Medicine 33 no. 1 (Feb 2020).This week’s image of a hospital corridor was uploaded to the image sharing site Pixbay by a user named Mitrey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In this episode, we discuss how myths of suburbia, the American West, and the American Dream informed regional planning, suburban design, and ideas about race and belonging in California’s East San Gabriel Valley as found in James Zarsadiaz’s debut monograph Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. Published by the University of California Press in October 2022, Resisting Change in Suburbia recently won the Organization of American Historians' Lawrence W. Levine Award, which is an honor acknowledging the year’s best book in American cultural history.Throughout the six chapters, Zarsadiaz illustrates the demographic transitions of the suburbs making up the East San Gabriel Valley from the 1960s through the 1990s and how these communities, despite racial and class differences, sought to protect their connections to a perceived ideal of country living away from LA’s ever-expanding metropolitan center. Zarsadiaz constructs the region’s history of settlement, quite literally, from the ground up by taking us through the development of master plans neighborhoods emulating a rural suburban American experience such as Phillips Ranch and Rowland Heights, to the regulations on architectural aesthetics following the arrival of Asian residents found in Chino Hills and Walnut, to the dueling narratives of whether to incorporate or not incorporate found in Hacienda Heights and Diamond Bar. In short, Resisting Change in Suburbia “serves a window into the mindset, perspectives, and lives of typically upwardly mobile suburbanites” (15) of the East San Gabriel Valley and how the suburbs they lived in “grappled with spatial, demographic, and political change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries” (4-5).Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies