Unseeing Empire

Unseeing Empire
Author: Bakirathi Mani
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1478012439

In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. She notes that the desire for South Asian Americans to see visual representations of themselves is rooted in the use of photography as a form of colonial documentation and surveillance. She examines fine art photography by South Asian diasporic artists who employ aesthetic strategies such as duplication and alteration that run counter to viewers' demands for greater visibility. These works fail to deliver on viewers' desires to see themselves, producing instead feelings of alienation, estrangement, and loss. These feelings, Mani contends, allow viewers to question their own visibility as South Asian Americans in U.S. public culture and to reflect on their desires to be represented.

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation
Author: David L. Eng
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2019-01-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478002689

In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.

The Color of Success

The Color of Success
Author: Ellen D. Wu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2015-12-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691168024

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History

The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History
Author: David Yoo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199860467

Introduction / David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma -- Part I. Migration flows -- Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and the American empire / Keith L. Camacho -- Towards a hemispheric Asian American history / Jason Oliver Chang -- South Asian America: histories, cultures, politics / Sunaina Maira -- Asians, native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in Hawai'i: people, place, culture / John P. Rosa -- Southeast Asian Americans / Chia Youyee Vang -- East Asian immigrants / K. Scott Wong -- Asian Canadian history / Henry Yu -- Part II. Time passages -- Internment and World War II history / Eiichiro Azuma -- Reconsidering Asian exclusion in the United States / Kornel S. Chang -- The Cold War / Madeline Y. Hsu -- The Asian American movement / Daryl Joji Maeda -- Part III. Variations on themes -- A history of Asian international adoption in the United States / Catherine Ceniza Choy -- Confronting the racial state of violence: how Asian American history can reorient the study of race / Moon-Ho Jung -- Theory and history / Lon Kurashige -- Empire and war in Asian American history / Simeon Man -- Queer Asian American historiography / Amy Sueyoshi -- The study of Asian American families / Xiaojian Zhao -- Part IV. Engaging historical fields -- Asian American economic and labor history / Sucheng Chan -- Asian Americans, politics, and history / Gordon H. Chang -- Asian American intellectual history / Augusto Espiritu -- Asian American religious history / Helen Jin Kim, Timothy Tseng, and David K. Yoo -- Race, space, and place in Asian American urban history / Scott Kurashige -- From Asia to the United States, around the world, and back again: new directions in Asian American immigration history / Erika Lee -- Public history and Asian Americans / Franklin Odo -- Asian American legal history / Greg Robinson -- Asian American education history / Eileen H. Tamura -- Not adding and stirring: women's, gender, and sexuality history and the transformation of Asian America / Adrienne Ann Winans and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

I Love Yous Are for White People

I Love Yous Are for White People
Author: Lac Su
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2009-05-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting, this stirring memoir chronicles one Asian-American immigrant's struggle to find himself--and to transcend the dangers of gang life in Los Angeles.

A People's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States
Author: Howard Zinn
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 764
Release: 2003-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780060528423

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools -- with its emphasis on great men in high places -- to focus on the street, the home, and the, workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles -- the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality -- were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. Revised, updated, and featuring a new after, word by the author, this special twentieth anniversary edition continues Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.

In Search of Our Frontier

In Search of Our Frontier
Author: Eiichiro Azuma
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520304381

In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.

Between Two Empires

Between Two Empires
Author: Eiichiro Azuma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2005-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195159403

The incarceration of Japanese Americans has been discredited as a major blemish in American democratic tradition. Accompanying this view is the assumption that the ethnic group held unqualified allegiance to the United States. Between Two Empires probes the complexities of prewar Japanese America to show how Japanese in America held an in-between space between the United States and the empire of Japan, between American nationality and Japanese racial identity.

Apparitions of Asia

Apparitions of Asia
Author: Josephine Park
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2008-02-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195332733

Apparitions of Asia traces a literary intimacy between the U.S. and East Asia that spans the twentieth century. Commercial and political bridges generated transpacific literary alliances, and Park analyzes American bards who capitalized on these ties and interrogates the price of such intimacies in the work of Asian American poets.