New Books in Asian American Studies

Interviews with Scholars of Asian America about their New Books

Society & Culture
History
201
Duncan Williams, “American Sutra: A Story of Fa...
American Sutra is also an inspiring account of how Japanese-Americans embodied faith, ingenuity and sacrifice in the face of great adversity...
87 min
202
Debra Thompson, "The Schematic State: Race, Tra...
This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity...
50 min
203
Ana Paulina Lee, "Mandarin Brazil: Race, Repres...
In her new book, Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press, 2018), Ana Paulina Lee (Columbia University) analyzes representations of the Chinese in Brazilian culture...
68 min
204
Jessica Trounstine, "Segregation by Design: Loc...
Segregation by Design draws on a century of data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments design policies that create race and class segregation...
22 min
205
Noenoe K. Silva, "Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstruct...
The process of colonialism seeks to demean Indigenous intellect and destroy Indigenous literary traditions...
45 min
206
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
207
Connie Chiang, “Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An E...
The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarc...
53 min
208
Janelle Wong, “Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Po...
Surprising to many, white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election at a higher rate than any candidate in the previous four presidential elections. At the same time, the Evangelical community is changing,
18 min
209
Jan M. Padios, “A Nation on the Line: Call Cent...
Jan M. Padios‘ new book A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Duke University Press, ) sheds light on the industry of offshore call centers in the Philippines, and attempts to understand the narratives cast...
61 min
210
Kawika Guillermo, “Stamped: An Anti-Travel Nove...
Today I talked with Kawika Guillermo, a creative scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. His book Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel (Westphalia Press, 2018) describes Skyler Faralan’s travels to Sou...
50 min
211
Lily Wong, “Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work,...
Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of ...
48 min
212
Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, “The Labor of Care...
Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez‘s new book, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2018) traces how globalization, neoliberalism and new technology have reshaped migrant care wo...
60 min
213
Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe, “Queering...
Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017), Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe gather artists and scholars whose work disrupts, challenges, and reimagines ways of being Asian and Asian American.
62 min
214
Mary-Kim Arnold, “Litany for the Long Moment” (...
In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and write...
56 min
215
Lon Kurashige, “Two Faces of Exclusion: The Unt...
In Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Lon Kurashige emphasizes the contingencies that shaped the history of Asian restriction and exclusion in the United Stat...
83 min
216
Amy Sueyoshi, “Discriminating Sex: White Leisur...
In Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American ‘Oriental’ (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Amy Sueyoshi argues that Americans did not always regard Chinese and Japanese in the U.S.
66 min
217
Beth Lew-Williams, “The Chinese Must Go: Violen...
The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants.
53 min
218
Simeon Man, “Soldiering through Empire: Race an...
Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S. global power after 1945.
44 min
219
David Atkinson, “The Burden of White Supremacy:...
Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United Sta...
69 min
220
Allison Varzally, “Children of Reunion: Vietnam...
In Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Allison Varzally documents the history of Vietnamese adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth ce...
59 min
221
Julian Lim, “Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrat...
With the railroad’s arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican,
44 min
222
Christopher B. Patterson, “Transitive Cultures:...
Christopher B. Patterson‘s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) reads English-language literary production from Southeast Asia and its diasporas in North America to recognize and reveal di...
46 min
223
Mark Padoongpatt, “Flavors of Empire: Food and ...
In Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), Mark Padoongpatt weaves together histories of food, empire, race, immigration, and Los Angeles in the second half of the twentieth century.
64 min
224
Harrod Suarez, “The Work of Mothering: Globaliz...
Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overseas Filipino/a workers,
60 min
225
Nicholas Trajano Molnar, “American Mestizos, th...
In 1898, the United States took control of the Philippines from the Spanish. The U.S. then entered into a brutal war to make the Filipinos submit to the new colonial power. The war and subsequent decades of U.S. rule meant a small,
51 min