Search

In 2021, Illinois became the first state in the United States to require that K-12 students learn about Asian American history. Illinois achieved this when lawmakers passed House Bill 376 (H.B. 376), colloquially known as the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act. H.B. 376 received praise for being the first legislation of its kind, and its passage inspired similar bills in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Given the bill's influence, it is imperative to consider its language and utility. This critical policy analysis specifically investigates lawmakers' employment of the term "Asian American." The analysis ultimately argues that H.B. 376 is a necessary first step in breaking centuries of silence and dislocation for Asian Americans; however, the bill advances a social definition—or sociopolitical understanding—of "Asian American" that is potentially harmful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how Southeast Asian American students develop their ethnoracial identities at an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI) and a non-AANAPISI, and if there are differences between the two institutions. Drawing on interviews with 26 Southeast Asian American undergraduate students, I find that students use three outlets at both institutions to further develop their ethnoracial identities: 1) Asian American Studies or related courses, 2) ethnoracial student organizations, and 3) ethnoracial events. However, these outlets provided students with a different type of ethnoracial identity development – political ethnoracial identity or social ethnoracial identity. Those that did not participate in these outlets had a colorblind ethnoracial identity as they still acknowledged their ethnoracial identities but did not view race or racism as relevant. The AANAPISI designation did not matter in the parameters of this study, as there were no differences for students at both institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Star Trek: Voyager's Ensign Harry Kim, portrayed by Taiwanese American actor Garrett Wang, remains the character of East Asian descent with the most on-screen time in the Star Trek franchise, the Kim character remains under-examined by scholars, often reduced to his widely lamented exclusions from professional advancement and durable heterosexual romance. By assembling a trans-media archive including Wang's previous work in Asian American theater and the Kim character's queer Asian American reception, this paper instead reads Kim and Wang for their experiments in alternative forms of ethical response to vexed dynamics attending Asian American masculinity, extending dialogues between feminist and queer currents in sf and Asian American studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how three Asian American educators utilize AsianCrit theory and culturally sustaining pedagogy to integrate the rich history and diverse experiences of Asian Americans into their teaching practices. It states that by focusing on the historical context of Asian American studies and addressing systemic racism, the educators seek to foster a more inclusive and critical curriculum that acknowledges and uplifts Asian American voices.

This article explores the concept of brownness and its complexities, emphasizing that it should be understood as plural and encompassing various aspects of identity, race, feeling, and relation. It examines the historical and global dimensions of brownness, including its connections to imperialism, racial science, activism, and empire. The text challenges traditional notions of brownness and diaspora, highlighting the importance of considering diverse perspectives and expanding the understanding of these terms. It also discusses the convergence of the infrastructural and the intimate in understanding brownness and its generative possibilities. The article includes a portfolio feature that explores indenture through visual and literary cultural production, highlighting its impact on connected oceanic worlds and racial formations. The issue of the academic journal includes essays that challenge existing parameters of knowledge and open up new conversations about brownness, covering topics such as self-fashioning in British imperial literature, diasporas, economies of salvation, and the ontology of brownness. The text also discusses the artwork of Mattai, which explores themes of oceanic migrations, indentured labor, and colonization, challenging traditional border-making practices and expanding our understanding of brownness and racialization. [Extracted from the article]

Multiracialism, or the concept of "mixed-race", remains a key racial discourse within twenty-first-century North American societies. Scholarly and mainstream studies of multiracial people often highlight the function of speech in theorizing mixed-race experiences, where interviews or other first-person narratives resist racialized stereotypes and express complex multiracial identities. Yet these studies often overlook the body as a comparable analytical site, ignoring how the body's mobilization—in dance, choreography, and everyday actions—might further nuance mixed-race subjecthood. My article emphasizes experimental dance and choreography as alternative methods for imagining multiracial subjects, where these body-based approaches reject both stereotypical depictions of multiracial people in mainstream media and "transparent" representations in interviews. Drawing on the concept of "opacity," which describes unknowable, illegible difference, I propose that experimental dance enables the expression of "opaque" multiracial subjectivities. This article then offers a choreographic analysis of Glenn Potter-Takata's Yonsei f*ck f*ck, an experimental dance that produces opacities for its performers, who are of mixed Japanese heritage. Through movement scores, stand-up comedy, and a re-created "late-night" talk show, the dance invites audiences to move beyond the desire to recognize, categorize, and "know" the mixed-race Asian American performer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss how walking as mapping serves as a method for observing and disrupting spatial geopolitics, opening possibilities for alternative systems of living. I explore three theoretical perspectives--posthumanism, Indigenous and decolonializing theories of land, and Black geography--that, while distinct, nonetheless share some overlapping characteristics: the recognition and contestation of knowledge systems, the turn toward a relational ethics of living, and a call for critical and creative methods of intervention into existing systems. In the final half of the paper, I consider these orientations and their call for creative and critical methods of intervention as I review my scholarship on walking and how it has served as a form of counterstory mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mitski Miyawaki, a Japanese American indie-rock artist professionally known as Mitski, wrote her 2016 song, “Your Best American Girl,” from the perspective of a woman who is unable to have a relationship with her love interest due to their different racial and cultural backgrounds. The accompanying music video engages with the song’s social message while adding nuance and complexity to it. Many of the lyrics portray Mitski’s feelings of isolation as an Asian American woman, especially through their employment of Japanese cultural symbols, while the music video uses parody, camera angles, and Americana iconography to further illustrate Mitski’s experiences of isolation. This essay analyzes the subtle ways in which “Your Best American Girl” subverts Asian stereotypes and destabilizes white patriarchal structures that are perpetrated by popular media, particularly through white centrality in the indie-rock genre. Comparison of “Your Best American Girl” to Lana Del Rey’s “Born to Die” music video reveals how “Your Best American Girl” uses parody techniques to criticize this white centrality. Further, its references to PJ Harvey allows Mitski to occupy a similar position of musical authenticity and command respect. Through lyrical, musical, and visual storytelling, “Your Best American Girl” chronicles Mitski’s journey towards self-acceptance, while critiquing the pervasive whiteness in romantic narratives.

This study is an exploration of mixed race narratives in postmodern literature, specifically in its iterations of Blasianness. In exploring the literary representation of Blasian individuals, this research does not seek to impose a concrete definition on what it means to exist at the intersection of Blackness and Asianness. Rather, it implores the implications of representing Black/Asian mixedness as it has manifested thus far via literary fiction.Because of the newness of its presence in the popular imagination, we have yet to form a developed vocabulary for thinking about multiraciality as it pertains to Blasianness; a central goal of this study is to extend us towards remedying that epistemological shortcoming. Adding to the burgeoning field of Critical Mixed Race Studies, this paper dissects the limits and possibilities of Blasian representation by interrogating modernity, racialization, and what critical mixed race studies theorist Michele Elam calls the anti-Bildungsroman—an alternative coming-of-age narrative that positions mixed race characters as periphery to an assimilationary arc. Using the resulting framework alongside the narratives of Lisa Countryman from Don Lee’s Country of Origin and Joey Sands from Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, I argue that the representation of Blasians in postmodern literature complicates how we imagine racial being in ways that are both limiting and expansive.

The image of the Apsara, a celestial dancer in Cambodian myth, is closely associated with Cambodian cultural preservation practices like Cambodian classical dance. The Apsara, its aesthetic features and its association with Cambodian cultural preservation have taken on new meaning in Cambodia's diasporic communities. In the diaspora, Apsara aesthetics have come to symbolize Cambodian heritage, history and identity, becoming a major feature of performances by Cambodian diasporic artists. However, orientalist expectations of Asian performers in the diaspora, paired with both the forgotten history of colonial intervention in Cambodian arts and state-sanctioned initiatives towards Cambodian nationalism, contributes to orientalist (and thus racialized) expectations of Cambodian diasporic performance. Mixed-race artists fail to fit neatly into the dominant narratives of Cambodian performance and have been marginalized by the Cambodian diasporic community's dominant conceptions of performance that are rooted in cultural preservation. As people that sit outside of the aestheticized markers of Cambodian-ness, mixed-race artists often struggle to have their work and their subjectivities recognized by their communities. To circumvent questions of their racial legibility, mixed-race Cambodian American artists construct performances that are strategically padded with markers of Khmer identity by engaging with Apsara aesthetics. This article will explore how three different SoCal-based artists have negotiated their Cambodian American identity and cultural politics through performance and/or performance related materials (ads, images, etc.). I will be using examples from the work of music artist and violinist Chrysanthe Tan, theater practitioner Kalean Ung, and autoethnographic engagement with my own creative projects to show how examining the work of multi-racial Cambodian American performing artists can bring forth the complex dynamics of Cambodian diasporic cultural politics and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the little-known experiences and memories of Korean 'guestworker' nurses who 'twice migrated'; first moving to Germany and then migrating to the US in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on extended, repeat interviews with four former nurses, their stories underscore how little is known about this wave of Korean migrant women, specifically, and why they decided to migrate, where, and how. The findings highlight how these women were agents of their own mobility, seeing the opportunity to migrate to Germany as the means by which to acquire independence and autonomy as young women. Further, their stories showed how twice migration to the US was not always experienced as a positive and more advantageous destination, particularly for the women. Instead, it was presented as a choice that many were forced to make, often because it was seen to benefit their spouses or children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi's queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom's Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women's community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh's utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn in Asian American studies to questions of Indigeneity and settler colonialism is of recent vintage considering that in the 1910s, Thind and Ozawa both grappled with their vexed relation to the figure of the native. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journey of Asian Americans in the United States is vital to understanding the perspective that Asian immigrants take on the way to becoming Asian Americans. Within the past century, Asians in America have played an essential role in communities across the country. In order to understand the efforts it takes for some of these people, our "Internship in Asian American Studies" (ASAM 490) class explored their experiences and lives by highlighting Asian American and Asian business owners in Greater Lafayette, other areas in Indiana. With a lack of vocalization about this topic, it is crucial to establish this voice for the Asian and Asian American communities. In our service-learning project, we created a narrative over images captured to visualize the history of the Asian Americans we interviewed. Through this narrative, we hope to enable a more established engagement within our campus archives both institutionally and academically in order to showcase the Asian American community and the successes and triumphs that those in the Greater Lafayette area have overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While considerable attention has been given to the ways that parents contribute to undergraduates' success, far less attention has been given to what these students do for their families, variation in students' provision of help, or the consequences of giving. Drawing on 61 interviews with Asian American college students from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds, this paper extends conventional understanding of families and college by analyzing the financial assistance and translation support Asian American undergraduates give their parents. Using a trichotomous model of class—comparing disadvantaged, advantaged, and ambiguous students—I show that class disadvantage motivated students' helping, advantage deterred it, while the ambiguous fell in between. Culture (i.e., filial piety) and a broad view of family (i.e., siblings' contributions) also influenced students' help. Finally, based on interview data combined with partial support from analysis of participants' grade point averages data, I demonstrate that helping had positive and negative implications for students' college experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical language awareness (CLA) encourages teachers and students to examine language as social practice and reflect on ideologies and power dynamics embedded within language use. In this article, the authors—both instructors in an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) federal grant project at a university in New York City—describe how we integrated a CLA framework to create an Asian American Studies class that uses culturally sustaining pedagogies to affirm student linguistic identities and demystify academic research practices. Specifically, we analyzed a project where we introduced the term linguistic landscapes (LL) and asked students to visit Asian American ethnic enclaves to examine linguistic signage. While implementations of CLA have been based in K-12 instruction, university writing courses, and teacher education courses, this paper presents a successful example of a project based in CLA used in credit-bearing university courses, specifically, in an Asian American Studies program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most unusual, influential, and overlooked figures in the early history of Buddhism in the United States was Swami Mazziniananda (pseudonym, unknown-1931), a former patent medicine salesman and quack doctor who became a spiritualist minister and fortune teller while claiming dubious credentials as a Buddhist bishop at the turn of the century. This article traces the rise of Mazziniananda and his connections to the Buddhist Mission of North America, as well as the circumstances surrounding their split and his final years. I suggest that the best way to understand the figure of Mazziniananda-his mixture of Buddhism and occultism, real engagement with other Buddhists and fabricated titles and rituals-is as a type of Buddhist "wandering bishop." Finally, I argue that in light of his close ties with the Japanese Buddhist establishment, the influence of his liturgy and hymnals, and the deep engagement with the occult by his contemporaries and the members of the Dharma Sangha of Buddha that preceded him, Swami Mazziniananda is best seen not as a marginal or atypical figure, but rather as central and emblematic of the Euro-American Buddhist converts of his time and the deep linkages between occultism and the history of Japanese Buddhism in America.

This excerpt from Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific asks how South East Asian writing in English can be analyzed in conjunction with texts from its North American diasporas to reread forms of global multiculturalism within a longer genealogy of “pluralist governmentality:” an art of government that expects individuals to visibly express their difference via given group identities, and in doing so, to represent imperial state power as neutral, universal, or benevolent. Patterson asks how South East Asian migrant narratives deracinate the optics of pluralist governmentality by emphasizing forms of transitivity that Patterson dubs “transitive cultures,” the sets of camouflaged and shifting cultural practices tactically mobilized in contexts where identity is defined as fixed and authentic. To read across ethnicized genres and identities, Patterson reframes Asian migrant texts as transpacific Anglophone texts—a category that stresses encounter and exchange—and shines a spotlight on works that trouble a global multiculturalist reading because they are deemed “inauthentic” to both nationalist literatures, global literatures, and American ethnic literatures. Chapter 4, Just an American Darker than the Rest: On Queer Brown Exile, extends the inquiries of transitivity by reading texts of queer brown migrancy. It pairs Lawrence Chua’s 1998 novel, Gold by the Inch, with R. Zamora Linmark’s 2011 novel, Leche. Both novels consider queer of color travel as a rejection of American senses of brownness and homonormativity.

R.F. Kuang’s bestselling 2022 fantasy novel, Babel, is set in the years leading up to the Opium Wars and chronicles the story of a Cantonese boy who is ferried to Oxford to learn the art of translation—and eventually discovers that his academic work is a tool used by the British imperial project. Kuang’s main character names himself after his favorite writer, Jonathan Swift, and the novel takes on a queer structure that aligns with Swiftian logic. This article examines this transhistorical intertextuality and reads both Swifts together. In so doing, and drawing from queer and Asian American studies work on “sideways”ness, this article argues for a sideways reading practice. This reading practice, the article theorizes and demonstrates, orients the reader obliquely to the text, accounts for narrative nonlinearity, asides, and marginalized perspectives, and challenges the more normative, imperial systems of signification these texts initially seem to propose and ultimately refute.

This autoethnographic essay and curation of visual notes and illustrations sheds light on the transformative power of visual notetaking as Asian American art practice. I focus on the influence the field of Asian American studies has had on my life in developing my critical consciousness and the way in which my activist practice remains grounded in sharing Asian American stories through creative forms of Asian American literature such as visual notes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we offer a specific example from our programmatic research and teaching praxis during the COVID-19 anti-Asian hate pandemic period. We demonstrate how Asian American Studies community-centered knowledge coproduction and narrative generational wealth investment can address critical experiences of young learners from underrepresented, religiously-diverse populations through content that supports culturally sustaining child development and challenges disparately impactful realities of racism, misrepresentation, and systemic Western biases which undermine their health and wellbeing. Focusing on religious themes in relation to child development was not an explicit intention of our collaboratively developed storybook project titled, Hira Makes a Sound. Nevertheless, centering a women-led, intergenerational Nepali immigrant story in both our process and final product necessarily led to foregrounding religious, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of diasporic family and community life that are essential to coping and development for the fictional lead character, Hira, and her loved ones. Robust story data themes—paradoxically grounded in the ether of a shared Gurung worldview—provide generative lessons for researchers, educators, artists, and community advocates who work with or need to account for the lived experiences of young learners within religiously diverse, multi-generational immigrant family households and community ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first describes two high-impact, foundational examples in Asian American Studies over three decades that successfully established and sustained inclusive and equitable educational environments at an urban, public, and federally designated Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Institution (AANAPISI) research university. Secondly, the article introduces the purpose, process, and product of a fresh programmatic example of cross-generational, community-centered storytelling initiated during the contemporary dual-pandemic period of COVID-19 and anti-Asian hate. Through these examples, we argue that AANAPISIs with longstanding Asian American Studies curricular and pedagogical commitments to transformative educational praxis can offer especially valuable insights for U.S. higher education precisely because the purposeful, strategic attention to developing equitable, inclusive learning environments is so well-developed. Within our own context, we specifically highlight the impacts and importance of developing long-term ecologies to support culturally sustaining curricula and storytelling co-production processes led by core faculty with students and alumni. These examples are particularly salient for under-resourced, predominantly commuter institutions where student engagement with faculty and peers in classroom environments is so vital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of the Apsara, a celestial dancer in Cambodian myth, is closely associated with Cambodian cultural preservation practices like Cambodian classical dance. The Apsara, its aesthetic features and its association with Cambodian cultural preservation have taken on new meaning in Cambodia’s diasporic communities. In the diaspora, Apsara aesthetics have come to symbolize Cambodian heritage, history and identity, becoming a major feature of performances by Cambodian diasporic artists. However, orientalist expectations of Asian performers in the diaspora, paired with both the forgotten history of colonial intervention in Cambodian arts and state-sanctioned initiatives towards Cambodian nationalism, contributes to orientalist (and thus racialized) expectations of Cambodian diasporic performance. Mixed-race artists fail to fit neatly into the dominant narratives of Cambodian performance and have been marginalized by the Cambodian diasporic community’s dominant conceptions of performance that are rooted in cultural preservation. As people that sit outside of the aestheticized markers of Cambodian-ness, mixed-race artists often struggle to have their work and their subjectivities recognized by their communities. To circumvent questions of their racial legibility, mixed-race Cambodian American artists construct performances that are strategically padded with markers of Khmer identity by engaging with Apsara aesthetics. This article will explore how three different SoCal-based artists have negotiated their Cambodian American identity and cultural politics through performance and/or performance related materials (ads, images, etc.). I will be using examples from the work of music artist and violinist Chrysanthe Tan, theater practitioner Kalean Ung, and autoethnographic engagement with my own creative projects to show how examining the work of multi-racial Cambodian American performing artists can bring forth the complex dynamics of Cambodian diasporic cultural politics and belonging.

Multiracialism, or the concept of “mixed-race”, remains a key racial discourse within twenty-first-century North American societies. Scholarly and mainstream studies of multiracial people often highlight the function of speech in theorizing mixed-race experiences, where interviews or other first-person narratives resist racialized stereotypes and express complex multiracial identities. Yet these studies often overlook the body as a comparable analytical site, ignoring how the body’s mobilization—in dance, choreography, and everyday actions—might further nuance mixed-race subjecthood. My article emphasizes experimental dance and choreography as alternative methods for imagining multiracial subjects, where these body-based approaches reject both stereotypical depictions of multiracial people in mainstream media and “transparent” representations in interviews. Drawing on the concept of “opacity,” which describes unknowable, illegible difference, I propose that experimental dance enables the expression of “opaque” multiracial subjectivities. This article then offers a choreographic analysis of Glenn Potter-Takata’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck, an experimental dance that produces opacities for its performers, who are of mixed Japanese heritage. Through movement scores, stand-up comedy, and a re-created “late-night” talk show, the dance invites audiences to move beyond the desire to recognize, categorize, and “know” the mixed-race Asian American performer.

This essay examines “Asian American Activism studies” and asks:  What changes through the legibility of Asian American activism studies?  What does Asian American activism research uniquely offer?  We offer a historiographical analysis examining topical themes as well as theoretical and methodological interventions across time.  We provide an overview of the articles in this special issue.  We discuss future directions, attending to the ways that research on activism remains surprisingly sparse in certain major areas within Asian American studies as well as to the ways that particular trends within the field are anticipated to shape activism studies.

"The Diversity Requirement" takes on anti-neoliberal criticisms of the post-2008 US university as emblematized by quit lit, the essay genre in which tenure-track hopefuls announce that they are leaving academia, as deracinated yet totalizing theories that ignore how racism structures institutional contingency and academic precarity, even when the diversity requirement is a norm. This article responds by turning to the Asian American campus novel, a generic category not readily deployed because of the recurrence of universities in literary and lived model minority narratives. Taking Asian American institutional racialization as representative of the ambivalence that subtends contingency, "The Diversity Requirement" connects the author's experience as contingent faculty and as staff of the campus diversity requirement to readings of Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel (2010) and Weike Wang's Chemistry: A Novel (2017) through the figure of the Asian American student teacher, the apt pupils within liberal whiteness who lack expertise or experience and yet are tasked with teaching responsibilities for diversity without full access to institutional power. In doing so, this article theorizes ambivalent contingency—a mitigated agency and constrained privilege from within institutional contingency that reflects contradicting intersections of power within and beyond the individual—as a strategy for surviving the institution without reproducing its logics of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the construct of parental home or maher in my native language Marathi—as a social, emotional, cultural, spiritual, physical, and lived construct. Maher informs my struggle to comprehend the construct of home and its relationship to displacement, loss of familiarity, nostalgia, and the liminal. I juxtapose my experiences of being a newly married woman of Indian origin in the United States, with my experiences of being a new graduate student in a reputed North American university—both simultaneous life events. This article is an autoethnographical reflection on my negotiation of my marital and academic landscapes where I found my identity and ontological orientations challenged. The borderlands that resulted from geo-familial displacement and ontological displacement in academia intersected to create vantage points and liminal spaces that allowed me to explore, re-orient, and assert my ontological roots that are informed by Indian philosophy—specifically, the Advaita Vedanta approach. This article explores the power of art as research and the process of art-making as a process synchronous to researching to explore identity in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we offer a specific example from our programmatic research and teaching praxis during the COVID-19 anti-Asian hate pandemic period. We demonstrate how Asian American Studies community-centered knowledge coproduction and narrative generational wealth investment can address critical experiences of young learners from underrepresented, religiously-diverse populations through content that supports culturally sustaining child development and challenges disparately impactful realities of racism, misrepresentation, and systemic Western biases which undermine their health and wellbeing. Focusing on religious themes in relation to child development was not an explicit intention of our collaboratively developed storybook project titled, Hira Makes a Sound. Nevertheless, centering a women-led, intergenerational Nepali immigrant story in both our process and final product necessarily led to foregrounding religious, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of diasporic family and community life that are essential to coping and development for the fictional lead character, Hira, and her loved ones. Robust story data themes—paradoxically grounded in the ether of a shared Gurung worldview—provide generative lessons for researchers, educators, artists, and community advocates who work with or need to account for the lived experiences of young learners within religiously diverse, multi-generational immigrant family households and community ecologies.

This article first describes two high-impact, foundational examples in Asian American Studies over three decades that successfully established and sustained inclusive and equitable educational environments at an urban, public, and federally designated Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Institution (AANAPISI) research university. Secondly, the article introduces the purpose, process, and product of a fresh programmatic example of cross-generational, community-centered storytelling initiated during the contemporary dual-pandemic period of COVID-19 and anti-Asian hate. Through these examples, we argue that AANAPISIs with longstanding Asian American Studies curricular and pedagogical commitments to transformative educational praxis can offer especially valuable insights for U.S. higher education precisely because the purposeful, strategic attention to developing equitable, inclusive learning environments is so well-developed. Within our own context, we specifically highlight the impacts and importance of developing long-term ecologies to support culturally sustaining curricula and storytelling co-production processes led by core faculty with students and alumni. These examples are particularly salient for under-resourced, predominantly commuter institutions where student engagement with faculty and peers in classroom environments is so vital.

Through Our Eyes, Hear Our Voices is a virtual photovoice project that documents the impact of COVID-19 on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Quantitative studies on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 are still emerging, but they do not reveal qualitative experiences of a racialized pandemic exacerbated by political leaders labeling it "China virus." As a qualitative participatory action research approach, photovoice is an ideal archival and pedagogical tool to capture the lived experience of AAPI communities. However, we had to adapt photovoice to a virtual research environment. We did so by adopting a variety of digital learning and information sharing platforms. In addition, we enlisted community-based organizations who are providing essential services for underrepresented communities to serve as research mentors for university student researchers. Finally, given the historic nature of the pandemic and the underrepresentation of AAPI experiences in mainstream archives, we emphasized the importance of students as co-producers of archival knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating "Asian America" and "Asia" in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most "Asiatic" genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the "real" genres of race and neo-Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-raciallyidentifying North American designers--Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee-- and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon recent work in Asian and Asian American studies, this essay explores dissonance, rather than disinterestedness, and its function and form for literary studies in our present time. It is inspired not only by my rereading of Matthew Arnold's essay but also the convergence of key events over the course of the last few years, ranging from recent attention to Asian and Asian American cultural production to anti-Asian hate crimes. As an Asian Americanist, I research and teach in a field whose very emergence was tied to activist claims for institutional and disciplinary space. I therefore find it profoundly difficult to imagine our endeavors in American literary studies as "disinterested." I am less invested in making the case whether or not the study of Asian American literature "matters"; rather, here I explore why Asian American literary studies—a method that seeks out and dwells in dissonance and urgency rather than disinterestedness and patience—might be a model worth continuing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our speculative ethnography of Chinese student experience in the United States during COVID-19 weds the tradition of speculative fiction (exemplified by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler) and digital autoethnography. The study is two-pronged: First, we articulate/map the methodological merits of speculative and digital autoethnography as particularly conducive to the crisis context of COVID-19 and its accompanying social isolation; second, we deploy said methodology within a population of nine Chinese students "trapped" in the United States during the COVID-19 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I address how walking as a curatorial practice of storying a neighborhood facilitates an irreducible politics of place occurring as affective intensities at various registers, where everyday movements entangle with spatial enactments of racism. Working with theories of assemblage and immanent movement, I examine walking narratives in San Jose Japantown, California (U.S.), a historic, ethnic neighborhood historically subjected to U.S. government and banking practices of "redlining" and Japanese American incarceration and dislocation to prison camps. As an analytical method, assemblage requires attention to movement: material elements of arrangement, the relations they require, new arranging and arrangements they might enable, and how these arrangements are legitimated. I examine spatial racism as an assemblage, analyzing its affective qualities wherein attentiveness to immanent movement might breach the assemblage and, in doing so, reach toward radical reformation through memorialization, community activism and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Man from Beijing depicts ethnic Chinese workers on the US transcontinental railroad, a literary development that challenges the linguistic boundaries nominally associated with Asian American Studies. Of equal importance, I argue, is the way Mankell expands the cartography of Nordic Noir to encompass capitalism's old-new frontiers in China (PRC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Arif Dirlik's work on the Asia-Pacific region's transformation into a "model region of globalization." Writing amidst the crisis of the Social Sciences, Dirlik analyzed how global capitalism's drive to simultaneously homogenize and fragment the world, a condition he termed "global modernity," had not only restructured the Asia-Pacific region so as to meet the demands of a new flexible mode of production, but also transformed knowledge production about the world, giving way to an endless splintering of knowledge that reinforced the logics of global capitalism and foreclosed any possibility for radical critique. Drawing on Asian American studies, Pacific Studies and Indigenous Studies, which emerged in the Asian-Pacific borderlands between social activism and the academy, Dirlik called attention to the local as the primary site of inquiry and advocated for radical scholarly and activist approaches grounded in a "critical localism" against the hegemony of global capitalism. This paper explores how Dirlik's work on the Asia-Pacific region generates the possibility for crafting what the anarchist sociologist Philippe Corcuff describes as "fragile epistemologies" of the plural social global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposals for Global Asias as an emerging field that "bridges" Asian studies and Asian American studies should attend to the residual debris of older understandings of global bridging work. This response explores two motifs for speculating about what bridging work in Global Asias could be: stars, as understood in terms of interimperial constellations, and sandbars, as a metaphor for more local, coalitional, and temporary aggregations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws on the philosophy, principles, and practices animating Global Asias scholarship to consider how this conceptual rubric shifts the ways in which we approach the subjects, objects, methods, and praxes of the academic study of Asia. Structurally dissonant as an epistemological project, Global Asias encourages scholars to acknowledge the institutional designs and disciplinary practices that currently organize and make legible work on Asia and its diasporas while simultaneously highlighting the limits of, and points of noncontact between, the broader infrastructures (including area studies, ethnic studies, diaspora studies, and the disciplines and interdisciplines) under which such work has traditionally been organized. In addition to offering a conceptual topography of Global Asias, this essay proposes three praxis-oriented concepts—relational nonalignment, structural dissonance, and imaginable ageography—that enable Global Asias as a tactical and evolving approach to the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas, one which actively resists the drive toward "critical consolidation" that often results from academic paradigm work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how an Asian/American woman leader-scholar (and others un/like her) have processed the Atlanta Massacre of 2021 and other types of racialized violence in and out of the academy by drawing on the analytic frameworks of Orientalism and racialized sexualization. This critical autoethnography involved synthesizing traumatic reflections into concept maps by drawing from the content of author-generated poems, e-mails, institutional statements, and journal entries based on a series of critical incidents that occurred between March 15, 2021 to March 22, 2021, as well as over the past several decades. She describes how many leaders at White-dominated institutions of higher education have perpetually dishonored Asian/Americans and other BIPOC faculty, staff, and students through their in/actions, mis/behaviors, and mis/deeds before, during, and after the Atlanta Massacre March 16, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a Korean adoptee engaged in critical adoption studies research, my personal perspectives and academic pursuits are inherently intertwined. Because I come from an interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies background, the scholars and writers who influence and inform my work are diverse in their perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. In my own research, I draw from the creative voices of transracial adoptee writers, frameworks of gendered colonialism, the interdisciplinary field of Asian American Studies, and the emerging scholarship of Korean adoption studies. My academic engagement with these bodies of research and wisdom has led to not only clarity in my own research, but has contributed to defining my sense of self as a transracial, transnational adoptee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This excerpt from Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific asks how South East Asian writing in English can be analyzed in conjunction with texts from its North American diasporas to reread forms of global multiculturalism within a longer genealogy of “pluralist governmentality:” an art of government that expects individuals to visibly express their difference via given group identities, and in doing so, to represent imperial state power as neutral, universal, or benevolent. Patterson asks how South East Asian migrant narratives deracinate the optics of pluralist governmentality by emphasizing forms of transitivity that Patterson dubs “transitive cultures,” the sets of camouflaged and shifting cultural practices tactically mobilized in contexts where identity is defined as fixed and authentic. To read across ethnicized genres and identities, Patterson reframes Asian migrant texts as transpacific Anglophone texts—a category that stresses encounter and exchange—and shines a spotlight on works that trouble a global multiculturalist reading because they are deemed “inauthentic” to both nationalist literatures, global literatures, and American ethnic literatures. Chapter 4, Just an American Darker than the Rest: On Queer Brown Exile, extends the inquiries of transitivity by reading texts of queer brown migrancy. It pairs Lawrence Chua’s 1998 novel, Gold by the Inch, with R. Zamora Linmark’s 2011 novel, Leche. Both novels consider queer of color travel as a rejection of American senses of brownness and homonormativity.

In this critical autoethnography, the author counter/narrates how she has navigated the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and structural racism predicated on over four centuries of racial oppression that reached a zenith on May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a White police officer. As an Asian American woman dean of education at a White-dominated regional university, she weaves in between the past and present to discuss the multilayered intersections between the lives and livelihoods of Asian Americans and Black Americans by theorizing contemporary meanings of the historic slogan from the 1960s: "Yellow Peril Supports Black Power." She reflects on a few critical moments during the dual pandemics where she has navigated predominantly White spaces that have attempted to center tired-old platitudes around justice for George Floyd despite the daily persistence of blatantly and subtly racist practices against individuals who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the occasion of celebrating the theoretical long durée of Strange Encounters to think about two radically different forms of strange encounters. At the moment when Strange Encounters is celebrating its 20th anniversary it is important for feminists and scholars of race and ethnicity to reflect on the possibilities that Ahmed's work has provided for our critical perspectives about contemporary formations of race, gender and sexuality. The article considers two case studies: an art installation titled Enemy Kitchen by Michael Rakowitz and the memoir Know My Name by Chanel Miller. The article begins by thinking through what it means to form eating publics that often draw strangers together. Intimacy formed through strangers in this context is to be understood as generative and enabling. The kinds of intimacy that are enabled and formed through encounters with the stranger, I argue, are constitutive of positive social change that implicitly jettison the heteronormative logic of familial and familiar intimacy to imagine social worlds and possibilities in which radically different possibilities for coming together – via acts of shared commensality – are imagined and realized. The paper then moves to a different example of the encounter with the stranger, Chanel Miller's memoir. Using Ahmed's work, I explore what it means to confront strange encounters that involve coming into proximity with strange bodies that actually mean to harm women of colour. I shift from thinking about the enabling possibility of coming into contact with strangers to examine the latent violence of the encounter with the stranger that is structurally embedded in the rape survivor narrative. Together, these two examples allow me to ask how Ahmed's work has generated possibilities for a critically engaged form of social critique in Asian American Studies that takes on the challenge of confronting different forms of injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]