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Focused on comparative ethnic studies and intersectionality, the author commences with a discussion about Barack Obama's historic inauguration and the Asian American literature classroom. This essay argues that courses, programs, and departments focused on ethnicity, race, gender, class, and sexuality remain important precisely because they continue to reflect the asymmetrical distribution of power by way of specific identity politics. Further, Asian American studies--which is critically attuned to "model minorities" and declarations of racelessness--provides a template upon which to deepen discussions of the "color line" and problem of "the colorblind" within the classroom. Lastly, as downsizing hits institutions across the country, the turn toward comparative ethnic studies is a possible solution to the impending crisis of budgetary proportions.

The article focuses on Vichet Chum's play "Bald Sisters," exploring its themes of domestic loss, familial remembrance, and intergenerational inheritance against the backdrop of Cambodian history, particularly the Khmer Rouge era. Topics include the impact of the Khmer Rouge regime, the play's engagement with tragedy and humor, and Chum's personal background as a Cambodian American raised in Texas.

The article explores the students-generated movement that birthed Asian American Studies in the late 1960s and addresses the needs of students in the field. It notes the efforts of Asian American students for more relevant and accessible education to their communities, influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and international liberation struggles. Mentioned is the structured curricula created by scholars that emphasized the nature of social identities including race, gender, and sexuality.

Despite the passage of almost four decades since the end of the so-known “Killing Fields Era,” to date onlythreeKhmer Rouge officials have been successfully tried and convicted for crimes against humanity. This article opens with such “belatedness” as a means of contextualizing the juridical politics of and historical indictments embedded in Rithy Panh'sThe Missing Picture(2013). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the special issue on perpetratorhood is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including wartime experiences of former soldiers, wartime propaganda, and legal prosecution.

Through a close reading of Cambodian American rapper praCh's Dalama: The End'n Is Just the Beginnin', I argue that his work embodies musical traditions, histories, and experiences from both the country of origin and the country of settlement. In analysing the story of its reception in Cambodia, I place his work within a larger schema of Cambodian American youth cultural production, which is marked by attempts to negotiate complicated US racial politics and mediate refugee subjectivities. Most important, praCh and other Cambodian American Hip Hop artists (which include graffiti artists, b-boys, and DJs) memorialise in their work the Killing Fields, and this memorialisation is geographically and culturally located in the United States and Cambodia. Thus, domestically produced and globally consumed, praCh's work creates a transnationally inflected space in which to simultaneously consider questions of selfhood, notions of belonging, and conceptualisations of nationhood. Circumscribed by both Cold War US foreign policy and domestic refugee initiatives, Cambodian American citizenship prompts the question not only of what it means to be American, but also what it means to be Cambodian and Cambodian American in light of a genocidal history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]