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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]

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]

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]

My goal in this article is to share my experiences as an academic in an institution of higher education in the United States. To a large measure, I provide insight into a world that contains multiple complexities for those who have come from a different shore. These experiences were based on my not, at first, understanding the prevailing cultural rules of the new context, with some experiences being humorous and others less so. This article presents lessons that were learned over the years that have allowed me to continue to strengthen my understanding of myself as a stranger from a different shore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As U.S.-led imperialism spreads in the Asia Pacific region through neoliberal trades and military occupation, how do “Asia” and “America” as both geopolitical units and embodied spaces construct and assemble diasporic Asian subjects affectively? Furthermore, as national allegiance is aggressively demanded by the surge of white nationalism in the Global North, how does an immigrant subject afford to be continuously attached to an object—“Asia”—that she must reject before becoming Asian American? Drawing on narrative study with queer Asian American activists involved in anti-imperialist organizing, this paper situates narratives of racialized queer grief in the framework of racial melancholia (Cheng 2000; Eng and Han 2000) as a form of protest against the splitting of Asian and American identity as the U.S. empire actively recruits Asian Americans into nationalist discourses. With a queer and intersectional method of narrating identity, this paper highlights how racial melancholia involves strategies of subjectivity-making against the colonial splitting of blackness and whiteness, the erasure of imperial history, and the segregation of communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing number of Asian American Studies (AAS) programs and Asian ethnic organizations across colleges and universities since the 1970s, surprisingly little empirical research examines the role of these aspects of higher education on Asian American identity. How do the roles of AAS curriculum and Asian American student organizations (Asian American activities) influence southeast Asian American college students’ ethnic and panethnic identity formation? Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews of 1.5 and second-generation college-educated Asian Americans, this study finds that the exposure to Asian American activities shapes respondents’ racial and ethnic identity construction. Specifically, the exposure to Asian American activities: (1) evokes an informed assertion of a contextual panethnic identity; (2) serves to trigger an assertion of a hyphenated American identity; and lastly, (3) plays a direct, but differing, instrumental role on identity construction among different Asian American sub-ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the field of Asian American studies, there has been an abundance of research on the cinematic representation of Chinese Americans in association with identity. While one type of study primarily focuses on the Orientalist discourse and racial politics in the Hollywood films, another approach highlights the production and distribution of Asian American independent media. Taking the representation of Chinese American families in transnational Chinese cinema as a point of departure, this article adopts a narrative analysis approach to illustrate the re-articulation of Chinese cultural identity. Following the premise that experience is pertaining to the construction of the identity of Chinese immigrants, four kinds of experiences are categorized – historical, educational, family and immigration. Representative characters are chosen as reference points from four films: Pushing Hands (Ang Lee 1992), The Guasha Treatment (Zheng Xiaolong 2001), Saving Face (Alice Wu 2004) and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Wayne Wang 2007). The disaporic subjects demonstrate how Chinese cultural identity has been shaped by various experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The article focuses on public Chinese burial grounds in Boston, Massachusetts and mentions Asian American studies. Topics discussed includes funeral ceremonies in Chinese communities in the city, Mount Hope Cemetery and racial segregation of Chinese. Other topics such as University of Massachusetts in the city are also discussed.

Drawing from a larger study on Asian Americans and Latino/as at HBCUs, this chapter focuses exclusively on the Latino/a students, sheds light on factors that motivated Latino/a students to attend a historically Black university, and discusses the on-campus experiences of these students. The chapter provides insight into what HBCUs might do to help increase a sense of belonging among Latino/a students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article emphasises two major themes that address the influence of the Asian American Movement: (1) encouraging students to broaden the discourse on race and ethnic relations by redefining categories and challenging prevalent assumptions; (2) an increased tolerance and frequency in course offerings that examine and centralise the histories, literature and political underpinnings of Asian Americans and ethnic (i.e. Japanese) specific communities, which has equipped students to engage in discourse and community action. Countering dominant narratives through unification and education is the means by which Asian American students fought for representation and fair treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the cultural politics of knowledge production regarding Hmong American food-related health issues. Textual analysis often research papers published in the last twenty years leads to the critique that mainstream scientific discourse, rooted in Eurocentric epistemology, has in effect constituted Hmong Americans as subjugated Others. We demonstrate how this discourse (1) demarcates between the subject and the object from a Eurocentric viewpoint; (2) associates Hmongness with tradition while dissociating tradition from American-ness; (3) overlooks multiple differences within Hmong American communities; and (4) keeps silent on institutional racism as a barrier to healthy living. We explicate the power relations inherent in science research regarding marginalized communities, and call for decolonizing knowledge and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research study examines Asian American student perceptions of Asian American Studies courses from a large Midwestern university using survey data (n = 761) and in-depth interviews (n = 12). Student voices and perspectives are centered in order better understand strengths and challenges of Asian American Studies beyond identified institutional factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is two-fold: First, it argues for critical engagement between Hmong Studies and Asian American Studies. Second, to illustrate the productivity of such engagement this article analyzes the media coverage of an incident involving Hmong American farmers and their white neighbors in Eagan, Minnesota, June 2010. The focal question is how media discourses around farming and immigration serve to racialize Hmong American identities. This analysis shows that Hmong Americans experience "Asiatic racialization" in that they are either discursively cast outside of the imagined American nation, or included contingent upon assimilation and conformity. Critiquing both the exclusionary and assimilative narratives, this article explicates the inherent contradictions of the U.S. nationalism, referencing both existing Hmong Studies literature and Asian Americanist discourses on race and nation. Both bodies of work foreground the historical and social construction of identities, as well as the simultaneous intertwined workings of race, class, gender/sexuality and nation. Critical dialogues could generate new ideas and possibilities for both Asian American Studies and Hmong Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets forth the history of the academic activities of the Asian American Literature Association (AALA) in order to explore the evolution of Asian American Studies in Japan. When the AALA was established in 1989, several scholars had already published research papers on Asian American literature, as had researchers involved energetically in the study of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. Around the time when AALA was established, other research groups focusing on immigration studies were formed. In 1993, several members of the AALA presented their papers at the annual meetings of other associations and, as a result, the activities of the AALA became known to a wider academic community. In 1994, the AALA published its first annual journal and, around 1995, the number of papers on Asian American literature and culture accepted by authoritative journals in Japan began to increase. By the end of the 1990s, Asian American studies made its presence conspicuous in the field of American studies in Japan. Since the turn of the century, a growing number of Asian Americanists in Japan have become engaged in interdisciplinary studies, thus providing new perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short essay situates this journal's special issue within the Cold War history and politics of transpacific knowledge formation by calling on Edward W. Said's concept of ‘traveling theory.’ Contributors to this groundbreaking collective project have shown us that Asian American critique interfaced with Asia can upset the discipline's boundary and its assumptions enough to generate new questions and objects of inquiry. At the same time, a discipline's travel necessarily accompanies and (re)institutes troubling apparatuses of knowledge and power. Of particular concern here are the two elements that largely set the discursive parameters of Asian American studies as they have been institutionalized in the United States: liberal multiculturalism and the ethno-national organization of knowledge. Also integral to the area studies formations, they have together served as a powerful epistemic tool for the US-led Cold War geopolitical management of the post-Second World War, postcolonial world. What are the consequences of traveling knowledge uncritical of such earlier history? The essay suggests that the inter-Asia, transpacific critique and its historical materialist interrogation of the Cold War legacies in Asia should remain urgent if we were to sustain the productively unsettling effects of Asian American studies' travel to Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the significance of engaging in Asian American studies in Asia, with examples drawn primarily from Japan. It asks: what happens when this US-based racial minority studies is relocated to the place where Asians do not constitute racial minorities? The paper argues that, on the one hand, the intellectual encounter between Asia and Asian America encourages the US-based minority studies to examine their implications in American imperialism in their perceptions towards Asia. On the other hand, Asian American studies as the racial minority discourse forces ethno-racial majority Asians, with all our ethnic, national, and other differences, to reflect upon the racial, ethnic, and (neo)colonial relations in our own lands while critiquing the inequalities that are taking place in and across Asia. The paper looks at the forms of minority struggles in Japan, zainichi Koreans and Okinawans, in order to propel the US Asian American scholars to decentralize their work and perspectives. It is my hope that this new perspective generated from Asia-based Asian American studies will help construct a place of mutual learning, where we can engage in conversation to ask new questions, to challenge and transform Asian American studies as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors present specific challenges, possibilities, and critical intersections that have emerged in their teaching and learning with both refugees and veterans in Asian American studies courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black populations in the post-civil rights era USA face forms of racial discipline generated not only by organizations and institutions representing the white mainstream and contributing to the preservation or restoration of white supremacy, but also increasingly by organizations and institutions representing non-black people of color and contributing to the deepening and rationalization of 'the new black/non-black divide. This article takes a critical look at the framing of urban multiracial coalition politics by professional intellectuals during the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, specifically academics in the field of Asian American Studies that attempted to explain the nature and sources of conflict between African Americans and Asian Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of Asian American Studies scholar Don Nakanishi's views on leadership in the Asian American community and the role that young professionals need to play in the community. Nakanishi's leadership tactics for young people include seeking out and not avoiding positions that can help change power relations, using power and resources to benefit Asian Americans as well as other communities of color and continuing to develop a multidisciplinary Asian American Studies field. The article explores the development of the Asian American professional sector and discusses how Nakanishi's strategies can be developed.

The extensive literature concerning America's exclusion of Asians has emphasized primarily the domestic contexts for restricting trans-Pacific migrations. Fears of a 'Yellow Peril' invasion and conquest were used to justify the earliest American attempts to limit the entry of races and nationalities deemed too different and incompatible to integrate and participate on equal terms in a republic dominated by European arrivals and their descendants. Asian American Studies scholars in particular have mined the rich vein of documents delineating the formative legacy of anti-Asian laws, ideologies, and institutions shaping the still deeply troubled patrolling of American borders today. Less attention has turned to the influence of foreign policy considerations and their role in carving out categories of migrants exempted from exclusionary laws. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882 made exceptions for merchants, merchant family members, students and teachers, diplomats, and tourists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the myriad historical and cultural trajectories of Asian America as a political coalition, Asian American Studies continually interrogates the terms of its coalitional unity as it foregrounds and theorizes "difference." The challenge for Asian American Studies is to question identity with nation as the endpoint to anti-racist politics in order to create a space for theoretical inquiries of belonging beyond nation and racial identity to foreground other ways of imagining affinity, communities, and political alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding emergent disciplines as knowledge-focused social movement phenomena called New Knowledge Movements, or NKMs. The proposed theoretical framework is developed through a synthesis of new social movement theory and Frickel and Gross's Scientific/Intellectual Movements (SIMs) model. In contrast to the SIMs model, this paper argues that many new disciplines emerge through contentious collective action on the part of political and intellectual outsiders rather than through the action of intellectual elites. The framework is examined through historical narratives of two disciplines, women's studies and Asian American studies, in the USA. This framework will be useful to scholars studying the emergence of other disciplines and their related social movement dynamics, particularly those disciplines connected to deeply held personal identities or belief systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores cultural differences between European American (n = 26) and Asian American (n = 17) parents' attributional ratings of children with Down syndrome. Links were examined among parents' attributions, reactions, and behaviors regarding their child's jigsaw-puzzle performance. Al- though the children's puzzle abilities did not differ, compared with European American parents, Asian American parents judged their child as less successful and had lower expectations for future success. Asian American parents also attributed the child's performance to lower ability and lower effort. Affectively, they indicated less sympathy and more anger and blame toward the child, Despite striking ethnic differences, parents in both groups judged their older children as more successful and reported offering them less encouragement and help. Implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing interviews with 18 Asian American female undergraduates, this study seeks to understand how participants viewed the sorority system at a predominantly White institution in the Southeastern United States. Drawing from critical race theory, I argue that the ways in which women perceived and experienced both acceptance and marginalization in the Greek system testify to the complexity and subtlety of racial politics on campus. While women generally perceived sororities as open access, they also reported instances in which race mattered, such as the presence of status hierarchies within the sorority system and the underrepresentation of women of color in sororities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of a study which investigated if acculturation affects smoking behavior among Asian Americans or immigrants. Data showed that acculturated women were 5 times more likely to smoke than traditional women. The opposite was true for acculturated men, who were 53 percent less likely to smoke than nonacculturated or traditional men.

The article explores the internationalization of Asian American cultural criticism and its relevance on Asian Canadian studies. It cites two events, which took place in 1980's and 1990's, that can be used to discern how Asian American studies has taken an international turn. The first event involves the redefinition and reconstruction of Asian American studies by placing Asian Americans within the global context. While the second event involves the "East of California" movement that attempts to identify, critique, and intervene in the California-centric nature of scholarship and curricula for Asian American studies.

The author reflects on the status and conditions of Asian Americans in higher education and Asian American Studies. He mentions that Asian Americans are the most visible racial minority in the U.S. universities and colleges wherein they have experienced a bifurcated pattern of enrollment showing their socio-economic status, discrimination and others. Asian American Studies is an interdisciplinary study of the experiences of various Asian immigrants that arrived in the U.S. to meet the demands for low cost labor.

The author talks of his experiences teaching an Asian American history survey class for undergraduates at the University of Michigan. The teacher begins his classes with a discussion of the academic scene in the late 1960s. It was this period that sparked the beginning of Asian American studies under pressure by students and activists of the time. The author refuses to have his class on the list of recommended courses that would help students meet their "race and ethnicity" requirement as this would increase his class size with students "forced" to be there as opposed to those with an honest interest in the subject.

The article presents an overview of research papers that were published within the issue. The efforts made by Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in ensuring that their people, histories and cultures are accurately represented are described. Important insights on how mainstream cultural institutions have changed is provided. The highly charged politics that are often intrinsic to the process of change is illustrated. Two articles focus on professional practices. The historical and contemporary obstacles and reasons behind the lack of exhibitions of Asian American works in the U.S. is examined.

The purpose of this study was to examine Asian American college students' behavioral acculturation to U.S. cultural norms and behavioral enculturation to Asian cultural norms and their relationships to ratings on measures of cognitive flexibility, general self-efficacy, collective self-esteem, acculturative stress, and attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help. As hypothesized, the results indicated that both acculturation and enculturation were positively related to the membership dimension of collective self-esteem. Although not hypothesized, the results indicated that acculturation was positively related to cognitive flexibility, general self-efficacy, and the public dimension of collective self-esteem. In addition, enculturation was positively related to the private dimension and the importance of identity dimension of collective self-esteem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents literary criticism which investigates the effectivity of Asian American Studies among the schools and towards racial differences in the U.S. It has been contended that the Studies must be altered so that through shared interpersonal strategies, people may communicate their thoughts and feelings efficiently. This can be made possible through the practice of admitting radical heterogeneity through communication. On the other hand, negotiation between racial groups in the society secures the relationship of justice.

This article offers a schematic reflection on the institutional formation and political location of Asian-American studies in relation to the rise of the U.S. prison industrial complex since the 1970s. I am generally concerned with the peculiar location of 'Asian Americans' as fabricated cultural figures within a U.S. social and racial formation that is increasingly constituted by various discursive and institutional technologies of criminalization and punishment. More specifically, I am interested in a critical assessment of the problematics, that is, the schematic sets of assumptions that frame and discipline processes of critical inquiry and intellectual formulation, through which Asian-American studies has come to narrate and cohere itself in the context of a post-civil rights and allegedly 'multicultural' civil society.

The level of self-advocacy skills in Asian American parents of young children with developmental disabilities was assessed. The relationship of self-advocacy skills with social support and with disability-based discrimination was investigated. Correlates of self-advocacy skills were explored. Asian American parents of young children with developmental disabilities in this study scored a significantly lower level of assertiveness and other self-advocacy skills than did their non-Asian American counterparts. The level of self-advocacy skills in Asian American parents was found to be positively correlated with the level of social support those parents had received, and negatively correlated with the level of disability-based discrimination against their children with developmental disabilities. Longer length of stay of Asian American parents in the United States was found to he associated with a higher level of self-advocacy skills. The practical implications of the findings of this study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the collaboration between student affairs professionals and faculty of Asian American studies (AAS) in the U.S. Overview of AAS; Contribution of the collaboration toward intellectual and psychological development of students; Need for student affair professionals to value student development theories of AAS.

The study presented here explored three factors that may explain why distinct Asian American groups have higher educational expectations than do whites: favorable socioeconomic and background characteristics, demonstrated academic ability, and parents' high expectations. With data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, the authors used linear and logistic multivariate regression models to examine these differences in educational expectations. The analyses indicated that although all Asian American ethnic groups have higher expectations than whites, the higher educational expectations of Asian American groups that are well assimilated into U.S. society are principally influenced by socioeconomic and demographic factors. Parental expectations generally explain a large portion of children's high educational expectations for all Asian American groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the relation of legal studies, critical race theory and Asian American studies. Use of legal-historical narratives to provide a context for understanding the Asian American; Percepts of legal positivism; Treatment of racism in the law school curriculum; Criticism against legal liberalism.

An introduction is presented to the section of this journal devoted to the Asian American National Basketball Association (NBA) player Jeremy Lin and what is known as the 2012 Linsanity phenomenon associated with him, particularly how Linsanity has affected Asian American studies.

Focuses on Asian American Studies in Universities in the United States. Criticism on the outdated black/white paradigm that excludes or marginalizes Asian Americans; Comments on student activists demonstrating against minorities, immigrants and women; Impact of technology on social relations.

The author offers a response to Jonathan Freedman's essay "Do American and Ethnic Studies Have a Jewish Problem; or, When Is an Ethnic Not an Ethnic, and What Should We Do About It?" in the issue. The author discusses Jewish American studies in terms of transnationalism, diaspora, and U.S. citizenship. The author compares the marginalization of Jewish studies to Asian American studies by claiming that both groups are considered too white. The author discusses the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Arizona's 2010 ban on ethnic studies in public schools, and the Tea Party conservative political movement.