eBooks

The Making of Asian America: A History
Lee, Erika (2015)

"The Making of Asian America" shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both “despised minorities” and “model minorities,” revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country. 

Published fifty years after the passage of the United States’ Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these “powerful Asian American stories…are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue” (Los Angeles Times). But more than that, "The Making of Asian America" is an “epic and eye-opening” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today. - Publisher's Description

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Corky Lee's Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice
Ng, Chee Wang; Ngai, Mae (2024)

Known throughout his lifetime as the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate,” the late photojournalist Corky Lee documented Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for fifty years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country. "Corky Lee’s Asian America" is a stunning retrospective of his life’s work--a selection of the best photographs from his vast collection, from his start in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s to his coverage of diverse Asian American communities across the country until his untimely passing in 2021. 

"Corky Lee's Asian America" traces Lee’s decades-long quest for photographic justice, following Asian American social movements for recognition and rights alongside his artistic development as an activist social photographer. Iconic photographs feature protests against police brutality in New York in the 1970s, a Sikh man draped in an American flag after 9/11, and a reenactment of the completion of the transcontinental railroad of 1869 featuring descendants of Chinese railroad workers, and his last photos of community life and struggle during the coronavirus pandemic. Asian American writers, artists, activists, and friends of Lee reflect on his life and career and provide rich historical and cultural context to his photographs, including a foreword from writer Hua Hsu and contributions from artist Ai Weiwei, filmmaker Renée Tajima-Peña, writer Helen Zia, photographer Alan Chin, historian Gordon Chang, playwright David Henry Hwang, and more.

Featuring never-before-seen photographs alongside his best-known images, "Corky Lee’s Asian America" represents Lee’s mission to chronicle a history of inclusion, resistance, ethnic pride, and patriotism. This is a remarkable documentation of vital moments in Asian American history and a timely reminder that it’s also a history that we continue to make. - Publisher's Description

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Minoru Yamasaki: Human Architecture for a Modernist World
Gyure, Dale Allen; Yamasaki, Minoru (2017)

Born to Japanese immigrant parents in Seattle, Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) became one of the towering figures of midcentury architecture, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1963. His self-proclaimed humanist designs merged the modern materials and functional considerations of postwar American architecture with traditional elements such as arches and colonnades. Yamasaki’s celebrated and iconic projects of the 1950s and ’60s, including the Lambert–St. Louis Airport and the U.S. Science Pavilion in Seattle, garnered popular acclaim. 

Despite this initial success, Yamasaki’s reputation began to decline in the 1970s with the mixed critical reception of the World Trade Center in New York, one of the most publicized projects in the world at the time, and the spectacular failure of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Apartments, which came to symbolize the flaws of midcentury urban renewal policy. And as architecture moved in a more critical direction influenced by postmodern theory, Yamasaki seemed increasingly old-fashioned. In the first book to examine Yamasaki’s life and career, Dale Allen Gyure draws on a wealth of previously unpublished archival material, and nearly 200 images, to contextualize his work against the framework of midcentury modernism and explore his initial successes, his personal struggles—including with racism—and the tension his work ultimately found in the divide between popular and critical taste. - Publisher's Description

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The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora
Hui, Yu; Stock, Jonathan (2017)

In "The Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora," twenty-three scholars advance knowledge and understandings of Chinese music studies. Each contribution develops a theoretical model to illuminate new insights into a key musical genre or context. 

This handbook is categorized into three parts. In Part One, authors explore the extensive, remarkable, and polyvocal historical legacies of Chinese music. Ranging from archaeological findings to the creation of music history, chapters address enduring historical practices and emerging cultural expressions. Part Two focuses on evolving practice across a spectrum of key instrumental and vocal genres. Each chapter provides a portrait of musical change, tying musical transformations to the social dimensions underpinning that change. Part Three responds to the role that prominent issues, including sexuality, humanism, the amateur, and ethnicity, play in the broad field of Chinese music studies. Scholars present systematic orientations for researchers in the third decade of the twenty-first century. - Publisher's Description

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Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music
Yoshihara, Mari (2007)

In the first book to account for the growing prominence of Asians in the world of Western classical music, Mari Yoshihara grapples with the significance of this trend.

This is a book about the about the origins of a social and cultural phenomenon, but it is also about the lives and work of individual musicians devoted to their art. - Publisher's Description

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Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives
Ty, Eleanor Rose (2022)

While most US-based comics studies anthologies tend to neglect race, "Beyond the Icon" brings it to the foreground through an analysis of the vibrant and growing body of graphic narratives by Asian North American creators in the twenty-first century. By demonstrating how the forms and styles of the comics genre help depict Asian Americans as nuanced individuals in ways that words alone may not, "Beyond the Icon" makes the case for comics as a crucial artistic form in Asian American cultural production––one used to counter misrepresentations and myths, rewrite official history, and de-exoticize the Asian American experience. 

An interdisciplinary team of contributors offers exciting new readings of key texts, including "Ms. Marvel," George Takei’s "They Called Us Enemy," Thi Bui’s "The Best We Could Do," Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s "The Shadow Hero," works by Adrian Tomine and Jillian Tamaki, and more, to uncover the ways in which Asian American comics authors employ graphic narratives to provide full and complex depictions of Asian diasporic subjects and intervene in the wider North American consciousness. "Beyond the Icon" initiates vital conversations between Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and comics. - Publisher's Description

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Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives
Chiu, Monica (2015)

The global circulation of comics, manga, and other such visual mediums between North America and Asia produces transnational meanings no longer rooted in a separation between “Asian” and “American.” "Drawing New Color Lines" explores the culture, production, and history of contemporary graphic narratives that depict Asian Americans and Asians. 

It examines how Japanese manga and Asian popular culture have influenced Asian American comics; how these comics and Asian American graphic narratives depict the “look” of race; and how these various representations are interpreted in nations not of their production. By focusing on what graphic narratives mean for audiences in North America and those in Asia, the collection discusses how Western theories about the ways in which graphic narratives might successfully overturn derogatory caricatures are themselves based on contested assumptions; and illustrates that the so-called odorless images featured in Japanese manga might nevertheless elicit interpretations about race in transnational contexts. With contributions from experts based in North America and Asia, "Drawing New Color Lines" will be of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including Asian American studies, cultural and literary studies, comics and visual studies. - Publisher's Description

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Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability
Huang, Vivian (2022)

In "Surface Relations" Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability—such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness, and withholding—to express Asian American life. 

Through analyses of diverse works by performance artists (Tehching Hsieh, Baseera Khan, Emma Sulkowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi), writers (Kim Fu, Kai Cheng Thom, Monique Truong), and video, multimedia, and conceptual artists (Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono, Mika Tajima), Huang challenges neoliberal narratives of assimilation that erase Asianness. By using sound, touch, and affect, these artists and writers create new frameworks for affirming Asianness as a source of political and social critique and innovative forms of life and creativity. - Publisher's Description

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War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art
Kina, Laura; Dariotis, Wei Ming (2013)

"War Baby / Love Child" examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. 

The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai'i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of "optional identity," this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures. - Publisher's Description

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Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life
Wong, Alice (2022)

In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong. 

Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future. As a self-described disabled oracle, Alice traces her origins, tells her story, and creates a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world. Filled with incisive wit, joy, and rage, Wong’s "Year of the Tiger" will galvanize readers with big cat energy. - Publisher's Description

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They Called Us Enemy
Takei, George; Eisinger, Justin; Scott, Steve; Becker, Harmony (2019)

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in "Star Trek," he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. 

In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. 

"They Called Us Enemy" is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. 

What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime. - Publisher's Description

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Hawaiian Language: Past, Present, Future
Schütz, Albert (2020)

With color and black-and-white illustrations throughout, "Hawaiian Language: Past, Present, Future" presents aspects of Hawaiian and its history that are rarely treated in language classes. The major characters in this book make up a diverse cast: Dutch merchants, Captain Cook’s naturalist and philologist William Anderson, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia (the inspiration for the Hawaiian Mission), the American lexicographer Noah Webster, philologists in New England, missionary-linguists and their Hawaiian consultants, and many minor players. 

The account begins in prehistory, placing the probable origins of the ancestor of Polynesian languages in mainland Asia. An evolving family tree reflects the linguistic changes that took place as these people moved east. The current versions are examined from a Hawaiian-centered point of view, comparing the sound system of the language with those of its major relatives in the Polynesian triangle. More recent historical topics begin with the first written samples of a Polynesian language in 1616, which led to the birth of the idea of a widespread language family. - Publisher's Description

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The Misrepresented Minority: New Insights on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and the Implications for Higher Education
Museus, Samuel; Maramba, Dina; Teranishi, Robert (2023)

While Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are growing faster than any other racial group in the U.S., they are all but invisible in higher education, and generally ignored in the research literature, and thus greatly misrepresented and misunderstood. 

This book presents disaggregated data to unmask important academic achievement and other disparities within the population, and offers new insights that promote more authentic understandings of the realities masked by the designation of AAPI. In offering new perspectives, conceptual frameworks, and empirical research by seasoned and emerging scholars, this book both makes a significant contribution to the emerging knowledge base on AAPIs, and identifies new directions for future scholarship on this population. Its overarching purpose is to provide policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in higher education with the information they need to serve an increasingly important segment of their student populations.

In dispelling such misconceptions as that Asian Americans are not really racial minorities, the book opens up the complexity of the racial and ethnic minorities within this group, and identifies the unique challenges that require the attention of anyone in higher education concerned with student access and success, as well as the pipeline to the professoriate. - Publisher's Description

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My Vietnam, Your Vietnam: A Father Flees. A Daughter Returns. A Dual Memoir.
Vo, Christina; Vo, Nghia (2024)

In this captivating, heartfelt dual memoir, Christina Vo and her father, Nghia M. Vo, delve into themes of their identity, heritage, and the tragic multi-generational ordeals of war, with intertwined stories that present a multifaceted portrayal of Vietnam and its profound influence on shaping both familial bonds and individual identities across time. 

Nghia M. Vo left Vietnam in April 1975 with only the clothes on his back, following the US withdrawal of troops and the fall of Saigon. After a harrowing two month journey, he found himself in a refugee camp outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where he began the painful process of reconnecting with his family and rebuilding his life as a medical doctor. Christina Vo, Nghia’s daughter, grew up in the US. As a restless young adult, she felt a longing to connect with her heritage and soon moved to Hanoi in the former North Vietnam—much to her father's distress—to discover a country that had changed dramatically since the war, yet retained many of the ancient traits experienced by her ancestors. 

Captivating in its fluid movement and evocative depictions of place, "My Vietnam, Your Vietnam" offers readers a rich, multilayered exploration of Vietnam through two very distinct voices and perspectives. The memoir's exploration of healing the trauma suffered by war refugees and their families echoes far beyond the personal experience of the two authors, providing a path to discussion of reconciliation and hope. - Publisher's Description

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Growing Up Brown: Memoirs of a Filipino American
Jamero, Peter (2024)

Peter Jamero’s story of hardship and success illuminates the experience of what he calls the “bridge generation” ― the American-born children of the Filipinos recruited as farm workers in the 1920s and 30s. Their experiences span the gap between these early immigrants and those Filipinos who owe their U.S. residency to the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. His book is a sequel of sorts to Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, with themes of heartbreaking struggle against racism and poverty and eventual triumph. 

Jamero describes his early life in a farm-labor camp in Livingston, California, and the path that took him, through naval service and graduate school, far beyond Livingston. A longtime community activist and civic leader, Jamero describes decades of toil and progress before the Filipino community entered the sociopolitical mainstream. He shares a wealth of anecdotes and reflections from his career as an executive of health and human service programs in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and San Francisco. - Publisher's Description

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Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories
Spaulding, Carol (2023)

This collection of linked stories follows four generations of the Songs, a Korean American family, beginning in 1924 just prior to the Immigration Act and extending to near the end of the century. Linked stories, or stories that form a story cycle, are a common book-length form seen in Asian American literature that accommodates multiple perspectives across generations and locations. Through this story cycle, patterns emerge as cultural identity and individuality, often in tension with one another, shape choices and outcomes. 

With these stories, Carol Roh Spaulding charts shifting definitions of “Americanness” across time through the arc of a family narrative. She also explores desire and belonging as articulated, in turns, by the mother, father, granddaughter, great-grandson, and even a ghost child who died after a tragic accident. But these linked stories center on the life experiences of Gracie Song. They follow her from girlhood to young motherhood, through her children’s teenage years, and finally to her elderly solitude, when to her great astonishment she finds romance with a younger man and reconciliation with an estranged daughter―both unexpected gifts of later life. - Publisher's Description

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We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word
Choi, Franny; Phi, Bao; Revilla, Noʻu; Siagatonu, Terisa (2024)

A beautiful anthology featuring some of the brightest voices in contemporary American poetry who challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label “Asian American and Pacific Islander” in today’s world. 

In this thoughtfully curated, intergenerational collection, poets of multiple languages, lands, and waters write against and through the contested terrain of AAPI identity. Too often, Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans are squeezed into the same story.

The poets gathered here, and the lineages they represent, exceed this sameness. May this anthology uplift complexities and incite transformation and joy. - Publisher's Description

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Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics
Hsu, V. Jo (2022)

"Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics" explores how race, migration, gender, and disability entwine in conceptions of deserving citizens. V. Jo Hsu explores three archives of trans and queer Asian American (QTAPI) rhetorics, considering a range of texts including oral histories, photography, personal essays, and performance showcases. To demonstrate how QTAPI use personal narrative to critique and revise the conditions of their exclusion, Hsu forwards a critical approach to storytelling, homing, which deliberately engages sites of alienation and belonging. Through a practice of diasporic listening, Hsu tracks confluences among seemingly divergent journeys and locates trans and queer Asian American experiences within broader US and global politics. 

The stories at the heart of "Constellating Home" center the voices of trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, and others often overlooked in conceptions of US citizenry. Hsu’s analyses demonstrate the inextricability of Asian American activism from queer politics, disability activism, and racial justice, and they consider how stories network individual experiences with resonant histories and struggles. Finding unlikely intimacies among individual and communal histories, "Constellating Home" provides tools for fostering mutual care, revealing harmful social patterns, and orienting shared values and politics. - Publisher's Description

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Here to Stay: Uncovering South Asian American History
Rudra, Geetika (2022)

Today, South Asians are a rapidly growing demographic in the United States, comprising nearly 2 percent of the population. But there was a time in the not-too-distant past when the United States was far less hospitable to South Asian immigrants. In fact, until 1952, only white immigrants could become naturalized American citizens. Yet in the first half of the twentieth century, many states still had thriving communities of South Asians. 

In "Here to Stay," Geetika Rudra, a second-generation Indian immigrant and American history buff, takes readers on a journey across the country to unearth the little-known histories of earlier generations of South Asian Americans. She visits storied sites such as Oregon’s “Hindoo Alley,” home to many lumber workers at the turn of the century, and Angel Island, California’s immigration hub. She also introduces readers to such inspiring figures as Bhagat Singh Thind, an immigrant who had enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve his adopted country in World War I, but who was later denied citizenship and took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In turns both serious and joyful, this book vividly reveals how South Asians have always been a vital part of the American tapestry. - Publisher's Description

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The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation: From Territorial Subject to American Citizen
Schachter, Judith (2013)

Through the voices and perspectives of the members of an extended Hawaiian family, or `ohana, this book tells the story of North American imperialism in Hawai`i from the Great Depression to the new millennium. The family members offer their versions of being “Native Hawaiian” in an American state, detailing the ways in which US laws, policies, and institutions made, and continue to make, an impact on their daily lives. 

The book traces the ways that Hawaiian values adapted to changing conditions under a Territorial regime and then after statehood. These conditions involved claims for land for Native Hawaiian Homesteads, education in American public schools, military service, and participation in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. Based on fieldwork observations, kitchen table conversations, and talk-stories, or mo`olelo, this book is a unique blend of biography, history, and anthropological analysis. - Publisher's Description

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Streaming Videos

Who killed Vincent Chin?
Choy, Christine; Tajima-Pena, Renee (1990)

This Academy-Award nominated film is a powerful statement about racism in working-class America. It relates the stark facts of Vincent Chin's brutal murder. A 27-year-old Chinese-American, Chin was celebrating his last days of bachelorhood in a Detroit bar. An argument broke out between him and Ron Ebens, a Chrysler Motors foreman. Ebens shouted ethnic insults, the fight moved outside, and before onlookers, Ebens bludgeoned Chin to death with a baseball bat. 

In the ensuing trial, Ebens was let off with a suspended sentence and a small fine. Outrage filled the Asian-American community to the point where they organized an unprecedented civil rights protest. His bereaved mother, brought up to be self-effacing, successfully led a nationwide crusade for a retrial. This tragic story is interwoven with the whole fabric of timely social concerns. It addresses issues such as the failure of our judicial system to value every citizen's rights equally, the collapse of the automobile industry under pressure from Japanese imports, and the souring of the American dream for the blue collar worker. Widely acclaimed by the press, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" is a memorable film for all audiences.

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Kumu Hina
Wilson, Joe; Hamer, Dean (2013)

Imagine a world where a little boy can grow up to be the woman of his dreams, and a young girl can rise to become a leader among men. Welcome to Kumu Hina's Hawai'i. 

During a momentous year in her life in modern Honolulu, Hina Wong-Kalu, a native Hawaiian māhū, or transgender, teacher uses traditional culture to inspire a student to claim her place as leader of the school's all-male hula troupe. But despite her success as a teacher, Hina longs for love and a committed relationship. Will her marriage to a headstrong Tongan man fulfill her dreams? An incredible docu-drama that unfolds like a narrative film, "Kuma Hina" reveals a side of Hawai'i rarely seen on screen.

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