Asian American Studies Now

A Critical Reader

Edited by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas Chen

Rutgers University Press

Asian American Studies Now truly represents the enormous changes occurring in Asian American communities and the world, changes that require a reconsideration of how the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies is defined and taught. This comprehensive anthology, arranged in four parts and featuring a stellar group of contributors, summarizes and defines the current shape of this rapidly changing field, addressing topics such as transnationalism, U.S. imperialism, multiracial identity, racism, immigration, citizenship, social justice, and pedagogy.

Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen have selected essays for the significance of their contribution to the field and their clarity, brevity, and accessibility to readers with little to no prior knowledge of Asian American studies. Featuring both reprints of seminal articles and groundbreaking texts, as well as bold new scholarship, Asian American Studies Now addresses the new circumstances, new communities, and new concerns that are reconstituting Asian America.

To read these essays is to be challenged again and again by some of the brightest minds and most sophisticated political sensibilities at work today. This volume is essential reading. Paul Spickard, author of Almost All Aliens

A very valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian American and ethnic studies. Highly recommended. Choice

Pedagogically focused and structured, Asian American Studies Now underscores the present-day relevance of the field, given the contemporary realities of neoliberal globalization and the post-9/11 security state. Asian American Studies Now is a return to the field's community-driven roots. MELUS

JEAN YU-WEN SHEN WU is a senior lecturer in the American studies program at Tufts University and the coeditor of Asian American Studies: A Reader (Rutgers University Press).

THOMAS C. CHEN is a doctoral candidate in the American civilization department at Brown University.

Introduction
Part I: Situating Asian America

When and Where I Enter
Neither Black nor White
Detroit Blues
A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
Home Is Where the Han Is
Native Hawaiians: A Quest for Sovereignty
Situating Asian Americans in the Political Discourse on Affirmative Action
Racism

Part II: History and Memory

The Chinese Are Coming. How Can We Stop Them?
Public Health and the Mapping of Chinatown
The Secret Munson Report
Asian American Struggles for Civil, Political, Economic, and Social Rights
Out of the Shadows
The Cold War Origins of the Model Minority Myth
Why China? Identifying Histories of Transnational Adoption
The "Four Prisons" and the Movements of Liberation

Part III: Culture, Politics, and Society

Youth Culture, Citizenship, and Globalization
Asian Immigrant Women and Global Restructuring, 1970s-1990s
Medical, Racist, and Colonial Constructions of Power in Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Searching for Community
How to Rehabilitate a Mulatto
Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Incident, by A Dialogue between Anthropologist Louisa Schein and Filmmaker/Activist Va-Megn Thoj
Collateral Damage

Part IV: Pedagogies and Possibilities