Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month

There is no record of Marco Polo ever visiting the Andaman Islands, so his brief description of the islanders must have been drawn from a secondary source. They were, he wrote, "a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth like those of dogs. They are very cruel, and kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon." Most subsequent travelers and travelogues have tended to agree, although in an age of inclusion and diversity, the modern understanding and appreciation of the indigenous Andamanese is somewhat more sympathetic. Nonetheless, that one common theme has persisted, in particular in the many colonial-era chronicles, which were all written at a time when Darwin and his contemporaries were rationalizing evolution, and evolutionary divergence. How could it be, they ask, that a small pocket of the human race could be content to linger so far behind in the journey of human development? The Andaman and Nicobar Islands comprise a tiny archipelago of some 200 islands in the Indian Ocean. They are located in a seemingly insignificant spot in the Bay of Bengal, comprising a combined area of only 3,500 square miles, but the islands are a tropical idyll, populated by dark Indians drawn mainly from the east coast, with a curious aboriginal people who appear more African than Asian. The islands have been within sight of international shipping routes since the very birth of ocean travel, and yet, until the arrival of the great European trading enterprises, the archipelago remained virtually unvisited, and absolutely unsettled by any other than its indigenous inhabitants. The Sentinelese: The History of the Uncontacted People on North Sentinel Island profiles the indigenous people, famous attempts to contact them, and what's known and unknown about them. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Sentinelese like never before.

There are 3.4 million South Asian-Americans in the U.S. They are creating an identity in a nation accustomed to binary racial choices, where the common understanding is that you are either black or white. The old model of immigration follows a progression from outsider to insider, or from being a person of color to either being perceived as white or being lumped in with white citizens. That transition has been documented with the help of two well known book titles: How the Irish Became White and How Jews Became White. Rudra argues that this typical pattern doesn't and can't apply to South Asian immigrants to the U.S. They are remarkably successful and well-educated residents, so they enjoy the privileges of whiteness without actually being white, while they continue to suffer discrimination (South Asian Muslims have a particularly difficult path toward acceptance). Author Geetika Rudra argues that it may no longer be necessary for minorities to be perceived white in order to succeed here on multiple levels. To explore South Asian identities, Rudra follows the influence of domestic immigration policies and international affairs for over a century. She starts her story in 1895, focusing on a particular immigrant who became the first South Asian-born naturalized U.S. citizen. For each of the five historical periods she covers, she has selected an exemplar--an actual historical figure -- whose story serves as an entryway to help explain evolving immigration policies and ethnic identity construction. Rudra explores how South Asian identity has veered toward and away from whiteness, allowing us to see the inherent artifice behind how American society has classified immigrant groups. She argues that the practice is more revealing about the construction of American identity than it is about American immigrant identity. Along the way, she also addresses the problem that there is not a single South Asian identity, since immigrants from the large geographical area that we call South Asia often have little in common.

In 1998, an Asian woman first joined the ranks of federal judges with lifetime appointments. It took ten years for the second Asian woman to be appointed. Since then, however, over a dozen more Asian women have received lifetime federal judicial appointments.   This book tells the stories of the first fifteen. In the process, it recounts remarkable tales of Asian women overcoming adversity and achieving the American dream, despite being the daughters of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants. Yet The First Fifteen also explores how far Asian Americans and women still have to go before the federal judiciary reflects America as a whole.    In a candid series of interviews, these judges reflect upon the personal and professional experiences that led them to this distinguished position, as well as the nerve-wracking political process of being nominated and confirmed for an Article III judgeship. By sharing their diverse stories, The First Fifteen paints a nuanced portrait of how Asian American women are beginning to have a voice in determining American justice.

The first comprehensive narrative of racism in America's World War II military and the resistance to it.America's World War II military was a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that's the story many Americans have long told themselves. Divisions offers a decidedly different view. Prizewinning historian Thomas A. Guglielmo draws together more than a decade of extensive research to tell sweeping yet personal stories of race and the military; of high command and ordinary GIs; and of African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. Guglielmo argues that the military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them. Taken together, they represented a sprawling structure of white supremacy. Freedom struggles arose in response, democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the stage for postwar desegregation and the subsequent civil rights movements. But the costs of the military's color lines were devastating. They impeded America's war effort; undermined the nation's rhetoric of the Four Freedoms; further naturalized the concept of race; deepened many whites' investments in white supremacy; and further fractured the American people. Offering a dramatic narrative of America's World War II military and of the postwar world it helped to fashion, Guglielmo fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the war and of mid-twentieth-century America.

Challenging the commonly held perception that immigrants' lives are shaped exclusively by their sending and receiving countries, Here, There, and Elsewhere breaks new ground by showing how immigrants are vectors of globalization who both produce and experience the interconnectedness of societies--not only the societies of origin and destination, but also, the societies in places beyond. Tahseen Shams posits a new concept for thinking about these places that are neither the immigrants' homeland nor hostland--the "elsewhere." Drawing on rich ethnographic data, interviews, and analysis of the social media activities of South Asian Muslim Americans, Shams uncovers how different dimensions of the immigrants' ethnic and religious identities connect them to different elsewheres in places as far-ranging as the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Yet not all places in the world are elsewheres. How a faraway foreign land becomes salient to the immigrant's sense of self depends on an interplay of global hierarchies, homeland politics, and hostland dynamics. Referencing today's 24-hour news cycle and the ways that social media connects diverse places and peoples at the touch of a screen, Shams traces how the homeland, hostland, and elsewhere combine to affect the ways in which immigrants and their descendants understand themselves and are understood by others.

Human rights violations have always been part of Asian American studies. From Chinese immigration restrictions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, yellow peril characterizations, and recent acts of deportation and Islamophobia, Asian Americans have consistently functioned as subordinated "subjects" of human rights violations. The Subject(s) of Human Rights brings together scholars from North America and Asia to recalibrate these human rights concerns from both sides of the Pacific. The essays in this collection provide a sharper understanding of how Asian/Americans have been subjected to human rights violations, how they act as subjects of history and agents of change, and how they produce knowledge around such subjects. The editors of and contributors to The Subject(s) of Human Rights examine refugee narratives, human trafficking, and citizenship issues in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. These themes further refract issues of American war-making, settler colonialism, military occupation, collateral damage, and displacement that relocate the imagined geographies of Asian America from the periphery to the center of human rights critique.