Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month

This volume discusses some of Tan's key themes: communication across generations of a family when those generations have grown up in different cultures, the immigrant experience, mother/daughter relationships, the intersection of gender roles and an Asian or Asian American experience, and depression and the artist, among others. Amy Tan has called writing "an extreme privilege, but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone." It seems Amy Tan will always be most associated with her highly successful debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. Yet she has also published five other bestselling novels, two memoirs, two children's books, and has participated in adapting her writing into many other forms of media, including film, television, and opera. This volume offers insights into the full range of her creative work.

Asian American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students is an invaluable resource for students curious to know more about Asian North American writers, texts, and the issues and drives that motivate their writing.This volume collects, in one place, a breadth of information about Asian American literary and cultural history as well as the authors and texts that best define it.A dozen contextual essays introduce fundamental elements or subcategories of Asian American literature, expanding on social and literary concerns or tensions that are familiar and relevant. Essays include the origins and development of the term "Asian American"; overviews of Asian American and Asian Canadian social and literary histories; essays on Asian American identity, gender issues, and sexuality; and discussions of Asian American rhetoric and children's literature. More than 120 alphabetical entries round out the volume and cover important Asian North American authors. Historical information is presented in clear and engaging ways, and author entries emphasize biographical or textual details that are significant to contemporary young adults. Special attention has been given to pioneering authors from the late 19th century through the early 1970s and to influential or well-known contemporary authors, especially those likely to be studied in high school or university classrooms.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.  With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

An innovative anthology showcasing Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond. This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women's lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women's and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories.

Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post-civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today. Read together, Asian American and Latinx literatures convey astonishing diversity and untapped possibilities for coalition within the United States' fastest-growing immigrant and minority communities; to understand the changing shape of these communities we must see how they have formed in relation to each other. As the U.S. population approaches a minority-majority threshold, we urgently need methods that can look across the divisions and unequal positions of the racial system. Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America leads the way with a vision for the future built on panethnic and cross-racial solidarity.

What does liberation mean for Asians at the core of an anti-Black, settler-colonial empire? This landmark book is the first to offer an Asian American theology of liberation for the present and future global crises. The broad scope of contemporary ideas that the book engages with will be of interest to students, activists, clergy, and scholars alike. Readers interested in radical politics, political theology, and Asian American history will find this book an important addition to their bookshelves. Providing an intersectional frame that considers the breadth and diversity of Asian American experiences alongside those of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx thinkers in the United States and across the globe, An Asian American Theology of Liberation puts Asian American theology in dialogue with theories from psychoanalysis, Afro-pessimism, Black Marxism, postcolonial studies, and queer theology. In this groundbreaking work, Wong Tian An combines archival research uncovering a much overlooked theology of liberation -- born in the 1970s out of Asian Americans' struggles for political recognition and civil rights in the United States -- with powerful analyses drawing from the theological, intellectual, and political developments of the last half century. This wide-ranging study connects urgent themes such as protest movements in Hong Kong, anti-Asian violence in the United States, and Indigenous struggles everywhere, while building on Asian theologies such as Dalit theology in India, theology of struggle in the Philippines, and Minjung theology in Korea. Drawing deeply and broadly across disciplines, the book altogether revives and renews an Asian American theology of liberation for a new generation.  

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.

The manuscript is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that examine the intertwining of religion and race among Asian American communities within a broad context of the United States. Both religion and race, as social constructs, have in their relation to one another been foundational for the formation of American identities, and for Asian Americas, largely reflected through exclusion and marginalization. Despite growing interest, religion continues to be an understudied, but vital dimension of Asian American experiences, and this volume is concerned about how Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities have navigated the post-9/11 period compounded by the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Contributors examine the role of popular culture and also draw upon and the extensive data collected by the Pew Research Center for the largest Asian American communities. What emerges are rich, complex, and multi-dimensional explorations of how religion and race have been significant forces in the lives of Asian Americans.