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Asian American Studies

Finding Books


The library organizes its collection by subject. 
  You can often simply locate a book of a specific subject area. Here are some examples of subject headings and subdivisions under Asian American Studies.

Amerasians

Angel Island

Asian American Authors

Asian American Ethnic Identity

Asian American Families

Asian Americans History

Asian American Politics and Government

Asian American Women

Books of Interest

Asian American history by Ling, Huping

A comprehensive survey, Asian American History places Asian immigration to America in international and domestic contexts, and explores the significant elements that define Asian America: imperialism and global capitalist expansion, labor and capital, race and ethnicity, immigration and exclusion, family and work, community and gender roles, assimilation and multiculturalism, panethnicity and identity, transnationalism and globalization and new challenges and opportunities

Dear Elia : letters from the Asian American abyss

Dear elia explores the many different kinds of unwellness that reside and proliferate among Asian Americans (and others) in the university, including pressures from immigrant families, the devaluing of critical ethnic studies and exploitation of contingent faculty, and the kinds of access and care demanded (and foreclosed) by approaches to COVID-19.  

Filipino time : affective worlds and contracted labor

This book examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. These forms of living capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time.

Biting the hand : growing up Asian in Black and White America

A passionate, no-holds-barred memoir about the Asian American experience in a nation defined by racial stratification. When Julia Lee was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she? This question would follow Julia for years to come, resurfacing as she traded in her tumultuous childhood for the white upper echelon of elite academia. It was only when she began a PhD in English that she found answers--not in the Brontèˆs or Austen, as Julia had planned, but rather in the brilliant prose of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

Asian American connective action in the age of social media : civic engagement, contested issues, and emerging identities

Develops a 'connective action' model for Asian Americans to examine the relationship between social media platforms and civic engagement

Race and media : critical approaches

A foundational collection of essays that demonstrate how to study race and mediaFrom graphic footage of migrant children in cages to #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite, portrayals and discussions of race dominate the media landscape. Race and Media adopts a wide range of methods to make sense of specific occurrences, from the corporate portrayal of mixed-race identity by 23andMe to the cosmopolitan fetishization of Marie Kondo. As a whole, this collection demonstrates that all forms of media—from the sitcoms we stream to the Twitter feeds we follow—confirm racism and reinforce its ideological frameworks, while simultaneously giving space for new modes of resistance and understanding

Contracting freedom : race, empire, and U.S. guestworker programs

This book represents the first scholarly attempt to examine the broad geographical dimensions of the World War II U.S. contract farm labor programs together and in sweeping detail. It views these labor programs relationally and in tandem to reveal how they were co-constituted and mutually understood across time and multiple places, producing a liberal consensus during this period that lives on today. By examining debates among government officials, labor leaders, civil rights activists, and agribusiness employers, it explores how the contractual consent and freedom of 1940s guestworker programs legitimated and extended U.S. racial and imperial domination abroad in the post-World War II period.

Assistance

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