New Books in Asian American Studies

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an almost revolutionary work of theory and critique: Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Ornamentalism offers arguably the first sustained theory of the yellow woman and, beyond that, a nuanced reflection on the way in which women of color are subjects-turned-into-things but that not every woman of color becomes-thing in the same way. Cheng insists on the term ornamentalism as both a lever of critique and of emancipation, resisting the easy distinction between person/thing and skin/substance to investigate how a theory of radical style offers ontological possibilities for thriving among injury. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been critically examined within philosophy, particularly by feminists and bioethicists, but the role of race—both in how the technologies are used and in the effects that they are having—has received less attention.  In The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), Camisha Russell undertakes this critical analysis.  While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work. Further, by arguing that race itself is a technology, Russell shows how race is both produced and productive, historically, as well as in everyday practices, techniques, and choices.  While this analysis focuses on what race does in the contemporary realm of ARTS, it illuminates the role of race, in the past and now, in constructing social reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (New York University Press, 2018), Long T. Bui examines the complicated relationship between the Vietnamese diasporic community and its home country, the former South Vietnam. Central to Bui’s argument is his use of Richard Nixon’s definition of Vietnamization as a way to frame the postwar afterlives of South Vietnamese refugees, their descendants, and those remaining in Vietnam today. While Nixon used this term as a military strategy to pull the U.S. military out of Vietnam, Vietnamization for Bui is a way to highlight how this Cold War term continues to function as an ideology and a discourse in the Vietnamese American community. Bui utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that includes discourse analysis, interviews, archival research, and personal narrative, in tackling questions of memory, loss, national identity, sovereignty, and agency. This book is both a critical investigation and a tribute to the refugee community that is a legacy of the Vietnam War.Laura Ha Reizman is a PhD candidate in Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance.Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian woman. Drawing on examples from the realms of law, popular culture and art from the 19th and 20th centuries, Cheng deepens our understanding of racial formation by demonstrating how race and gender are conceived not only in relation to the body, but inorganic ornamentation as well.Anne A. Cheng is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Princeton University.Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In this episode, I talked with Ali Michael on her award-winning book, Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education (Teachers College Press, 2015). According to a 2014 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, white teachers comprise over 85% of the K-12 teaching force in the United States, whereas as of 2011, 52% of the public school students were white students, 16% black students, 24% Hispanic students, 5% Asian and Pacific Islander students, and 1% American India or Alaska Native students. In many urban areas, white teachers are teaching classes in which a majority of the students are non-white. In such a context, how is the issue of race addressed in American schools? How do white teachers connect to their students of color? Or simply, is it necessary to raise race questions?In Raising Race Questions, Ali Michael worked with a group of white teachers to inquire about race and schooling. She has masterfully shown to us, how teachers can become more racially competent through asking difficult questions, building inquiry groups, and working on personal and interpersonal reflection. The book offers four guiding principles for teachers to inquire about race and racism: (1) the inquiry aims to make teachers and classrooms more whole than creating fractures; (2) teachers’ and students’ positive racial identity matter; (3) a multicultural curriculum is not sufficient for building an antiracist classroom; (4) racial competence can be learned. These principles are inspiring and helpful for not only teachers, but also all the citizens who care about the issues of equity, inclusion, and social justice. Raising Race Questions won the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Its author, Ali Michael is the co-founder and director of the Race Institute for K-12 Educators. Other than this book, Dr. Michael also published regularly on popular and professional media such as the Huffington Post and Independent Schools Magazine.Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In her new book, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019), Ann Gleig makes a major contribution to scholarship on American Buddhism. Gleig focuses on meditation-based convert Buddhist lineages in North America, and in particular she is interested in the generational changes underway in these groups. The first generations of convert Buddhist teachers often modernized the tradition in distinctly American ways, and now Gen X and millennial Buddhists are re-engaging with the tradition but bringing to their Buddhist practice and teaching new questions. The issues that they—and Gleig, in her study—tackle include mindfulness as a secular and commercialized practice, sex scandals, and new technologies. These Buddhists ask how their communities should address racism and social injustice, and what the goal of practice should be. Gleig sets her fine-grained ethnographic research within a larger discussion of Buddhist modernism, arguing that the convert Buddhism is better understood through the lens of post-modernity.Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

The story of popular entertainment in American immigrant communities is only just beginning to be told. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao from University of Illinois Press (2017) addresses the history of Cantonese Opera performed in Chinatowns in cities across North America with a primary focus on San Francisco, New York City, and Vancouver during the 1920s. Using a wealth of archival material, including extensive records from the U.S. Immigration Service, Rao provides an enormous amount of information about the theaters, companies, performers, and repertoire of this operatic genre. She contextualizes the performance of Cantonese Opera within the cultural life of Chinese communities, explains the print materials and recordings that circulated the music, and details the significant impact that exclusionary governmental immigration policies had on this theatrical tradition and Chinese immigrants in Canada and the United States. Rao’s book not only offers information about this performance tradition that has never been published before, it also provides a model for the kind of work that still needs to be done on musical and theatrical entertainment in many other ethnic communities in North America. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America has been awarded the 2019 Association for Asian-American Studies Performance and Media Studies Book Award, the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music for the best book published in 2017, and the 2018 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society.Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a professor of music at Rutgers University where she is the Head of Music Theory. One of the leading scholars in the study of Chinese American music, her work has appeared in many journals including the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Music Theory Spectrum. She has received an NEH Research Fellowship and ACLS Scholar in China Fellowship to support her work on the intersections between China and the West, particularly in contemporary Chinese music. In 2007, she won the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music for an essay on the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies