New Books in Asian American Studies

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of anti-Asian racism as well as moments of sexism and nationalism within Chinese communities. Yet for Wong, the tensions and visibility of this figure also allows alternative and alternating forms of solidarity rooted in stepping back from ideologies of nation, race and gender. The sex worker thus allows us to see Chineseness and other forms of collectivity as an affective product, an attachment that mobilizes our emotions and frames how we see others as well as ourselves. By charting representations of the Chinese sex worker through histories of Pacific Crossing, Cold War era ideologies, and contemporary globalization, Wong’s book shows the multiple ways that sex work and prostitution have unsettled forms of collectivity, while providing new spaces for dwelling. Christopher B. Patterson teaches at the University of British Columbia, Social Justice Institute. He is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific and Stamped: an anti-travel novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez‘s new book, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2018) traces how globalization, neoliberalism and new technology have reshaped migrant care work from the Philippines. The book is the result of five years of research interviewing migrant women and participating in their communities, as well as intermittent trips to the Philippines where Dr. Francisco-Menchavez spent time speaking with the families and extended families of migrant workers. Her book attempts to redefine notions of care and overseas employment that focus solely on the worker’s labor, and rather to understand a form of what she calls “multidirectional care,” which describes the ways in which “transnational family members activate multiple resources, people, and networks to redefine care work in the family” (23). Dr. Francisco-Menchavez explores this larger network of care to understand how migrant work affects gender roles and creates new solidarities. Christopher B. Patterson teaches at the University of British Columbia, Social Justice Institute. He is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific and Stamped: an anti-travel novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017), Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe gather artists and scholars whose work disrupts, challenges, and reimagines ways of being Asian and Asian American. Through nine original artist interviews and seven critical essays, the editors showcase contemporary artists who queer our conceptions of surveillance, affect, mixed race, and Asian America itself. In doing so, the editors remain interested in the queer disturbances within artworks that respond to racism and state violence, while also forming solidarities based on critical understandings of shared oppression. 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 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes: “I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.” Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurred possibilities. She takes us into her need to know this never-realized self and this life she never lived. By stunning and poignant turns, her book reveals the complexities of the lives we do end up living, the hauntings that make us who we are, and the unexpected way in which great art and artists pull us apart and pieces us back together. And the book has an excellent trailer, which you can find here. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. 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 Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Lon Kurashige emphasizes the contingencies that shaped the history of Asian restriction and exclusion in the United States from the 1840s to the 1980s. Two Faces of Exclusion answers the question, posed by another scholar, of why Asian exclusion took so long to achieve and was so uneven if racism was so total and overwhelming. Kurashige proposes that we think about anti-Asian racism as the result of a “perfect storm” that required the convergence of several vulnerabilities—most important among them the inability of Asians to become U.S. citizens—with fears about political, economic, and social contamination by Asians. Contesting the ebbs and flows of this storm were two camps that Kurashige calls the “exclusionists” and the “egalitarians,” which themselves evolved over time. Like other recent cutting-edge scholarship in the field of Asian American history, Two Faces of Exclusion follows these threads internationally and shows how American lives and careers abroad in many cases influenced their support for egalitarianism at home. Kurashige’s use of quantitative data about congressional roll call votes and precinct-level voting patterns will interest fans of historical methods, and adds fresh insights to a story that many may think they already know. 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 Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American ‘Oriental’ (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Amy Sueyoshi argues that Americans did not always regard Chinese and Japanese in the U.S. as pan-ethnic “Orientals” in ways that are familiar to Asian Americans today. Rather, this conflation occurred against a backdrop of troubling stereotypes that enabled white Americans in turn-of-the-century San Francisco to explore changing ideas and practices of gender and sexuality. Sueyoshi uses a wide variety of sources including newspapers and magazines, morgue and court records, novels, plays, and oral history to reconstitute differing images of Chinese and Japanese American men and women, while at the same showing that their lives defied these misrepresentations. In this conversation, Sueyoshi shares insights from Discriminating Sex, and talks about her journey through academia and activism in pursuit of equity for queer Asian Americans both on and off the page. Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at kshin@bates.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 American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. In The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America. The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment in federal border control failed to slow Chinese migration, vigilantes attempted to take the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, U.S. policymakers redoubled their efforts to keep the Chinese out, overhauling U.S. immigration law and transforming diplomatic relations with China. By locating the origins of the modern American alien in this violent era, Lew-Williams recasts the significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history. As The Chinese Must Go makes clear, anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today’s immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the “heathen Chinaman.” Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press), out in paperback May 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S. global power after 1945. Man argues that the Cold War divide between communism and liberal democracy cast Asians into either bad or good—the bad being the Communists and Viet Cong, and the good being military servicemen channeled into American war zones. Following the labor circuits of Asian military workers and soldiers as they navigated an emergent Pacific world, Man reframes Asians as both U.S. citizens and as people from Asian countries like the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. Doing so, Man writes, allows us to understand how U.S. empire took hold through a murky process of decolonization that on its surface sought to create an “Asia for Asians” but actually legitimated and obscured U.S. state violence. At the same time, Man traces other forms of decolonization by Asian soldiers who sought freedom and self-determination beyond the nation-state form, and saw decolonizing projects as permanently suspended and incomplete. Christopher B. Patterson teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University and is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (UNC Press, 2016) offers an important revision to this literature by examining legal and social responses to Japanese and South Asian mobility in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the U.S. between 1896 and 1924. Atkinson argues that, while these various geographies shared similar ideologies and motivations for restricting Asian mobility, local conditions—for example, economic conditions, proximity to Asia, structures of political governance, and the number of real vs. prospective Asian migrants—were far more determinative of exclusionary campaigns and policies. The resulting imperial discord and international tensions constituted the “burden of white supremacy.” In this conversation, Atkinson shares insights from this complex history, as well as his approach to researching and crafting a multi-national, multi-archival project. 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 Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Allison Varzally documents the history of Vietnamese adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Varzally adds to the growing literature on Southeast Asian Americans and on Asian international adoption by highlighting the distinctiveness of Vietnamese adoption for its liberal orientation and its expansive notion of kinship. Four chapters trace this history from its antiwar beginnings in the early Cold War; to Operation Babylift in 1975 and its controversial legal aftermath; to the federal legislation and social practices that shaped the “homecomings” of Amerasians in the 1980s; and, finally, to Vietnamese adoptees own attempts in the 1990s (and beyond) to find meaning in their journeys. Making ample use of oral history, Varzally tells stories that are both heart-rending and inspiring. They confirm that family formation was a central site of political contestation and protest in late twentieth-century America. Children of Reunion offers food for thought in contemporary debates over refugee resettlement and family reunification as a principle for immigration policymaking. Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at kshin@bates.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