Celebration of Asian Americans: Literature & Arts

Poised at the intersection of Asian American studies and dance studies, Choreographing Asian America is the first book-length examination of the role of Orientalist discourse in shaping Asian Americanist entanglements with U.S. modern dance history.

Taiko is a dynamic form of drumming that originated in 1950s Japan and inspired Japanese Americans in the 1960s. Through interviews, historical research, and the author's taiko experience, Drumming Asian America connects taiko with Asian American politics, arguing that taiko players of many identities perform Asian America on and off stage.

National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness" through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection--a process that demands that Americanness be defined by the exclusion of Asian Americans, who are either cast as symbolic foreigners incapable of integration or Americanization or distorted into an "honorary" whiteness. She examines how Asian Americans become culturally visible on and off stage, revealing the ways Asian American theater companies and artists respond to the cultural implications of this abjection. Shimakawa looks at the origins of Asian American theater, particularly through the memories of some of its pioneers. Her examination of the emergence of Asian American theater companies illuminates their strategies for countering the stereotypes of Asian Americans and the lack of visibility of Asian American performers within the theater world.

Choreographers Kumiko Kimoto, Sun Ock Lee, Mel Wong and moderator Peggy Choy discuss how Asian and Asian-American issues and identity shape their work. Discussion is intercut with excerpts from work performed by each choreographer.

Indian-Americans from a broad spectrum of cultural experience share their personal stories in an exploration of Indian culture in the United States.

Christine L. Garlough explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework she examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition opening at The Asia Society Galleries, New York, Feb. 16, 1994 and travelling to other galleries through July 28, 1996.

Rather than defining an Asian American art aesthetic, Asian/American/ Modern Art highlights the stylistic tensions and artistic influences apparent in the work of major artists including Chiura Obata, Yun Gee, Ruth Asawa, Isamu Noguchi, Nam June Paik, and Carlos Villa. Two areas of emphasis, the modernist matrix of the early twentieth century and the post-World War II period wherein artists developed new approaches, support the book's recurring themes of war and peace, urban life and community.

Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is the first comprehensive study of the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian ancestry active in the United States before 1970. The publication features original essays by ten leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and over 400 reproductions of artwork, ephemera, and images of the artists.

A survey of Asian American modernists active during the era of Abstract Expressionism which sets out to re-evaluate a generation of neglected artists. Paintings, stone and metal sculptures, woodcuts, works on paper, ceramics and collages are all presented in this volume.

The global circulation of comics, manga, and other such visual mediums between North America and Asia produces transnational meanings no longer rooted in a separation between "Asian" and "American." Drawing New Color Lines explores the culture, production, and history of contemporary graphic narratives that depict Asian Americans and Asians. It examines how Japanese manga and Asian popular culture have influenced Asian American comics; how these comics and Asian American graphic narratives depict the "look" of race; and how these various representations are interpreted in nations not of their production. By focusing on what graphic narratives mean for audiences in North America and those in Asia, the collection discusses how Western theories about the ways in which graphic narratives might successfully overturn derogatory caricatures are themselves based on contested assumptions; and illustrates that the so-called odorless images featured in Japanese manga might nevertheless elicit interpretations about race in transnational contexts. With contributions from experts based in North America and Asia, Drawing New Color Lines will be of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including Asian American studies, cultural and literary studies, comics and visual studies.

Envisioning Diaspora peers into the nuances of artist collective formations and communities of affinity, and ultimately the core issues of identity politics, aesthetics, and diaspora involved in Asian American Art.

Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes chronicles the blossoming of Asian American art and anticipates the growing democratization of American art and culture. Pairing work by twenty-four contemporary Asian American visual artists with responses provocatively drawn from cultural critics, other artists, activists, and intellectuals, this book explores themes of geographical movement, the sexuality of Asian bodies, colonization, miscegenation, hybrid forms of immigrant cultures, the loss of home, war, history, and memory.

Irene Poon's book pays tribute to 25 Asian American artists she has known and photographed during her own distinguished career. She has compiled a book about the pioneers she found to emulate when she began creating images of the world around her, both within and beyond her own San Francisco Chinatown.

This pioneering work traces the emergence of the modern and contemporary art of Muslim South Asia in relation to transnational modernism and in light of the region's intellectual, cultural, and political developments.

In this insightful study, Jasmine Alinder explores the photographic record of the imprisonment in war relocation centers such as Manzanar, Tule Lake, Jerome, and others. She investigates why photographs were made, how they were meant to function, and how they have been reproduced and interpreted subsequently by the popular press and museums in constructing versions of public history. Moving Images reveals the significance of the camera in the process of incarceration as well as the construction of race, citizenship, and patriotism in this complex historical moment.

This creatively designed book focuses on recent works by seventeen Asian American artists born in the late 1960s and 1970s--including Patty Chang, Kaz Oshiro, and Jean Shin--to explore this pivotal generation of artists, the prevalent themes in their art, and the different ways they configure identity in their work.

Introduction: A Crisis of Representation 1. On the Origins of Asian American Literature: The Eaton Sisters and the Hybrid Body 2. Wounded Bodies and the Cold War: Freedom, Materialism, and Revolution in Asian American Literature, 1946-1957 3. The Remas

Examines the work of 18 Asian Pacific American artists creating in the Pacific Northwest during the period from 1900 to 1960. Essays on art in Seattle, Asian American painters of Washington state, early Asian American photographers, and the legacy of Asian American art accompany color paintings and

In Unsettled Visions, the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural, and political contours of Asian America, and a renaissance in Asian American art and visual culture was well underway. Machida conducted extensive interviews with ten artists working during this transformative period: women and men of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese descent, most of whom migrated to the United States. In dialogue with the artists,

Why Asia?: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art is a ground-breaking investigation into two overlapping and rapidly emerging areas in contemporary art. Extricating them from their current confusion under a generic "Asian" label, Yang reveals the specificity of each. The book consists of lucid discussions on individual artists, exhibitions and theoretical issues. With over sixty illustrations it serves to introduce the current landscape of Asian and Asian American Art, with essays on art in China, Taiwan and North America, as well as individual essays on leading artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Xu Bing and Michael Joo. Above all, Yang explores the challenges that contemporary Asian and Asian American art poses to artists, critics, curators and viewers alike. In particular, she reflects on the complexities of exhibition practice, the role of identity politics in arts, the unspoken assumptions of Western critics faced with Asian art, and the difficulties faced by artists working between cultures. This is a major critical contribution in an area where criticism conspicuously lags behind artistic practice.

As a teenager during China s Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin served as an uneducated soldier in the People s Liberation Army. Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel "Waiting," completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. Ha Jin s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world questions that take center stage in "The Writer as Migrant," his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing are enlisted to explore a migrant author s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin s mental library, "The Writer as Migrant" is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival. "

This anthology covers writings by Asian Americans in all genres, from the early twentieth century to the present. Some sixty authors of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Southeast Asian American origin are represented, with an equal split between male and female writers. The collection is divided into four sections-memoir, fiction, poetry, and drama-prefaced by an introductory essay from a well-known practitioner of that genre: Meena Alexander on memoir, Gary Pak on fiction, Eileen Tabios on poetry, and Roberta Uno on drama.

"An array of fresh and original voices. Sharp, nervous, watchful, quickening prose."-The New York Times Book Review. Forty-eight stories sweep across the 20th century and the range of Asian American experience.

Edited by acclaimed novelist and National Book Award nominee Jessica Hagedorn, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World brings together  forty-two fresh, fascinating voices in Asian American writing--from classics by Jose Garcia Villa and Wakako Yamauchi to exciting new fiction from Akhil Sharma, Ruth Ozeki, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monique Truong. Sweeping in background and literary style, from pioneering writers to newly emerging voices from the Hmong and Korean communities, these exceptional works celebrate the full spectrum of Asian American experience and identities, transcending stereotypes and revealing the strength and vitality of Asian America today.

The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

Master storyteller Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters.

Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It's a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.       

Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life ?no-no boys.' Yamada answered ?no? twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle. As Ozeki writes, Ichiro's ?obsessive, tormented? voice subverts Japanese postwar ?model-minority? stereotypes, showing a fractured community and one man's ?threnody of guilt, rage, and blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world.' The first edition of No-No Boy since 1979 presents this important work to new generations of readers.

In this gorgeous, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew.

At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection, but like sisters everywhere they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other, but each knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other the most. Along the way they face terrible sacrifices, make impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who they are: Shanghai girls.

A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II.

A collection of stories set in the fictional town of Rosarita Bay, California, examines what it means to be Asian in America.

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards,The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow,The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

Viet Thanh Nguyen'sThe Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but also the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the ALA Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Nguyen's next fiction book,The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. With the coruscating gaze that informedThe Sympathizer, inThe Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters,The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.

"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity"

This exciting anthology of work by up-and-coming writers is the first to profile a new generation of Asian American poets. Building on the legacy of now-canonized poets, such as Li-Young Lee, Cathy Song, and Garrett Hongo, who were the first to achieve widespread recognition in the American literary community, this new generation also strikes off in bold new directions. Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation gathers for the first time a broad cross section of the very best work of these young poets, all under the age of forty, including Timothy Liu, Adrienne Su, Sue Kwock Kim, Rick Barot, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mong-Lan, as well as less familiar names.

Contains a collection of poems dealing with the immigrant experience by poets with ties to the Asian Pacific, and short biographies of each poet.

This landmark anthology provide the first historical survey of Asian American poetry. The poems were selected to reflect both the high quality and wide range of Asian American poetic discourse. The anthology begins with writings from the 1890s by Sadakichi Harmann and Yone Noguchi and includes poems by Jun Fujita (1923), Bunishi Kagawa (1930), Hisaye Yamamoto (1940), Diana Change 91946) , and others. Earlly work by well-known writers Joy Kogawa, Jessica Hagedorn, and Lawson Inada are also represented. Essays by Fay Chiang, Eric Chock, Alan Chong Lau, Kimiko Hahn, and Gerry Shikatani give an overview of regional Asian American poetry scenes from the 1970s through the 1990s, and the editor provides a complete bibliography of published volumes of Asian American poetry. An important source book, Quiet Fire makes a significant contribution to the remapping of American poetry and Asian American literature.

A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.
"Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"--And very human--subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers."

This ground-breaking first Asian American women's anthology breaks barriers of invisibility that Asian American women have faced. Among the more than 80 writers and artists are Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Diana Chang, Marilyn Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Mayuni Oda, Nellie Wong, Merle Woo, and Mitsuye Yamada.

The winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, from Newbery Medalist Cynthia Kadohata. Cynthia Kadohata's ode to the breadbasket of America has received six starred reviews and was selected as a National Book Award Finalist.

Would you make a deal with a magical tiger? This uplifting story brings Korean folklore to life as a girl goes on a quest to unlock the power of stories and save her grandmother.

This funny and profound debut novel by prolific illustrator Lin tells the story of young Pacy who, as she celebrates the Chinese New Year with her family, discovers this is the year she is supposed to "find herself." Illustrations.

This critical study of Asian American literature discusses work by internationally successful writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan and others in their historical, cultural and critical contexts. The focus of the book is on contemporary writing, from the 1970s onwards, although it also traces over a hundred years of Asian American literary production in prose, poetry, drama and criticism.

An indispensable reference collection, it is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedgagogic resource.

A recent explosion of publishing activity by a wide range of talented writers has placed Asian American literature in the limelight.

Modern Minority presents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature's relationship to the genre of realism, particularly through its preoccupation with the everyday. Lee argues that it is through the elements of the everyday, which she defines as the 'quantifiable' attention to familiar objects and 'quasi-statistical' repetitions of ordinary acts, that Asian American writers negotiate their vexed relationship to modernity.

This book provides a survey of literature by North American writers of Asian descent, both by national origins (Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Vietnamese) and by shared concerns. The volume is intended to serve as both a guide and a reference work for scholars, teachers, and students in Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and American studies. In terms of breadth and depth of coverage it is the first of its kind.

The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature offers an engaging survey of Asian American literature from the nineteenth century to the present day.

This interdisciplinary collection of critical essays on Asian American fictional and autobiographical narratives, film, and photography examines the mobile geographies of Asia and America as sceneries of migration and meeting points.

In the past four decades the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies has grown enormously, expanding its areas of inquiry beyond the reflections on national identity and citizenship to encompass such issues as transnational and diasporic identities and communities; the workings of imperialism; the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality; and social justice/human rights in a global context. This project is the largest and most comprehensive collection of scholarship on Asian American literature and culture to date.

Popular genre fiction written by Asian American women and featuring Asian American characters gained a market presence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thoma shows how these writers' works address the various pressures on women to manage their roles in relation to family and finances--reconciling the demands of work, consumer culture, and motherhood--in a neoliberal society..