Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

by Cathy Schlund-Vials (Editor), Viet Thanh Nguyen (Afterword)

Overview

Emerging from mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points analogously serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection that considers-almost fifty years after its student protest founding—the possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline. Unequivocally, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies investigates the multivalent ways in which the field has at times and-more provocatively, has not-responded to various contemporary crises, particularly as they are manifest in prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic, and exclusionary politics at home, ever-expanding imperial and militarized practices abroad, and neoliberal practices in higher education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823278619
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (UConn). She is the author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the short story collection, The Refugees. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

I. ETHNIC STUDIES REVISITED

CHAPTER ONE
Amy Uyematsu, "Five Decades Later - Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned Poet"

CHAPTER TWO
Timothy Yu, "Has Asian American Studies Failed?"

CHAPTER THREE
Nitasha Sharma, "The Ethnic Studies Project: Asian American Studies and the #BLM Campus"

CHAPTER FOUR
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, "Planned Obsolescence, Strategic Resistance: Ethnic Studies, Asian
American Studies, and the Neoliberal University"'

CHAPTER FIVE
Anita Mannur, "Un-homing Asian American Studies: Refusals and the Politics of Commitment"


II: DISPLACED SUBJECTS
CHAPTER SIX
Junaid Rana, "No Muslims Involved: Letter to Ethnic Studies Comrades"

CHAPTER SEVEN
Asha Nadkarni, "Outsourcing, Terror, and Transnational South Asia"

CHAPTER EIGHT
Rajini Srikanth, "Asian American Studies and Palestine: The Accidental and Reluctant Pioneer"

CHAPTER NINE
Candace Fujikane, "Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory
Solidarities across Settler States"


III: REMAPPING ASIA, RECALIBRATING ASIAN AMERICA

CHAPTER TEN
Yen Le Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama, "Transpacific Entanglements"

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Martin F. Manalansan IV, "Tensions, Engagements, Aspirations: The Politics of Knowledge
Production in Filipino American Studies"

CHAPTER TWELVE
Cynthia Wu, "Asian International Students at U.S. Universities in the Post-2008 Collapse Era"

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kandice Chuh, "Asians are the new what?"


IV: TOWARD AN ASIAN AMERICAN ETHICS OF CARE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Yoonmee Chang, "Asian Americans, Disability, and the Model Minority Myth"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sharon A. Suh, "Buddhist Meditation as Strategic Embodiment: An Optative Reflection"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Brandy Liên Worrall-Soriano, "On Asian/American Memory, Illness, and Passing"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Min Hyoung Song, "An Ethics of Generosity"


AFTERWORD
Viet Thanh Nguyen, "Becoming Bilingual, or Notes on Numbness and Feeling"


Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Flashpoints for Asian American Studies offers an ambitious, bracing, and wide-ranging critique of Asian American studies by practitioners within the field. It calls for a wholesale reconsideration of how Asian American studies operates inside and outside universities; how it theorizes, selects, and defines its subjects and constituencies; and how it functions as an academic and political project. This volume presents a highly original reassessment from the inside of Asian American studies that is unparalleled in terms of its breadth and sustainment."—Daryl Maeda, University of Colorado, Boulder

"This collection offers a bold and timely discussion of key debates in Asian American studies provoked by the institutionalization of Asian American studies in the neoliberal university. In a context of budget crises and also persistence of anti-Asian racism, the essays by a diverse group of scholars offer frank, sometimes autobiographical, reflections from the trenches about questions of incorporation, diversity management, interracial solidarity, public scholarship, and survival. This is a book I have been waiting to read, especially in the era of and Black Lives Matter and BDS activism and with Trump's election, as it offers important lessons for faculty, administrators, and students about how Asian American studies can resist the logics of multiculturalism and austerity."—Sunaina Maira, University of California, Davis

From the Publisher

Flashpoints for Asian American Studies offers an ambitious, bracing, and wide-ranging critique of Asian American studies by practitioners within the field. It calls for a wholesale reconsideration of how Asian American studies operates inside and outside universities; how it theorizes, selects, and defines its subjects and constituencies; and how it functions as an academic and political project. This volume presents a highly original reassessment from the inside of Asian American studies that is unparalleled in terms of its breadth and sustainment.

University of Colorado, Boulde - Daryl Maeda