Asian-American Studies: A Research Guide: Issues

A primer on racism that offers an intersectional, anti-racist, coalition-building view of Asian American identity. Drawing on her experiences and observations from history, conversations with Asian American peers, and lessons derived from other people of color, Camp unpacks the confusing dynamics that underlie anti-Asian stigmas and stereotypes. From the model minority myth to yellowface to anti-Blackness among Asian communities, Camp presses into hard questions, naming fears so that we might dispel them. Stories of resistance reveal the importance of solidarity, both among the diverse people under the Asian American umbrella and with all who are exploited by white supremacy.

(Also in print, E184 A75 N565 2021) erin Khuê Ninh considers the factors that drove college imposters such as Azia Kim (who pretended to be a Stanford freshman), and Jennifer Pan (who hired a hitman to kill her parents before they found out she had never received her high school diploma) to extreme lengths to appear successful. These outlier examples prompt Ninh to address the larger issue of the pressures and difficulties of striving to be model minority, where failure is too ruinous to admit. [The book] insists that being a "model minority" is not a "myth," but coded into one's programming as an identity....and that the true cost of turning children into high-achieving professionals may be higher than anyone can bear.

In Straight A's Asian American students at Harvard reflect on their common experiences with discrimination, immigrant communities, their relationships to their Asian heritage, and their place in the university. They also explore the difficulties of living up to family expectations and the real-world effects of the "model minority" stereotype. Their examinations of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and culture directly speak to the Asian American experience in U.S. higher education.

""By looking at storytelling, form, and style in graphic novels and comics such as Ms. Marvel, George Takei's They Called Us Enemy, Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do, Gene Luen Yang's The Shadow Hero, and others, this volume demonstrates how Asian American creators in the twenty-first century employ graphic narrative to show Asian Americans as complex, nuanced individuals"

Yellow Peril--one of the most long-standing and pervasive racist ideas in Western culture-- is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, pop culture artifacts and political polemic. Written by two leading scholars, with paintings, photographs and images drawn from dime novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, polemical and pseudo-scholarly literature and other pop culture ephemera, this book is both a unique archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

The AIDS crisis reshaped life in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s and radicalized a new generation of queer Asian Americans with a broad vision of health equity and sexual freedom. Even amid the fear and grief, Asian American AIDS activists created an infrastructure of care that centered the most stigmatized and provided diverse immigrant communities with the health resources and information they needed.

"The pressures Asian Americans feel to be socially and economically exceptional include an unspoken mandate to always be healthy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the expectation for Asian Americans to enter the field of medicine, principally as providers of care rather than those who require care. [This book] explores what happens when those considered model minorities critically engage with illness and medicine whether as patients or physicians. James Kyung-Jin Lee considers how popular culture often positions Asian Americans as medical authorities and what that racial characterization means.

Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black-white relations, this interdisciplinary collection explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South. Some essays attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region...

Heartfelt personal accounts from Asian American women on their experiences with skin color bias, from being labeled "too dark" to becoming empowered to challenge beauty standards. In Whiter, thirty Asian American women provide first-hand accounts of their experiences with colorism in this collection of powerful, accessible, and brutally honest essays. Featuring contributors of many ages, nationalities, and professions...

..."we begin with a review of the standard explanations for delinquency and gang activity that have been offered by academics... we then work through these explanations by providing accounts by individuals in Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Korean and Indian communities. Some of the conventional explanations appear to be less important in these communities, but others take on more prominence."

4 vols Vol.1 contains historical and contemporary memoirs, essays, fiction, and stories that reveal the diversity of Asian American women's experience with themes such as freedom, labour, domesticity, sexuality, self-actualization, liberalism, nationalism, family, language, and coalition. The following three volumes place research from history, literature, law, sociology, popular culture, psychology, new media, and visual culture into interdisciplinary dialogue.