Asian Tragedies in the Americas: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Stories explores the stories of nineteenth-century East Asian migrants throughout the Americas, tracing the asymmetrical international conditions which shaped migrants’ experiences. Won K.Yoon examines such phenomena as Chinese paper (fraudulent) wives and daughters, Korean picture marriages, and Japanese war brides, analyzing the impact of racism and colonialism on East Asian groups and family experiences in the West.

People of Asian descent have lived for centuries in North and South America, where they have been actively involved in the creation of multicultural, multiethnic societies. This groundbreaking anthology explores their experiences among ethnic and cultural groups in a unique collection of works by and about Asian Americans. Utilizing a rich blend of analytical, autobiographical, biographical, and narrative essays, oral histories, fiction, photography, and artwork, the anthology focuses especially on the interactions of Asians with others outside the dominant culture. Contributors range from established scholars, writers and artists to little-known voices heard here for the first time. Scholars of Asian diasporas and all readers interested in Asia in the Americas will find this book an extraordinary resource. Contributions by: Kozy K. Amemiya, Himani Bannerji, Monica Cinco Basurto, Raissa Nina Burns, Jeff Chang, Jay Chaudhari, Kathryn Jeun Cho, Rienzi Crusz, Astrid Hadad, Laura Hall, Muriel H. Hasbun, Tomoyo Hiroishi, Velina Hasu Houston, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Naheed Islam, Feroza Jussawalla, Nguyet Lam, Armando Siu Lau, Stephanie Li, R. Zamora Linmark, Sunaina Maira, Diane Monroe, Ofelia Murrieta, Luis Nishizawa, Dwight Okita, Gary Pak, Monica J. Rainwater, Aly Remtulla, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Ann Suni Shin, Jan Lo Shinebourne, Janet Shirley, Lok C. D. Siu, Rajini Srikanth, Leny Mendoza Strobel, Eileen Tabios, Ayumi Takenaka, Gabriela Kinuyo Torres, Kay Reiko Torres, Takeyuki Tsuda, Usha Welaratna, Bill Woo, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Thomas Sze Leong Yu.

Chronicles Asian Americans' fight for equality and political inclusion in the United States during the late twentieth century, exploring how the movement brought about surprising social change in ethnic neighborhoods across the country and how it influenced Asian American art, literature, and culture.

Labor, laws, and love. Yen Le Espiritu explores how racist and gendered labor conditions and immigration laws have affected relations between and among Asian American women and men. Asian American Men and Women documents how the historical and contemporary oppression of Asians in the United States has (re)structured the balance of power between Asian American women and men and shaped their struggles to create and maintain social institutions and systems of meaning. Espiritu emphasizes how race, gender, and class, as categories of difference, do not parallel but instead intersect and confirm one other.

The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes. The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.

Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good." Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.

A “provocative and sweeping” (Time) blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world “[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Mother Jones In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them. The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs. Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.

This collection of essays interrogates literary and cultural narratives in the contexts of the incidents following 9/11. The collected essays underscore the new and (re)emerging racial, political, and socio-cultural discourse on identity related to terrorism and identity politics. Specifically, the collection examines South Asian American identities to understand culture, policy making, and the implicit gendered racialization, sexualization, and socio-economic classification of minority identities within the discourse of globalization. The essays included here relocate the discourse of race and cultural studies to an examination of transnational labor diasporas, reopen debate on critical constructions of U.S. racial and cultural formations, and question the reconfiguration of gendered and sexualized discourses of the South Asian diaspora within the context of national security and terrorism. This book provides a multifaceted account of South Asian racialization and belonging by drawing from disciplines across the humanities and the social sciences. The scholars included here employ methods of ethnographic studies as well as literary, culture, film, and feminist analysis to examine a wide range of South Asian cultural sites: novels, short stories, cultural texts, documentaries, and sports. The rich intellectual, theoretical, methodological, and narrative tapestry of South Asians that emerges from this inquiry enables us to trace new patterns of South Asian cultural consumption post-9/11 as well as expand notions and histories of “terror.” This volume makes an important contribution to renewing scholarship in the key areas of representations of race, labor, diaspora, class, and culture while implicating that there needs to be a simultaneous and critical dialogue on the scope and reconnections within postcolonial studies.

This is the only anthology that covers several different topics related to Koreans’ experiences in the U.S. and Canada. The topics covered are Koreans’ immigration and settlement patterns, changes in Korean immigrants’ business patterns, Korean immigrant churches’ social functions, differences between Korean immigrant intact families and geese families, transnational ties, second-generation Koreans’ identity issues, and Korean international students’ gender issues. This book focuses on Korean Americans’ twenty-first century experiences. It provides basic statistics about Koreans’ immigration, settlement and business patterns, while it also provides meaningful qualitative data on gender issues and ethnic identity. The annotated bibliography on Korean Americans in Chapter 10 will serve as important guides for beginning researchers studying Korean Americans.

This book uses everyday consumption as a lens to analyze how South Asian Muslim American women negotiate racial, religious, gendered, classed, and often political identities. In particular, Ternikar examines the use of food and clothing as well as social media accounts among this important immigrant population, offering new insight that goes beyond examining Muslim American women through the lens of hijab. This timely and nuanced interdisciplinary study draws on both sociology of consumption theory and intersectional feminism and will be valuable for courses in gender and women’s studies, sociology of consumption, and women and religion.