The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion and Self-making in Mona in the Promised Land

Reviewed by: POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies Kamala Visweswaran POSITIONS, Special Issue; “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies.” Edited by Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe. Durham: Duke University, 1997. The journal Positions was founded in 1993 with the objective of providing “a new forum of debate for all concerned with the social, intellectual, and political events unfolding in East Asia and within the Asian diaspora.” Its mission statement identified intensifying global flows of labor and capital in the late 20th century as central concerns, and asked its readers to reflect on how these transformations might recast priorities in scholarship, teaching, and criticism. It is therefore in keeping with the intellectual tradition already established by the journal, that a special edition on “New Formations, New Questions: Asian American Studies” explores emerging relationships between Asian and Asian American studies. [End Page 308] Positions, over the last few years, has published groundbreaking articles on questions of colonialism and modernity in East Asia, and explored the distinct perspectives post-structuralist and postcolonial theory might bring to area studies. This issue of the journal asks what ethnic studies might bring to area studies, and conversely establishes the importance of linking ethnic studies to critical area studies, or more particularly, of linking the contradictory, but mutually constitutive relations between Asians and Asian Americans. Guest editors Elaine Kim and Lisa Lowe make it clear that such a relationship must account for “the long history of dissymmetry between the fields...the differences in their institutional locations, and the large gaps between the subjects and knowledges posited by each field” (viii). Yet they also establish the necessity of forging such a relationship. They remind us that Asian Americans are formed simultaneously within U.S. national and global frameworks. The return of (Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean) immigrants to the imperial center means that their racialization under terms of the U.S nation-state can’t be understood without understanding histories of colonialism and capitalist development in Asia. Such an approach disrupts the master narrative of becoming a national citizen for Asian American subjects, and productively recasts the relationship of Asian American studies with American studies. This special issue of Positions is, therefore, a timely and important collection of essays that significantly contributes to, and expands upon national discussions about the shape of Asian American studies east of California, reflected in other edited collections over the last decade: Gary Okihiro’s Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies (1988), Shirley Hune’s (1990) Asian Americans; Comparative and Global Perspectives, and Robert Lee and Lihbin Shao’s (1994) Building Blocks for Asian American Studies: Proceedings of the 1992 East Of California Asian American Studies Conference. Thus, Kim and Lowe tie the emergence of theoretical “new formations” in Asian American studies to “new immigrations”— by which is meant not only the inclusion of more recent post-1965 immigrant groups such as Koreans, Indians, and Vietnamese, but the multiple, back and forth migrations of such groups resulting from U.S imperial and economic policies. They identify and enumerate four major pressures (ix) that shape the questions to be posed as part of these new formations: 1. the ‘post-Fordist’ restructuring of global capitalism that employs ‘mixed production’ and ‘flexible accumulation’ and permits the exploitations of Asian workers both in Asia and the United States; [End Page 309] 2. the changed demography of the Asian American population as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which increased and diversified Filipino, Korean, Southeast Asian, and South Asian communities in the United States; 3. the colonial and neocolonial role of the United States in the Asian states from which these new Asian American communities emigrate; and 4. the failure of citizenship and civil rights to guarantee equality of opportunity and resources to poor, racialized and gendered communities in the United States. Editors Kim and Lowe have done an excellent job of laying out the parameters of this new relationship by including articles that address the politics and dynamics of the new immigration. Essays by Peter Kiang and Anuradha Advani reaffirm the field’s historic focus on community studies by examining relationships between community groups...

Meeting Asian/Arab American StudiesThinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S. Sunaina Maira (bio) and Magid Shihade (bio) I am the witness of the massacre I am the victim of the map I am the son of simple words . . . —Mahmoud Darwish, from "Poem of the Land"1 Speak, your lips still have their liberty Speak, still yours is the spoken word . . . Speak, for the truth is alive even now Speak, say all you wish you had said. —Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from "Speak" (1941)2 Why link Asian and Arab American Studies? Why should we speak of Arab American studies in Asian American studies, or have a conversation in ethnic studies about points of convergence and divergence between these two areas? Is it in order to recognize an emerging ethnic studies field in the U.S., with all the limitations that a politics of recognition based on multiculturalism entails? Is it to extend a comparative ethnic studies approach that is increasingly transforming Asian American studies while raising questions about the definition of ethnic and racial boundaries? In our view, the answer is all of these, but much more. We argue here that speaking of Arab and Asian [End Page 117] American studies in the same breath is ultimately valuable because it illuminates a broader and more urgent issue: the need to develop a fuller analysis of U.S. empire. The meeting of Asian American and Arab American studies has been increasingly highlighted in discussions after 9/11 as it has become apparent that Asian American—particularly South Asian—and Arab American communities as well as Muslim Americans more generally, have similar experiences as targets in the "war on terrorism" waged by the United States. The question of how to produce intellectual and political knowledge to respond to the everyday crisis of empire is urgent at this particular moment, but we want to point out that it has always been so—the conjuncture between Asian/Arab American studies helps to situate U.S. empire in a much longer historical trajectory that links movements in, and out of, Asia and the Middle East. Imperial power operates by obscuring the links between homeland projects of racial subordination and minority co-optation and overseas strategies of economic restructuring and political domination. This link between the domestic and global fronts of empire can be exposed only if we expand our frame of analysis to consider the ways in which categories of subjects such as "Asian American" and "Arab American" are positioned in relation to U.S. empire. Ethnic studies has focused in large part on documenting, understanding, and challenging the construction of ethnic and racial boundaries as they intersect with other axes of domination, such as gender, sexuality, and class, within the nation. However, there has also been a movement in Asian American studies to acknowledge the transnational dimensions of Asian communities and histories, on the one hand, and the paradoxes and pitfalls of a multiculturalist identity politics, on the other. So the meeting of Arab/Asian American studies highlights the question of borders, and the political and epistemological work of boundaries in shaping our understanding of power and resistance. It helps us to locate the issue of ethnic and racial borders within the larger frame of U.S. empire, and to understand that the question facing Asian American studies today is how to intellectually and institutionally confront imperial, not just national or ethnic, politics. This has always been the challenge for ethnic studies, which has often remained confined within a national frame. [End Page 118] The purpose of linking Asian and Arab American studies is not to colonize Arab American studies within an ever-expanding rubric of pan-Asian ethnicity, but to do the opposite: to challenge the ever-expanding borders of an imperial project that operates through direct as well as proxy wars, neo-colonial occupation, and client states. Ultimately, it is for Arab Americanists themselves to decide where they want to be situated in the academy and how Arab American studies should be introduced into the curriculum. Research on Arab Americans is growing and gaining more academic recognition through new faculty hires and programs, though it continues to occur in...

The journey of Asian Americans in the United States is vital to understanding the perspective that Asian immigrants take on the way to becoming Asian Americans. Within the past century, Asians in America have played an essential role in communities across the country. In order to understand the efforts it takes for some of these people, our “Internship in Asian American Studies” (ASAM 490) class explored their experiences and lives by highlighting Asian American and Asian business owners in Greater Lafayette, other areas in Indiana. With a lack of vocalization about this topic, it is crucial to establish this voice for the Asian and Asian American communities. In our service-learning project, we created a narrative over images captured to visualize the history of the Asian Americans we interviewed. Through this narrative, we hope to enable a more established engagement within our campus archives both institutionally and academically in order to showcase the Asian American community and the successes and triumphs that those in the Greater Lafayette area have overcome.

The concept of duty is overrated (Fire) The swamiji's testicles have grown too big for his loincloth (Fire) It's a dyke thing (Junky Punky Girlz) Eswar Allah tero Naam (Junky Punky Girlz) Before ex...

Guest Editors' Introduction

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

Insurgency and Asian American Studies in the Time of Black Lives Matter Justin Leroy (bio) Peter Liang has the distinction of being one of approximately a dozen police officers convicted of murder or manslaughter for killing a civilian while on duty since 2005. Liang's victim was Akai Gurley, a black man shot dead after Liang fired his weapon into an empty stairwell of the East New York public housing complex where Gurley lived. A New York Supreme Court justice eventually reduced Liang's charge to criminally negligent homicide and declined to sentence him to serve time in prison. However, the initial charge of second-degree manslaughter could have sent Liang away for fifteen years. Liang was the only NYPD officer convicted in an on-duty shooting in well over a decade; the question of whether he was a racial scapegoat soon emerged. Asian American activists in New York City and beyond mobilized in defense of Liang, in what New York Times staff writer Jay Caspian Kang called "the most pivotal moment in the Asian-American community since the Rodney King riots" more than two decades earlier.1 In response, many young, progressive Asian Americans engaged their families and communities about issues of police brutality and the importance of Black Lives Matter. The authors of a widely translated "Letter for Black Lives" explained that the constant threat of violence black Americans face is not the same as other forms of discrimination, and made the case that the (always incomplete) civil rights protections Asian Americans do enjoy is in large part due to black-led freedom struggles.2 The letter was a tremendous show of solidarity, and served as a template for other groups, such as Latinos and second-generation Africans, to discuss antiblackness with their families as well. Still, the letter is fraught with old tropes. It draws too sharp a distinction between black and Asian racialization, as when the authors write, "It's true [End Page 279] we face discrimination … but for the most part, nobody thinks 'dangerous criminal' when we are walking down the street." Many South Asian, Muslim, and Arab Americans are in fact considered "dangerous" while walking down the street, boarding a plane, or speaking Arabic or Urdu in public. The letter concludes by referencing the American Dream: "The American Dream that we seek is a place where all Americans can live without fear of police violence." It ultimately offers a vision of justice that reinforces discrete forms of racialization, always looking inward toward the nation. But the power of Asian American studies in this moment is not in reconciling narratives of antiblack racism with Asian migration to the United States for the purpose of pressing the nation to uphold its foundational values of colorblind liberty and justice for all. Rather, considering Black Lives Matter through the lens of Asian American studies should shift our gaze to the never-ending wars in the Pacific and Middle East, to the insurgent and insurrectionary moments of resistance to U.S. empire. Asian American studies should force us to reject any notion that continued violence against black Americans is aberrant in an otherwise steady march toward justice. Asian American studies allows us to frame antiblackness as part of a conjoined history of domestic and imperial forms of racial governance. An ever-timely reminder that despite being central to U.S. race relations, antiblack violence always has global stakes. Take, for example, former Attorney General Eric Holder's stance that the U.S. government's targeted drone assassination program could be likened to the police officer's permissible use of lethal force in pursuit of a fleeing felon.3 The gulf between foreign war and domestic policing is bridged by the racialized procedures of state-administered death. Moon-Ho Jung has argued that despite the field's coalescence around histories of migration and exclusion, Asian American history is still wedded to national frameworks and imaginaries. Jung suggests that instead of advocating simply for national inclusion, Asian American history "has the radical potential to dislodge nationalist narratives and, at base, to expose and critique the racial and imperial formations that have made the conception of the United States possible in the...

If the rubric of the Global Anglophone has come to be largely synonymous with the postcolonial, a development that some commentators have viewed with concern and even alarm, this essay explores a certain politically aspirational potential in the catachrestic elisions this category might engender. For if postcolonial studies has always struggled with a certain exclusionism predicated on how the South Asian context has functioned as its paradigmatic example, then the category of the Global Anglophone might help the field shed its own version of provincialism and develop more expansive geographic and temporal understandings of empire. Drawing in part from the work of Roanne L. Kantor, which bridges South Asian and Latin American studies, this essay explores how this newly ascendant category might help bring the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and East Asian studies into more explicit alliance. While first acknowledging the potential identitarian tensions that might emerge between Asian scholars hired under the rubric of the Global Anglophone and Asian American and/or Ethnic Studies respectively, this essay ultimately argues for a more coalitional awareness of how seemingly distinct strains and traditions of anticolonial and antiracist scholarship might be relationally articulated to one another.

Preface. Introduction. 1. An Overview of the Asian American Experience. The History of Asians in America, Timothy P. Fong. Contemporary Asian American Sociodemographic Status, Larry H. Shinagawa. 2. Critical Perspectives. Asian American Historiography, Sucheng Chan. Is Yellow Black or White? Gary Y. Okihiro. Rethinking Race: Paradigms and Policy Formation, Shirley Hune. 3. Asian American Communities. The Acculturation Pattern of Orange County's Southeast Asian Refugees, Chor-Swang Ngin. Asian Americans in Enclaves-They Are Not One Community: New Modes of Asian American Settlement, Tom L. Chung. Filipinos Find Home in Daly City, Bert Eljera. Dixie's Global Village, Jeff Yang. Still Bitter All These Years, Angela E. Oh. 4. Education Issues. We Could Shape It: Organizing for Asian Pacific American Student Empowerment, Peter Nein-Chu Kiang. Educating Asian Pacific Americans: Struggles and Progress, Shirley Hune and Kenyon Chan. Multiculturalism: Battleground or Meeting Ground? Ronald Takaki. Being Different Together in the University Classroom: Multiracial Identity as Transgressive Education, Teresa Kay William, Cynthia L. Nakashima, George Kitahara Kich, and G. Reginald Daniel. 5. Employment and Occupation. The Inventing and Reinventing of Model Minorities: the Cultural Veil Obscuring Structural Sources of Inequality, Deborah Woo. Asian Americans in Public Service: Success, Diversity, and Discrimination, Pan Suk Kim and Gregory B. Lewis. San Francisco Guards Punished for Their Accents: Discrimination Spoken Here, Richard J.P. Cavosara. Immigrant Asian Women in Bay Area Garment Sweatshops: After Sewing, Laundry, Cleaning, and Cooking, I Have No Breath Left to Sing, Miriam Ching Louie. 6. Popular Culture, Imagery, and Stereotypes. The Rape Fantasy: The Cheat and Broken Blossoms, Gina Marchetti. The Death of Asia on the American Field of Representation, James S. Moy. Asian Women in Film: No Joy, No Luck, Jessica Hagedorn. What Hollywood Should Know, Steve Park. A Disappointing All-American Girl, William Wong. 7. Families, Identities, and Culture. Chinese-America Families, Evelyn Nakano Glenn with Stacey G.H. Yap. Vietnamese American Families, Nazli Kibria. Invisible Americans: An Exploration of Indo-American Quality of Life, Snehendu B. Kar, Kevin Campbell, Armando Jimenez, and Sangeeta R. Gupta. A False and Shattered Peace, Katherine Kam. 8. New Asian American Families, Identities, and Culture. Asian American Panethnicity and Intermarriage, Larry H. Shinagawa and Gin Y. Pang. All of the Above, Angelo Ragaza. A Fighter for Gay Rights, Carlos Mendez. Stories from the Homefront: Perspectives of Asian American Parents with Lesbian Daughters and Gay Sons, Alice Y. Horn. 9. Asian American Political Empowerment. Becoming Citizens, Becoming Voters: The Naturalization and Political Participation of Asian Pacific Immigrants, Paul Ong and Don Nakanishi. Asian Americans and Latinos in San Gabriel Valley, California: Ethnic Political Cooperation and Redistricting, 1990-1992, Leland T. Saito. P.R. Elections in N.Y.C: Effects of Preference Voting on Asian-America Participation, Tito Sinha. Foreign Money Is No Friend of Ours, Ling-chi Wang. Asian-Americans under Glass: Where the Furor over the President's Fundraising Has Gone Awry-and Racist, Phil Tajitsu and Frank Wu. S.F. Rally Spotlights Kao Killing, Bert Eljera. 10. Future Directions in Asian American Studies. Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences, Lisa Lowe. Postmodern Possibilities: Theoretical and Political Directions for Asian American Studies, Keith Osajima. Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads, Sau-Ling C. Wong. Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America, Dana Y. Takagi. Contributors.

Th e impact of the COVID- 19 global pandemic to American communities extends beyond physical health problems to include political, economic, education, business, mental health, and social relation impacts. This essay, based on a summer and fall 2020 place-based research project collaboration between Purdue Honors College students and the Purdue Asian American and Asian Resource and Cultural Center, examines impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to the Asian and Asian American communities. Th e research asks what the impacts of COVID-19 are to Asian/American communities, how COVID-19 anti-Asian racism is unique or not unique, how the Asian American communities have collectively responded to the racism connected to the pandemic, and how Asian American communities displayed solidarity with other communities during this difficult time in public health and racial justice. Th e essay connects extensive media and archival research to detail COVID-19 impacts in the areas of health and wellness, job security, and social/racial justice. The essay then documents the persistent history of stereotyping and racism to Asian/American communities particularly in the midst of larger changes in political, national security, or public health situations. The next part of the essay provides an analysis of the rising number of reporting centers utilizing different platforms to counter the experience of racism. Finally, with the tragic deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd that sparked forms of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, the essay examines specific online and offline eff orts in regard to Asian and Asian American solidarity.

Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory Christopher Lee (bio) In 1974, the newly established Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, submitted “A Proposal for the Establishment of the College of Third World Studies” to the university’s Provost. In its proposed structure for a major in Asian American Studies, the committee recommended that students concentrate on one of three areas in addition to taking a set of core courses: community studies, social sciences, or humanities. While the first two concentrations are clearly designed to contribute “to the body of direct experimental knowledge of the conditions in the Asian American community” (A18) and promote “service to the Asian American people” (A17), the humanities concentration is marked by a noticeable lack of content and cohesion. Only two courses, one on Asian American literature and a creative writing workshop, are listed in the proposal, and this lack of structure is reflected in its provisional tone: That Asian students be encouraged to venture into the humanities is obvious; what form self-expression will take in the context of the Asian American experience and Asian American Studies is yet to be seen. It is certain that the student with a concentration in the humanities will be given the freedom to explore Asian American and Third World literature, art and dance, and creative writing. At the same time, however, the same amount of rigor and depth of understanding [End Page 19] of the Asian American experience expected of the major in the other two areas of concentration will be asked of the student in the humanities. The proposal goes on to clarify the role of the arts in Asian American Studies: “Of particular importance will be the student’s responses to the question of the flow and interchange between life and art. This last point is of considerable importance since it will help to give the individual the clarity of vision necessary in delineating between what is truly an Asian American assertion and what is a replica of what exists, clothed in Oriental paraphernalia” (A21). Even while the proposal embraces the arts as a means of actualizing the emancipatory goals of Asian American Studies, it seems unsure of what constitutes suitable artistic content and identifies the humanities as an area in which courses and methodologies remain to be developed. In charting future directions for research and teaching, it suggests that barriers between the study and production of culture need to be broken down, a task that resonates with their desire to integrate theory and practice. Moreover, the proposal argues that art and literature must not be “only for the purposes of glorifying the individual writers or artist” but rather must “serve the broader needs of our people.” To this end, it insists that the humanities must be driven by political commitment in order to oppose the colonial legacies that have “denied the right [of Third World Peoples] to express themselves in creative ways” (A26). In short, it is only by entrenching the humanities within a larger political project that it can acquire the “clarity of vision” needed to dismantle Orientalist and racist misrepresentations. Reading this report some thirty-five years later, one cannot help but notice the contrast between its tentative engagement with the humanities and the current status of the humanities within Asian American Studies. Asian American cultural criticism, of which a large portion is concerned in some way or another with literary expression, has flourished in the last two decades and constitutes one of the largest components of an interdisciplinary field. New scholarship on the humanities is being produced at a healthy rate, while courses in Asian American literature are regularly offered at many universities and colleges, which in turn affects the training and hiring of new faculty with expertise in literary and cultural studies. These developments have reconfigured the relationship between the humanities and the social sciences, producing an ongoing tension between methodologies that emphasize theoretical speculation and textual analysis on the one hand and empirical analysis on the other. Yet the issues raised by the 1974 Berkeley proposal continue to be relevant for Asian American literary studies today. After all, [End Page 20] students and scholars...

Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. By C. Winter Han. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+237. $89.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).

Editor’s Preface Huping Ling Asian Pacific Americans (APA) make up 2.3 percent of the midwestern population, or about 1.45 million people, according to the 2000 census. The growth in the APA population in the Midwest was an astounding 86.5 percent from 1990 to 2000. To reflect the rapid population growth and the recent academic development in the Midwest, the journal’s special issue this year is devoted to the topics on Asian American studies in the Midwest. The essays of the issue were edited by guest editor Pawan Dhingra of Oberlin College, who organized and chaired a megasession panel entitled “The Heart(land) of Asian American Studies: Approaches in the Midwest” at the 2008 annual conference of the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) in Chicago, from which the special issue evolved. The four excellent essays as well as the introduction in this issue challenge the conventional notions on Asian Americans in the Midwest, with sound research and evidence, keen observation, provocative arguments, and insightful suggestions. All contributors to the issue are accomplished writers and/or past awardees or honorable mention recipients of the Book Awards by the AAAS, and are situated at universities and colleges in the Midwest teaching and/or directing Asian American studies programs at their respective institutions. Representing academic disciplines of anthropology, English, history, and sociology, and combining longtime scholarship and professional and personal experiences at Midwest campuses and in Asian American communities of their locales, they collectively provide [End Page v] us with compelling testimonies as practitioners of Asian American studies in the Midwest, and pose a burning question to the dynamic and ever-growing Asian American studies: where is the “heart” of Asian America? Erika Lee’s essay examines the recent growth in Asian American studies in the Midwest and raises central questions that have framed that growth: What does Asian American studies scholarship, pedagogy, and outreach look like in the Midwest? How does a Midwest focus complicate existing narratives, approaches, and canons of the field? What particular questions, histories, and ethnic groups emerge from a Midwest perspective, and how might they transform the field more generally? She also reviews recent academic writings on Asian American studies in the Midwest, with a focus on Minnesota-based scholarship. Josephine Lee’s essay describes the genesis and current state of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Asian American Studies Consortium (CIC-AASC). Founded in 2007, the CIC-AASC brings together faculty, staff, and students involved in Asian American studies from twelve major research universities. Recognizing the challenges of establishing and nourishing Asian American studies in a time of fiscal crisis and uncertain support for ethnic studies, the CIC-AASC moves toward a model of intercampus collaboration to encourage cooperation and collaboration, provide opportunities for mentoring and networking, and emphasize new and distinctive understandings of Asian American communities, histories, and cultures, particularly in the Midwest. Andrea Louie’s ethnographic study examines the constraints shaping American adoptive parents’ approaches to their children’s Chineseness within the broader context of U.S. racial and multicultural politics. Based on thirty-five interviews in the St. Louis area with adoptive parents, and an additional twenty-five interviews in the San Francisco Bay Area with white and Asian American adoptive parents and teens adopted from China, Louie points out the possibilities that “some parents can come to new, more nuanced understandings of how race affects their children’s lives and that there is and should be a place for culture in the lives of adoptive families, even in its more essentialized forms.” Pawan Dhingra’s essay complicates the “ethnic community” by moving beyond the typical setting of large metropolises. How do immigrants form [End Page vi] community when the few coethnics locally are their economic competition? This is the dilemma facing Asian Indian American motel owners in Ohio. Owners stretched the boundaries of what is considered “local” to include more peers. Moreover, they relied on ritual encounters to create camaraderie with local coethnics despite competitive relations. Both strategies result more in the “possibility of community” than a deep one. The essay more broadly explains how immigrants handle environments that, as is often the case, are both welcoming and standoffish...

Mental health care among marginalized populations in the United States

Building upon recent work in Asian and Asian American studies, this essay explores dissonance, rather than disinterestedness, and its function and form for literary studies in our present time. It is inspired not only by my rereading of Matthew Arnold’s essay but also the convergence of key events over the course of the last few years, ranging from recent attention to Asian and Asian American cultural production to anti-Asian hate crimes. As an Asian Americanist, I research and teach in a field whose very emergence was tied to activist claims for institutional and disciplinary space. I therefore find it profoundly difficult to imagine our endeavors in American literary studies as “disinterested.” I am less invested in making the case whether or not the study of Asian American literature “matters”; rather, here I explore why Asian American literary studies—a method that seeks out and dwells in dissonance and urgency rather than disinterestedness and patience—might be a model worth continuing.