American Studies Program Research Articles

Dr. Ling-Chi Wang reflections on Lau v. Nichols (1974): Bilingual education, language rights, and political activism

ABSTRACT Born in Xiamen, China in 1938, Dr. Ling-Chi Wang was the founder of Chinese for Affirmative Action, an organization focused on affirmative action in employment, representation of the Chinese in politics, voting, and language rights. He is also a Professor Emeritus of Asian American Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Ling-Chi established the Asian American Studies program at Berkeley, teaching its first course in 1969. In this paper, Ling-Chi shares his perspectives on the long history of Chinese discrimination dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and his years as a political activist during the 1960s to the present in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His role in community organizing was pivotal in the events leading up to this pivotal U.S. Supreme Court case. Ling Chi’s reflections on activism and linguistic justice documents his imprint on the this language rights case that has shaped US educational language policies for the last fifty years.

Supporting Asian American Multilingual College Students Through Critical Language Awareness Programming

ABSTRACT Critical language awareness (CLA) encourages teachers and students to examine language as social practice and reflect on ideologies and power dynamics embedded within language use. In this article, the authors—both instructors in an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) federal grant project at a university in New York City—describe how we integrated a CLA framework to create an Asian American Studies class that uses culturally sustaining pedagogies to affirm student linguistic identities and demystify academic research practices. Specifically, we analyzed a project where we introduced the term linguistic landscapes (LL) and asked students to visit Asian American ethnic enclaves to examine linguistic signage. While implementations of CLA have been based in K-12 instruction, university writing courses, and teacher education courses, this paper presents a successful example of a project based in CLA used in credit-bearing university courses, specifically, in an Asian American Studies program.

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)

Uprooted but Unbroken: Ethnic Studies Programs in California Prisons

Asian Americans compose a relatively small but growing portion of the prison populationboth nationwide and in California, with the number of AAPIs incarcerated in the US quadruplingfrom 2000 to 2010. Incarcerated Asian Americans face unique challenges, often having arrivedto the US as refugees fleeing war and genocide and struggling with intergenerational trauma,familial isolation and stigma, and a lack of culturally informed programs in prison. Thus, thisresearch project focuses on ethnic studies programs in California prisons, with a specific focuson Asian American studies programs. Constructed through interviews with participants andfacilitators of these programs, this project finds that ethnic studies programs have transformativeeffects on incarcerated people’s sense of self, personal healing, sense of community, and capacityas agents of change for themselves and others during and after incarceration.

Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak

Reviewed by: Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak Emily Gowen Gregory E. Smoak, editor, Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2021. 232 pp. Hardcover, $70; paper, $35; e-book, $28. In the twelve essays that make up Gregory Smoak’s Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West, the University of Utah’s American West Center comes into view as the contested center of a fifty-year battle to define and expand the parameters of public history. In one sense the volume is a rich, polyvocal institutional history of the center, and a loving tribute to its founders’ vision. In another sense, though, the volume is an extended meditation on the most pressing questions that animate the field of public history. What sorts of tensions arise when historians, Richard White asks, enter the public sphere? How do we resist the popular urge to instrumentalize history, to make it speak the way we want it to? Or as Liesl Carr Childers puts it, what happens when history is “hostage” to politics? (27). And what would it look like to truly center Native voices in the way we tell stories about the American West? The volume offers several models of good public history: Michael Childers writes about Hal Rothman, the late historian and public intellectual who sought to “engage the public on its own terms” and “create the ears with which to hear us” (41). Leighton M. Quarles shares lessons from his own work as a historian for the National Park Service, a role in which nationalist mythmaking, tribal memory, environmental preservation, and the mandates of a tourism economy jostle for primacy. As many of the essays insist, a professional historian is uniquely positioned to understand and combat the settler colonial origins of land preservation projects that, in the popular imagination, are often billed as an unalloyed good. Yvette Towersap Tuell calls walking the line between serving Native history and public land management “working on the dark side” (101). But she insists that inhabiting such a vexed position is essential if we are to “better incorporate Native history and local knowledge into . . . policy decisions” (101). From the adjudication of tribal water rights to the interpretive decisions made on ghost tours, to the creation of new centers for [End Page 88] Native American and Indigenous studies programs, to the digitization of archives, the volume charts the American West Center’s sprawling and complex legacy, and showcases the hard, often frustrating, but richly rewarding work of “doing public history in the American West” (1; emphasis original). In its best moments the volume lives up to its own definitions of public history, offering a road map to young scholars interested in forging careers that span disciplines, audiences, and institutional constituencies. For those entering the profession today this volume may even feel like a life raft. Its vivid accounting of the wide range of purposes to which a historian’s credentials can be put offers a much more expansive vision of a fulfilling academic career than we often see in discussions of the academy today. To read Western Lands, Western Voices is to get an up-close look at what it’s like to wade into the messy, fascinating, unfinished work of public history in the American West, and perhaps even to be inspired to enter the public sphere oneself. [End Page 89] Emily Gowen The American Antiquarian Society Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association

Notes From the Editor

Notes From the Editor Gregory S. Crider The Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies convened 10-12 March 2022 in Charlotte, North Carolina for our Sixty-Ninth Annual Meeting. The conference featured forty panels on a wide variety of topics. Program chair Steven Hyland (Wingate University) saw to the essential tasks of putting panels together in the areas of Literature & Cultural Studies as well as History & Social Sciences. Monica Rankin (University of Texas at Dallas), Jürgen Buchenau (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Steven Hyland (Wingate University) and Gregory Crider (Winthrop University) organized local arrangements for the convention. Freed from many COVID-19 restrictions, attendees were thrilled to meet face-to-face this year after the successful but less personal online meeting in 2021. Centered in the historic Dunhill Hotel in uptown Charlotte, members enjoyed our regular social and networking events, professional development opportunities, and diverse local cultural life. As co-sponsors of the conference, the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University and the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs offered meaningful support and participation. Lou Pérez (UNC), Beatriz Riefkohl-Muñiz (UNC), and Natalie Hartman (Duke) provided critical assistance to the annual meeting. Our collaborators at UNC Press, John McLeod, Kate Stack, and Dylan Stroupe, offered much appreciated backing as well. Now with five years of alliance with the University of North Carolina Press, our readership and exposure continue to grow with inclusion in Project MUSE, an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. The Latin Americanist also continues to partner with the SECOLAS podcast, Historias, which frequently interviews TLA authors and other Latin Americanists from diverse disciplines. The collaboration of these two projects produces opportunities for authors to share their work, advancement of meaningful scholarly engagement, and written and audio resources for classrooms and the public. As always, TLA editors welcome new ideas and suggestions. This volume features some of the best papers from the conference in article format. Eleven of the 150 presenters at the conference submitted revised manuscripts of their papers for publication. Following editorial and peer review and another round of revisions, the five articles published in this issue represent a range of disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences. Graduate assistant Rebekah Ward has played a key role in communicating with authors and organizing and preparing manuscripts for publication. [End Page 6] UNC Charlotte, Winthrop University, and Wingate University, the three SECOLAS host institutions, offer significant financial and institutional support for the publication and success of this journal. In particular, we offer our gratitude to Dr. Nancy Gutierrez, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC Charlotte; to Dr. Takita Sumter, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Ellison Capers Palmer, Jr. Professorship of History at Winthrop; and to Dr. Jeff Frederick, Provost at Wingate University, for their continuing encouragement of both The Latin Americanist and SECOLAS. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2023 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies

Supporting an Inclusive Campus Community: An Academic Library’s Co-sponsorship of Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month Celebrations

With the absence of an Asian American Studies program at Eastern Washington University (EWU), the campus community has limited opportunities to learn about the diverse and complex history and experience of Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) populations in the United States. Over the course of 6 years, EWU Libraries have co-sponsored AANHPI Heritage Month celebrations with multiple campus units and the local AANHPI community. With a focus on 2021’s virtual activities, this article describes the development and implementation of these celebrations and the library’s contributions to the diverse range of events proffered by the partnerships.

Textbook Harassment: The Hindu Right’s Conservative Agenda to Whitewash History

Journal Article Roundtable on Hindutva Harassment of Academics in North America: Textbook Harassment: The Hindu Right’s Conservative Agenda to Whitewash History Get access Rupa Pillai Rupa Pillai Rupa Pillai, Asian American Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA Email: rupillai@sas.upenn.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5486-9391 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad026, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad026 Published: 23 June 2023

CRT in praxis: Library and archival collections at San José State University

Through various efforts, the staff and faculty of San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (King Library) are working towards creating more equitable and inclusive collections. Examining the library’s collecting practices and collections by and about African Americans, this article presents the ongoing work of a working group that was formed in 2020 in response to an Anti-Racism Action Plan developed in the library. By using some of the tenets of the CRT framework such as intersectionality, counter-storytelling, and deconstructing colorblindness and white supremacy, the authors discuss the steps that are being taken to revise, review, and revisit the King Library’s collecting practices in relation to the history of SJSU’s African American Studies program, the Africana Center, and other relevant community history.

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Biography and Bernard Bailyn: <i>The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson</i> and the “Logical Obligation” of Historical Research

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Contributors

Other| August 01 2022 Contributors Gastronomica (2022) 22 (3): ix–x. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.3.ix Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Contributors. Gastronomica 1 August 2022; 22 (3): ix–x. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.3.ix Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search Lara Anderson is an associate professor in the Spanish and Latin American Studies program at the University of Melbourne. Her main research area is Spanish food culture, and her recent monograph, Control and Resistance: Food Discourse in Franco Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2020), looked at food discourse as a site of control and resistance. Agata Bachórz is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her research interests include food cultures and their relation to modernization, reinterpretation of “national cuisines,” and cultural dimensions of food production, mainly in Eastern Europe. Natasha Bunzl is a PhD student at New York University in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies. Her research focuses on nonprofits that address food insecurity and the increasing presence of celebrity chefs in solutions to hunger. Jaina Cipriano is a Boston-based artist communicating with the world through photography, film, and installation. Her works explore... You do not currently have access to this content.

Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak

Reviewed by: Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak Debbie Z. Harwell Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West. Edited by Gregory E. Smoak. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2021. Pp. 240. Photographs, notes, index.) Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West grew out of a 2014 symposium commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Utah’s American West Center, the nation’s oldest regional studies center, to “explore the power and promise of publicly engaged [End Page 149] scholarship in the American West” (1). Comprising presentations and selected essays, the book explores some of the ways that historians do public and regional public history with practical applications in areas across the eleven-state area of the American West. To establish a definition of public history, the authors look beyond intended audiences (the public) and the method of delivery to the ways in which public historians use their skills and training to engage in collaborative projects with community partners in order “to empower communities, inform public decision-making, protect heritage resources, and address the needs of public audiences” (8). The twelve essays fit into four main areas. The introduction by editor Gregory Smoak and the first two essays discuss how public history is defined, with Richard White arguing that “the core of public history lies in who asks the questions rather than in who gives the answer” (22), and Leisl Carr Childress seeing it as a public service. Essays by Michael Childers, Leighton M. Quarles, and Mette Flynt examine the history of place as seen through the work of public historians in the West generally, at national parks, and tourist sites in Lake City, Colorado. A third group of essays explores ethnic and Native American populations. Trisha Venisa-Alicia Martínez and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez explore the meaning of identity and migration patterns of Nuevomexicanos between Albuquerque and Cheyenne. Yvette Towersap Tuell, E. Richard Hart, and Brittani R. Orona explore issues related to Native American populations including public land management, water rights, and memory and visual sovereignty respectively. The last group of essays examines how public historians educate through Native American Studies programs (detailed by Laurie Arnold), scholarship in a regional print journal (discussed by Jedediah Rogers), and museums as a tool to build bridges between academic and public history (by Stephen Aron and Virginia Scharff). The contributors to this volume are historians with extensive credentials in their fields, whether environmental, indigenous, ethnic, or regional history. Therefore, as one would expect, the essays are extensively researched with sources ranging from theoretical discussions of public history as a field to oral histories and primary source documents on water rights and land treaties, some dating back the to the early twentieth century. Although the articles do not mention Texas other than a reference to a Texas-based company’s efforts to extract shale gas deposits on a Mi’kmaq reserve in Canada, the principles discussed on many topics can be related easily to similar questions in this state. Western Lands, Western Voices has material that will appeal to readers specifically interested in studying the American West as a region, Indigenous peoples, policy decisions, environmental issues, and education. The greatest value to broader audiences, however, lies in the discussion of public history itself, using these topics as case studies to show how public history has [End Page 150] evolved, how it is used today, and how it can be used in the future for the greater public good. Western Lands, Western Voices demonstrates the value of public history standing side-by-side equally with traditional academic history to provide a more comprehensive and useful historical perspective. [End Page 151] Debbie Z. Harwell University of Houston Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

“Rude and in Defiance of Authority”: Arizona Anti-Mexican American Studies Legislation and the Discursive Positioning of the “Rude” Student of Color

This article considers a style of civility discourse centered on perceived “rudeness” of youth, particularly youth of color (YOC) and its use as a political strategy that positions YOC as both uncivil and lacking agency. It is constructed as a racialized concept of rudeness that positions YOC as unreliable narrators and problem students whose voices can be dismissed when it comes to educational policy that directly impacts them. I refer to this discourse as “rudeness rhetoric.” It takes on a key role in the (re)production of the school as a political site of white supremacist citizen production. I focus on Arizona politicians’ mobilization of rudeness rhetoric as justification for legislation targeting Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program for termination. I rely on triangulation of multiple sources and methods, including observation of meetings and the trial concerning the constitutionality of anti-MAS legislation, plaintiff evidence, documents and public statements by politicians, and online commentary concerning MAS. I find that, while politicians and the Arizona Department of Education engaged accusations that MAS promoted anti-white racism, they used rudeness rhetoric to frame the program as harmful, charging that it produced rude students based on protests politicians associated with MAS. Focusing on “rude” YOC allowed politicians to reframe legislative attacks on ethnic studies and move debate over MAS away from racial animus in the legislation. Rather than one explosive moment in which the rudeness rhetoric performed its political work, it snaked throughout multiple venues from political arenas to the courtroom to the media.

Demands from Duke Asian Students

This document shares the 2021 demands by students at Duke University, as they seek to create Asian American and Ethnic Studies programs on their campus. It includes an original letter of demands by a coalition of student groups directed to university leadership, an extensive timeline of such demands from previous students, and a call for campus-based cultural centers. The document also demands better data disaggregation and a change in how the institution understands hate and bias incidents.

Why Is There No Asian American Studies Program in Brooklyn College?

This document provides a transcript of the documentary video produced by the Asian American Studies Project at Brooklyn College in 2021. The documentary was created through student research, led by faculty member Cherry Lou Sy, which interrogated the lack of Asian American Studies at their institution. The video collects reflections and observations from numerous students, faculty, and alumni advocating for the development of an Asian American Studies program and curriculum. Participants also reflect on their experiences as Asian Americans, their support for the program, and/or their understanding of why the college has not developed this area of study.

Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones

Book Review| April 01 2022 Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha LolaJones. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. viii, 346 pp. Birgitta J. Johnson Birgitta J. Johnson BIRGITTA J. JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music and the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include music in African American churches, change and identity in Black popular music, and gospel archiving. She has published articles in the Black Music Research Journal, Ethnomusicology Forum, Liturgy, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, and The Grove Dictionary of American Music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2022) 75 (1): 163–167. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.163 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Birgitta J. Johnson; Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2022; 75 (1): 163–167. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.163 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance is an innovative contribution to contemporary Black sacred music and religious life scholarship. Jones uses multi-sited ethnographic research to anchor her analysis of the layered nuances of race, sexuality, gender, and gender presentation in Black Pentecostal religious communities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The diverse settings for musical and rhetorical performances of Black masculinity, gender, and sexuality that Jones traverses in Flaming? are timely additions to an emerging area of Black music research in America. Throughout the book’s eight chapters, she uses insightful case studies to center the spoken and unspoken sentiments of Black male Christian musicians living and working in a society in which their humanity has been historically and violently contested. At the same time, these men are members of a religious community in which Black masculinity is often lionized in overtly... You do not currently have access to this content.

Why Bother with Asian American Studies? Reflections on a Documentary Research Project

This document catalogs the reflections of a team of students and one faculty member who researched the history of demands for an Asian American Studies program at Brooklyn College. The authors explain their initial interests in the Asian American Studies Program project, describe their learning process as well as the research methods used. They discuss how their commitment to the project transformed during the research process, as well as their reactions to the final documentary video product, Why Is There No Asian American Studies Program at Brooklyn College.

‘A space for beginning’: teaching Mexican American studies in Texas community colleges

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to highlight Mexican American Studies programs in community colleges, a sector where Ethnic Studies has largely gone unstudied. Drawing on interviews from 13 faculty members across Texas, this study describes these instructors’ approach to teaching and the impact they feel this type of curriculum has on students’ academic journeys. The findings suggest that MAS curriculum has a positive impact on Latina/o/x students’ cultural pride and helps them connect their racial and cultural background to their education.

Contributors

Contributors