Finding BooksThere is a rich literature on Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies spanning many disciplines. See below for information on how to access books at UC Berkeley, across the UC campuses, and make requests from the Northern Regional Library Facility, a storage repository which holds books from UC campuses in Northern California.
Check out the podcast New Books in Asian American Studies for interviews with authors and book recommendations!
Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars' Resistance and Renewal in the Academy
Asian American women scholars experience shockingly low rates of tenure and promotion because of the particular ways they are marginalized by the intersectionalities of race and gender in academia. Although Asian American studies critics have long since debunked the model minority myth that constructs Asian Americans as the ideal academic subject, university administrators still treat Asian American women in academia as though they will simply show up and shut up. Consequently, because silent complicity is expected, power holders will punish and oppress Asian American women severely when they question or critique the system. However, change is in the air. Fight the Tower is a continuation of the Fight the Tower movement, which supports women standing up for their rights to claim their earned place in academia and to work for positive change for all within academic institutions. The essays provide powerful portraits, reflections, and analyses of a population often rendered invisible by the lies that sustain intersectional injustices in order to operate an oppressive system.
Dream of the Water Children: memory and mourning in the Black Pacific by
Born to an African American father and Japanese mother, Frederick D. Kakinami Cloyd, the narrator of Dream of the Water Children, finds himself not only to be a marginalized person by virtue of his heritage, but often a cultural drifter, as well. Indeed, both his family and his society treat him as if he doesn't entirely belong to any world. Tautly written in spare, clear poetic prose, this memoir explores the specific contours of Japanese and African American cultures, as well as the broader experience of biracial and multicultural identity. To tell his story, Cloyd incorporates photographs and Japanese writing, history, and memory to convey both rich personal experience and significant historical detail. Bringing together vivid memories with a perceptive cultural eye, Dream of the Water Children brings readers closer to a biracial experience, opening up our understanding of the cultural richness and social challenges people from diverse backgrounds face.
Facilitating Injustice: the complicity of social workers in the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1946 by
"On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 - the primary action that propelled the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. From the last days of that month, when California's Terminal Island became the first site of forced removal, to March of1946, when the last of the War Relocation Authority concentration camps was finally closed, the federal government incarcerated approximately 120,000 persons of 'Japanese ancestry.' Social workers were integral cogs in this federal program of forced removal and incarceration: they vetted,registered, counseled, and tagged all affected individuals; staffed social work departments within the concentration camps; and worked in the offices administering the 'resettlement,' the planned scattering of the population explicitly intended to prevent regional re-concentration. In itsunwillingness to take a resolute stand against the removal and incarceration and carrying out its government-assigned tasks, social work enacted and thus legitimized the bigoted policies of racial profiling en masse. Facilitating Injustice reconstructs this forgotten disciplinary history tohighlight an enduring tension in the field - the conflict between its purported value-base promoting pluralism and social justice and its professional functions enabling injustice and actualizing social biases. Highlighting the urgency to examine the profession's current approaches, practices, andpolicies within today's troubled nation, this text serves as a useful resource for students and scholars of immigration, ethnic studies, internment studies, U.S. history, American studies, and social welfare policy/history."
Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Diversity, and Community by
Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures theexperiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.The essays by scholars both in the United States and Japan draw upon the Japanese American millennial experience to examine how they find self-expression in Youth Basketball Leagues or Christian youth camps as well as how they grapple with being mixed-race, bicultural, or queer. Featuring compelling interviews and observations, Japanese American Millennials dislodges the dominant generational framework toaddress absences in the current literature and suggests how we might alternatively study Japanese Americans as a whole.
More Than Organs by
A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett's More Than Organs questions "whatever wholeness means" for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay "the choreography of loss" after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family's culinary history. Barrett works "to build / a shelter // of / everyone / they] meet," from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive.
Mountain Movers: student activism & the emergence of Asian American studies : commemorating 50 years of Asian American studies at SF State, UC Berkeley & UCLA by
Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. California Interest. With accounts from San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, MOUNTAIN ROVERS highlights how students changed the course of history through the origin stories of Asian American studies at those campuses and the narratives of nine remarkable students. For each of these Asian Americans, their ethnic heritages and racialized experiences, their family backgrounds, their education, and the social movements of their day intersected so that they became agents of change. Specifically, they organized and mobilized fellow students and community members to establish and further Asian American Studies (AAS) on their campuses. AAS has since grown not only to offer a relevant curriculum for and about these students, but also to help develop and empower their communities.
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: the Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by
The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt--Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors' contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.
Redress: The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations by
This is the unlikely but true story of the Japanese American Citizens League's fight for an official government apology and compensation for the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Author John Tateishi, himself the leader of the JACL Redress Committee for many years, is first to admit that the task was herculean in scale. The campaign was seeking an unprecedented admission of wrongdoing from Congress. It depended on a unified effort but began withan acutely divided community: for many, the shame of "camp" was so deep that they could not even speak of it; money was a taboo subject; the question of the value of liberty was insulting. Besides internal discord, the American public was largely unaware that there had been concentration camps on US soil, and Tateishi knew that concessions from Congress would come only with mass education about the government's civil rights violations. Beyond the backroom politicking and verbal fisticuffs that make this book a swashbuckling read,Redress is the story of a community reckoning with what it means to be both culturally Japanese and American citizens; how to restore honor; and what duty it has to protect such harms from happening again. This book has powerful implications as the idea of reparations shapes our national conversation.
Reencounters: on the Korean War and diasporic memory critique by
In Reencounters,Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live with and remember an ongoing war when its manifestations--hypervisible and deeply sensed--become everyday formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond notions of inherited trauma and post memory, Baik offers the concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War's illegible entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works that includes oral history projects, performances, and video installations rarely examined by Asian American studies scholars. Baik shows how Korean refugee migrations are repackaged into celebrated immigration narratives, how transnational adoptees are reclaimed by the South Korean state as welcomed "returnees," and how militarized colonial outposts such as Jeju Island are recalibrated into desirable tourist destinations. Baik argues that as the works by Korean and Korean/American artists depict this Cold War historiography, they also offer opportunities to remember otherwise the continuing war. Ultimately, Reencounters wrestles with questions of the nature of war, racial and sexual violence, and neoliberal surveillance in the twenty-first century.
Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture by
Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture by Doreen G. Fernandez is a groundbreaking work that introduces readers to the wondrous history of Filipino foodways. First published by Anvil in 1994, Tikim explores the local and global nuances of Philippine cuisine through its people, places, feasts, and flavors. Doreen Gamboa Fernandez (1934-2002) was a cultural historian, professor, author, and columnist. Her food writing educated and inspired generations of chefs and food enthusiasts in the Philippines and throughout the world. This Brill volume honors and preserves Fernandez's legacy with a reprinting of Tikim, a foreword by chef and educator Aileen Suzara, and an editor's preface by historian Catherine Ceniza Choy.
A Violent Peace: Race, U. S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific by
A Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States' transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia. Examining U.S. militarism's centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive--placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War-era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity--imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.
We Are Anarchists: essays on anarchism, pacifism, and the Indian independence movement, 1923-1953 by
"Ole Birk Laursen has done us a valuable service in tracking down and collecting the work of M.P.T. Acharya, scattered across countries, decades, and publications, and not least placing this work in well-researched context.... This is a treasure chest that will enrich our picture of both global anarchist and South Asian radical history." --Maia Ramnath, author ofDecolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle "With this collection of writings--many made available in English for the first time--Ole Birk Laursen recovers the extraordinary life and writings of M.P.T. Acharya, perhaps India's most important but least remembered anarchist activist and theoretician.... Anyone interested in anticolonial struggles past or present should read this book." --Kenyon Zimmer, author ofImmigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America "This fascinating and rich collection of essays by M.P.T. Acharya significantly deepens our understandings of transnational radical thought in the early twentieth century, placing Indian activists at the center of critiques of communism emanating from Berlin, Paris, Bombay and London." --Kama Maclean, author of A Revolutionary History of Interwar India M.P.T. Acharya (1887-1954) was a contemporary and critic of Mohandas Gandhi during the Indian Independence Movement. A lifetime of anticolonial struggle led him to embrace anarchism and he saw tremendous revolutionary potential the practice of nonviolent direct action. A transnational figure, Acharya engaged in anticolonial activism across India, Europe, the United States, and Russia. He was also a prolific writer for publications across the globe, penning essays that are testimony to atireless agitator and intellectual seeking to develop a radical, internationalist idea of national liberation. Acharya's work demonstrates the global reach of anarchism in the interwar period and gives us a more complete and nuanced understanding of Indian anticolonial struggles.