Asian American Studies

in an article in the Spring 2021 issue of Gastronomica, John Broadway discussed what he termed the ''hypocrisy of hyperlocality'' and critiqued hyperlocal restaurants that cater exclusively to well-heeled, globe-trotting customers. Hyperlocality facilitates an escalation of exclusivity for haute cuisine. The last big trend, molecular gastronomy, lost its luster among global tastemakers after its assimilation into the mainstream; immersion circulators are now available at Target. Something new had to be found, and what better way for elite consumers to showcase their worldliness than championing irreproducible food from geographically disparate areas? . . . The few with access get the added benefit of virtue, signaling that their conspicuous consumption is done in the service of promoting sustainability through rediscovering endangered ingredients and cuisines. The combination of chefs' virtuous intent, consumers' globe-trotting, and the experience's inaccessibility for ordinary people is a potent one for generating social capital. Broadway raises important questions about not only ''hyperlocality'' but also the top restaurants' chefs and diners. He suggests that we ask chefs who promote the hyperlocal why they are serving these foods at restaurants located in these places, what impact their sourcing has on local communities, and who dines at their restaurants. And, of course, he urges those who patronize these restaurants to reflect on the implications of their decisions to support the ''hypocrisy of hyperlocality.'' After reading Broadway's article, I tried to imagine what a restaurant that met his criteria and achieved what I would call an ''ideal hyperlocality'' would look like. Clearly, it would have to be a restaurant (1) whose chefs' virtuous intentions are not undermined by their restaurant's profile and global position, (2) whose chefs' reliance on what is sourced locally does not adversely affect the communities that supply them, (3) whose chefs' rediscovery and use of forgotten ingredients revitalize endangered cuisines, (4) whose overhead is not so high and its margins so narrow that customers are charged exorbitant amounts for a meal, and (5) whose customers are drawn chiefly from local communities. I wondered whether there were such chefs, restaurants, and customers. What immediately came to mind was monk, Yoshihiro Imai's tiny restaurant on the eastern edge of Kyoto, Japan. Indeed, if I had been in Japan, I would have rushed to Kyoto to interview Imai about his restaurant. But I was stuck in Los Angeles and constrained by the travel restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, I had bought Imai's recently published cookbook-monk: Light and Shadow on the Philosopher's Path-and I thought it might allow me to study his restaurant from a distance and determine whether it met my criteria for an ideal hyperlocal restaurant. 2 I also was able to contact Imai by email, and he kindly answered all my questions about his restaurant.

Over the last forty years, Japanese cuisine has had an oversized influence on fine dining in the United States. Chefs cooking at celebrated American restaurants are now freely using Japanese ingredients, condiments, culinary techniques, and concepts, and the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, the leading culinary school in the country, now offers a concentration in Japanese cuisine. This article examines this "Japanese turn" and argues that this contemporary culinary movement toward Japan is comparable to the Japanese influence on European and American art and architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and may be another important Japanese moment in American cultural history.

Afterword to the special issue of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology Vol. 150 No. 1 (2025).
open access Link: https://zfejsca.org/ojs/index.php/jsca/issue/view/150-1

In the afterword to the collection - edited by Philipp Schorch and Safua Akeli - Christine Winter contextualises collecting and museum collections within wider histories that explore the impact of Sāmoa and the Pacific on German speaking lands and Germany during the ninetennth century. She links theories of the Global South and South-North relationships with ethical considerations for museums today: holding Pacific collections these institutions are to be spaces that welcome Sāmoans and benefit from enduring relationships. [19th century colonialism; theories of the Global South; ethical museum practises]

This essay explores early modern forms of anti-Asian racism by reading two hagiographies of Catarina de San Juan (ca.1607–1688), an alleged fair-skinned princess from the Mughal Empire who disembarked in Acapulco as an enslaved china and died as a venerated dark-skinned mystic in Puebla. I argue that the racialized discourses on chinos in New Spain formed part of the transnational practice of the production of blackness as a racial category. More specifically, the hagiographers of Catarina turned to epidermal and linguistic tropes of blackness in setting up her exemplary qualities as an achinada mystic. The reproductive and commercialized sexuality of Catarina further sheds light on intercolonial ideals of racialized sexualities at the intersection of transatlantic and transpacific slave trades. This essay aims at incorporating the Asian-diasporic subjects in the early modern transpacific into the transhistorical analytical framework of race delineated by the scholarship of premodern critical race studies.

This chapter examines the historical and political significance of the ahupua‘a of Wahikuli, West Maui, as a site where processes of colonial dispossession, settler colonialism, and tourism-driven development converge. It situates Wahikuli within the broader transformation of Hawai‘i’s economy from a subsistence and plantation-based order to one dominated by global tourism. Central to this transformation is the contested status of crown lands, which remain a locus of Hawaiian resistance against capitalist territorialization. Through legal struggles, such as Office of Hawaiian Affairs v. Housing and Community Development Corporation of Hawai‘i and Hawai‘i v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the chapter illustrates how disputes over Wahikuli reveal deeper conflicts between Indigenous land claims, state authority, and market imperatives. By tracing genealogies of land tenure, labor regimes, and tourism planning, Collins argues that Wahikuli embodies both the historical violence of dispossession and the enduring possibilities of resistance, offering a critical lens on tourism’s role in Hawai‘i’s colonial present

This paper examines the role of the Young Women's Christian Association in promoting the social adjustment of Asian immigrant women in Honolulu, Hawaii, through a program known as the International Institute. This was the YWCA's principal contribution to the Americanization fervor that swept the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Unlike nativist and anti-immigrant Americanization programs that sought to dismantle ethnic differences and promote conformity to Anglo-Saxon values, International Institutes were conceived as serviceoriented agencies that celebrated ethnic differences and promoted cultural pluralism -an important distinction given Hawaii's development as a socially diverse insular community. The study identifies tensions between the middle-class, paid staff from the national YWCA and wealthier volunteer board members in Hawaii who controlled the Honolulu Institute's structure and progress as an assimilative agency. Whereas Honolulu board women viewed the International Institute as a service that promoted socioeconomic continuity, their professional colleagues from the continental U.S. viewed it as an instrument of social change.

This companion comprises essays that analyze interactions between art and global imperial relationships from 1800 to World War II.

The essays in this volume expose and add to historical layers of meaning in their discussions of art and empire. Found across much of the globe, sites of sedimentary rock allegorize the dynamics of art and empire and frame the section structure for this book. Twenty‑two authors unpack imperial layers in a variety of global and historical contexts through case studies that center art and visual and material culture. The authors show how art and aesthetics have operated as tools of empire. Interpreting a comprehensive array of media as well as inter‑media dialogues, they analyze and intervene in how we remember and examine entwinements between empire and aesthetic practices. In this volume’s attention to the role of art in imperial formation, as well as the legacy of colonization, the essays disentangle sediments of culture as they are moved and shaped by homogenizing forces of empire, showing that the aesthetics of empire inflect not only individuals, makers, and economies, but also practices of circulation and collecting.

The book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, and professors and may be used in classes focused on art history, imperialism, and colonialism.

The Rise of Chinese American Leaders in U.S. Higher Education offers a timely and incisive exploration of the lived experiences of Chinese American educators who have ascended to leadership roles in U.S. colleges and universities. Through a blend of personal stories, reflections, and critical insights, this book sheds light on a historically marginalized group that endured exclusion from the United States for over sixty years solely due to their nationality. By revealing both their remarkable achievements and the systemic challenges they confront, Honggang Yang and Wenying Xu, as editors, bring together a powerful collection of voices that serve as "roadmaps" for future generations of Chinese Americans, illuminating pathways of resilience, leadership, and possibility.

Racialized exclusion of Asian entrepreneurship and its communities, as part of the entrenched systemic racism in American society, has long been promulgated by the mainstream media and policymakers. Notably, nail salons, as an Asian-dominated multi-billion-dollar industry, reflect the confluence of media portrayals and policy structure of racialization. With the racial triangulation framework, we examined the news discourse of nail salons in New York (2015–2016) and California (2020–2022), and therefore, identified a four-step racialization of Asians that underlines media-regulation nexus, that is, Othering, Discriminating, Regulating, and Consolidating. Specifically, the general stereotypical portrayals of Asian Americans, for example, Model Minority and Yellow Peril, generate discriminatory images of certain Asian groups (e.g., business owners and immigrant workers) through covert language and frames, further motivating top-down regulatory measures that aggravate the economic and political burdens on the whole Asian community and thus solidifying the current racial dynamics. Altogether, this study heightens our sensitivity to the varied forms of (re)production of anti-Asian racism and underlines the legacy of White supremacy and colonialism in symbolic constructions and the legal regime.

Through a close reading of it has always been the perfect instrument, an installation art exhibition by Cato Ouyang, this essay asks after the affordances of form/lessness, an aestheticization of antisociality that ruptures identitarian frameworks of belonging and exclusion. Utilizing the exhibition as a point of contact between Bataillean base materialism and Asian Americanist subjectless discourse, the essay argues that Ouyang’s sculptures invoke violent self-deformation to perform an escape from the human body and a refusal of racial abstraction. In so doing, it expands a Bataillean sensibility that calls on absolute expenditure as a means of undoing the violence of homogeneity and the settlement of form. Where contemporary theories of minoritarian worldmaking have enfolded subjectless critique into exaltations of sociality based on identitarian attachments, this essay argues that Ouyang’s work rejuvenates subjectless critique’s theoretical stakes in identitarian deconstruction, extending it to a full-fledged refusal of the fantasies of relation that in turn sustains the potentialities of social form. Is it possible, the essay asks, that the social is possible only when we work against its idealized constitution?

Heonik Kwon defines the civil war aspect of the Korean War this way: as “a civil war fought between two mutually negating postcolonial political forces, each of which, through the negation, aspired to build a common, singular, and united modern nation-state.” Because this definition is attuned to the specificity of post-1945 and post-1953 Korea, this formulation is productive on many levels: for example, showing how the experience of state violence is transmitted within families, and across generations. But what is lost when we sideline the revolutionary aspects of post-1945 Korean society and politics by referring to the Korean War as a civil war?

Ever heard of Amache? What about the Amache Internment Camp or the Grenada Relocation Center in Granada, Colorado? No? Well let us tell you a story about courage, the resilience of children, the toughness of their families, lives turned upside down, and marbles! NOTE: Regardless of the researcher's perspective, it is impossible to please everyone when writing about the terrible injustice of removing American citizens against their will from their homes and into barbed-wire camps. It is illegal to confiscate 1 1 Lange, D. (1942) Hayward, California, Two Children of the Mochida Family who, with Their Parents,

Teaching the Indochina Wars in American World History Classrooms M ost American World History Connected readers probably imagine they are teaching a world history course that challenges students to see the world differently. We're not high school American history teachers who can't stop talking about the Civil War and struggle to cover anything beyond the Second World War. We're not teaching Western Civilization and getting lost in the Thirty Years' War and the French Revolution. We're not even world history teachers whose survey is the West and the Rest. We most likely imagine we're aware of Eurocentrism and how it shapes our understanding of world history. But if you're like me, we still have areas for improvement. How we teach Southeast Asia after the Second World War is probably one of those areas for growth. In world history surveys, Southeast Asia often appears in particular contexts. We focus on how Southeast Asian states (e.g., Khmer Empire or Srivijaya) flourished and participated in Indian Ocean exchange before 1500. After the arrival of Europeans, we focus on how Europeans established trading posts in part of Southeast Asia (e.g., Melaka or Jakarta) and how other parts (e.g., Siam) resisted Europeans. During the era of New Imperialism, we explore European colonization of Southeast Asia and Indigenous resistance in the region. Once we come to the period after the Second World War, almost every world history textbook adopts an Americentric approach to the political conflicts and discusses the "Vietnam War" as one of many "proxy wars" in the Cold War. Instead of approaching Southeast Asian history from an American perspective, we can adopt regional and global perspectives that allow us to center the experiences of people who lived in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

We examine exclusion and the persistence of STEM disparities for underrepresented minority (URM) students at one diverse college campus, a prestigious Minority Serving Institution (MSI). We draw on in-depth interviews with 28 class-and ethnoracially diverse children of immigrants to examine how they navigated their first year in biology. Our analysis reveals three types of students who differ in STEM capital: (1) STEM-thrivers, who inhabit a ''bio-bubble''; (2) STEM-adapters, who straddle STEM-dominant and non-STEM-dominant peers; and (3) STEM-disconnected, who struggle in silence. We explain how this STEM capital typology is racially inflected, informed by both immigrant class origin and high school segregation. We call attention to social dynamics associated with STEM capital, the forms of exclusion encountered by URM students, and how universities, including MSIs, can reinforce STEM disparities that result in social reproduction.

This essay explores the cultural significance of jeepney art and symbolism in the Philippines, especially within the ongoing Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program (PUVMP). Employing insights from automobility studies, it investigates how these cultural symbols distinctly reflect and shape Filipino identities and narratives. Through semiotic analysis a variety of motifs reveal values, aspirations, and social realities unique to Filipino culture. The article also emphasises the role of jeepneys as essential components of the Philippines' unique transportation system, and as integral elements of both urban landscapes and social interactions. This aspect is further elaborated by considering the potential cultural implications of the jeepney modernisation program. The discussion underscores the importance of understanding the socio-political dimensions of this transformation. Moreover, the paper brings to light the critical need for further research into these socio-cultural impacts. This is particularly relevant as the modernisation program progresses, potentially altering the traditional jeepney landscape. Concluding, the paper suggests that future modernisation efforts in the Philippines should thoughtfully consider preserving cultural heritage. This could involve incorporating traditional jeepney art into the design of new vehicles, symbolising an important balance between modernisation and cultural preservation. This signifies the importance of balancing modernisation with cultural preservation, a theme echoed in urban mobility studies.

This research explores the impact of civic education on voter turnout in Guyana's Local Government Elections (LGEs), particularly in light of the prolonged 24-year gap between the 1994 and 2016 elections. Despite legal provisions requiring LGEs every three years, turnout has remained below 50%, indicating low civic engagement. Utilizing a mixed-methods, phenomenological approach, the study combines quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews with electoral stakeholders and content analysis of civic education materials. The findings reveal a significant correlation between civic knowledge and electoral participation. Key barriers include limited understanding of local governance, political interference, inadequate civic education outreach, and a general lack of trust in the process. Youths and men were less likely to vote, underscoring demographic disparities in engagement. The study recommends a holistic civic education strategy integrating school-based learning, targeted social media campaigns, and collaborative efforts among electoral bodies, government ministries, and civil society. The findings offer valuable insights for policy reforms at the Guyana Elections Commission and may inform strategic planning in similar electoral contexts across the region.

In this collaborative project, the authors revisit an article published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies in 2014. Through the act of revisiting together a publication by one of us ten years earlier, we aim to trace multiple trajectories of feminist knowledge production, particularly regarding women of color and Third World feminisms as well as transnational feminisms in and outside of the academy. Methodologically, we propose "Two Asian Feminists Writing" (TAFW) as a way to disrupt conventional academic forms of scholarly writing by building on each other's voices, explicitly creating coalitional identity practice in order to find common ground through both similarities and differences in our experiences as Asian/American feminists. Thinking together as Vietnamese and Korean American scholars of women, gender, and sexuality studies, we navigate various borders-disciplinary, national, generational, and institutional-to share stories and formulate new epistemology. Via TAFW, the authors reclaim both the positionalities of two Asian feminists writing and the subversive format of the interview mixed with summative critical analyses to discuss the transformative impact of "Hot Commodities, Cheap Labor: Women of Color in the Academy" over time. We look back and live now to move forward toward a queer of color futurity that is critical and free of epistemic systems of oppression.

Abstract: This ethnographic study introduces Asian American taiko group Mu Daiko (now Ensō Daiko) through a look at three members and their original compositions. The group is well known for their emphasis on movement and theatricality and developed their own unique style in the American Midwest. This case study explores how Mu Daiko continues the tradition of Asian American taiko drumming while simultaneously innovating and pushing the art form in new directions. Furthermore, I examine how Mu Daiko operates within the larger North American
taiko community, their social justice mission, and how the art form engages with, and is informed by, the larger Asian American movement.

Résumé : Cette étude ethnographique aborde le groupe de taiko asio-américain Mu Daiko (à présent Ensō Daiko) en examinant trois de ses membres et leurs compositions originales. Le groupe est réputé pour l’accent qu’il met sur le mouvement et la théâtralité, et pour avoir élaboré son propre style dans le Midwest américain. Cette étude de cas se penche sur la façon dont Mu Daiko perpétue la tradition du tambour taiko asio-américain tout en étant en même temps novateur et en poussant
cette forme d’art dans de nouvelles directions. En outre, j’examine la façon dont Mu Daiko fonctionne au sein de la communauté élargie du taiko américain, sa mission de justice sociale et la façon dont cette forme d’art s’inscrit dans un mouvement asio-américain plus large et s’en inspire.

This article examines the narrative poetics and thematic concerns in Chinese American literature through a comparative analysis of the writings by Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Celeste Ng. The article interprets how these authors recount the between-world experiences of Chinese Americans across generations by employing distinct narrative strategies: spatial forms, temporal alternations, and intriguing narrative progression. Kingston's historical narrative, China Men, details a description of spaces for historical authenticity of early laborers' experiences and uses a fragmented narrative collage to mirror their bewilderment between the "promised" America and their hometown. Characterized by temporal alternation, Tan's mnemonic narrative, The Bonesetter's Daughter, portrays how the American-born Chinese daughter untangles present dilemmas through an excursion into personal and familial history. Ng initiates her mystery narrative, Everything I Never Told You, with the unexplained death of a mixed-race adolescent and thereby engages readers in piecing together the factors that shaped her fraught navigation between the harsh reality and idealized fantasies. In the first comparative study of works by these three authors through a narratological lens, we attempt to integrate cultural analysis with literary hermeneutics to trace the evolving portrayal of Chinese American experiences.

To examine the racist stereotyping process through the making of The Five Chinese Brothers, we shall begin by looking at the text, texture, context, as well as the illustrations. Specifically, we can apply the ideas of tale type, function/motif, figures, themes, cultural symbolism, as well as the semantic issues related to translation and visualization. While existing criticism from other perspectives is summarized, a distinctive analysis from a folkloristic perspective goes beyond a personal or emotional level and presents how the vitality of classic tales is continued through the application of the principles in structuring a tale, and how the violation of such principles reveals a certain ideological agenda, in this case, a racist ideology. The popularity of The Five Chinese Brothers may be seen from these two aspects: The first is that the tale itself fits the formula for any classic fairy tale, as shown above, and the history and popularity of the fairy tale in the West have well prepared its readers to accept the formula with expectations of exotic or surprising twists in new tales. The second aspect is about the illustration, that is, this picture book, with its distinctive illustrations, disconnects the Western readers, mostly parents, from something that they are familiar with to something with which they are unfamiliar but about which they have fantasized. What was familiar to Westerners was the image of the Chinese, men in queues, for example, which was popularly presented in various media since the First Opium War between Great Britain and China in 1840, and to Americans, the images in political campaigns before and after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed as Federal Law in 1882. What was unfamiliar was the enchantment in such a Chinese tale and the use of color with Chinese painting style and the cartoony look targeting a generation/group of new readers-the young children. Indeed, previous images of the Chinese with queues were nearly all with ugly facial expressions, full of negative implications,

This essay argues that Ocean Vuong foregrounds character over identity in his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous-not only to voice the unevenness created by US imperialism, racial violence, and refugee selection, but also to refashion the marginal positioning that refugees are accorded in conventional representations-through his relentless attention to beauty. Although "usefulness" is not a concept usually paired with beauty, Vuong's elegant transformation of the enduring trials of refugee life can be read as a pragmatic and calculated intervention into the aesthetic structures and readerly desires under which refugee stories are usually consumed.

Between 1997 and 1998, conceptual photographer Dean Sameshima documented his visits to two Los Angeles bathhouses for his series In Between Days (Without You). Composed of images of empty, used beds in the saunas’ private rooms, the series offers a portal into a fading milieu devastated by the AIDS crisis and concomitant shifts in public sexual cultures. By visually withholding the sexual performances that trace and stain the beds, Sameshima opens the images for projection while simultaneously retaining the singular and unknowable aspects of the undocumented acts. This article argues that the series’ play of openness and closure dialogues with discourses on anality and absence in gay Asian American sexual representation. While previous discussions of the anal emphasize vulnerability and receptivity, this essay engages anal retentivity to read for the stubborn and private sensations of queer Asian American sexuality that refuse to be effaced from the practices of minoritarian relationality.

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) is a
poignant collection that bridges personal experience with
broader historical and cultural contexts, particularly those of
war, migration, and queerness. This paper employs Edward
Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading to critically analyze
Vuong's poetry, exploring how Vuong’s personal narratives of
exile, trauma, and identity intersect with global histories of
war, imperialism, and cultural displacement. Contrapuntal
reading encourages readers to acknowledge the intertwined
nature of personal and political histories, amplifying
marginalized voices in the process. This paper argues that
Vuong’s poetry presents a counter-history to the dominant
narratives of the Vietnam War and immigration, offering a
nuanced perspective that complicates traditional views of
national identity, memory, and belonging. The analysis will
focus on how Vuong’s poetic language resists hegemonic
structures of power, particularly through his exploration of
language, queerness, and the legacy of war.

KK: Tell us about yourself. Where were you raised? GK: For the first seven years of my life, I was raised in veterans' housing called "Kalihi War Homes," with my three sisters, my mother and father. My father was a World War II veteran. Our rented home now is the site of the public housing project Kuhio Park Terrace. I attended Kalihi Waena Elementary School until second grade, then my family moved to a new housing subdivision in Pearl City, closer to my father' s work at Pearl Harbor. KK: Who were your parents? GK: Both of my parents -Takao Kubota and Yoshie Inouye -were raised in large families in west Kauai. They were children of Japanese immigrants who came to Hawaii in the early 1900s. My grandfather on my mother' s side was a stevedore. My grandmother on my mother' s side was a picture bride from the farm country of Kumamoto. My grandparents on my father side were Japanese language school teachers from Hiroshima.

Reform in the People's Republic of China has seen a dramatic change in the discourse of localism, which has now moved from being a political crime to being a technique for encouraging entrepreneurialism and economic development. One of the oft-cited arguments about the coincidence of economic growth and localism is that this might result in a weakening of central governments and even the agendas of the nation state. An investigation of place identity in Shanxi Province, North China, suggests to the contrary that the impact of new discourses of localism has actually strengthened the nationalist project through creating new and more integrated multiple place identities.

Chinese immigrants in the United States have primarily relied on co-ethnic networks and formal labor market
intermediaries to seek work in the ethnic economy, but online platforms have gained increasing significance. I
conduct a qualitative content analysis of 145,986 job posts created between July 2019 and August 2022 for the
restaurant and nail salon industry on a Chinese-language online platform, with a focus on the manifestation
of gender roles. Advertisers communicate norms of masculinity and femininity through explicit requirements
for gender, desired traits, and descriptions of working conditions. In the restaurant industry, a gendered div-
ision of space is imposed, requiring female workers for front-of-house positions and male workers for back-of-
house positions, with a stoic and hardworking working-class masculinity emphasized for the latter. Nail salons
that require more intimate customer interactions are more likely to explicitly require women, drawing on
gender norms that hold women to higher standards of emotional labor and attention to detail. Salon advertise-
ments often included information on the racial or socioeconomic makeup of the customer base or the salon’s
neighborhood. The findings extend our understanding of digital labor market intermediaries in the ethnic
labor market, as well as how symbolic boundaries of gender are transposed from offline to online contexts.

This dissertation analyzes racialization in the fantasy genre work of The Way of Kings (2010) by Brandon Sanderson. The primary objective is to examine how the author mimics the real-world process of racialization in a secondary world. The analysis is conducted through an intersectional lens, incorporating literary and post-colonial frameworks. Consequently, the study also investigates its interaction with other facets of identity, such as class and gender. More precisely, this study explains how eye color is used as a proxy for skin color as a race signifier and how this racialization impacts characters’ lives through, depending on where they stand in the social hierarchy. Additionally, the racialization of non-human beings within the secondary world is examined, highlighting how the fantasy genre allows for critical exploration of realworld issues through imaginative constructs. The study looks at language and symbols of power, relating them to race and explaining how a quasi-colonial system of oppression is supported by these elements. This study demonstrates how fantasy literature engages with and critiques realworld systems of racialization, providing new perspectives on identity, power, and colonial structures.

Extant research on scholarship programs provides foundational knowledge on student enrollment patterns, different types of programs and their students, and outcomes for scholarship recipients in different sectors of higher education. Despite this growing body of research, however, looming questions remain about the measurable impact of scholarship funding. in this study, we use an experimental research design a to estimate the impact of a race-conscious scholarship program for Asian American and pacific islander (AApi) students attending three Asian American and Native American pacific islander-Serving institution (AANApiSi) community colleges: City College of San Francisco, De Anza College, and South Seattle College. Our primary goal was to understand the lived experiences of AApi students attending community college and the relative impact of the funding on their educational experiences and academic achievement. a We employed a randomized controlled trial to compare scholarship recipients and non-recipients in order to isolate the impact of the scholarship on students' educational experiences.

I attached the introduction to my book chapter that is forthcoming.

“Heartbreak and Resilience: A Look at Lao-Americans in the LDS Church” in The Center Cannot Hold: Exploring the Frontiers of Mormon Space, Place, and Ethnicity, Edited by Russell Stevenson and Andrew Hal, International Mormonism series with the University of Illinois Press

Issue 29 (July 2025) (RE)THINKING GENDERED IDENTITIES Dear readers, The cover of the current issue of ESLA features an oil on canvas titled "Pájaros y flores" from the series La Primavera by Chilean artist José Pedro Godoy. The series dazzles with riotous palette of saturated greens, lush yellows, and vibrant reds that evoke the fecundity of spring. Godoy celebrates and interrogates the untamed beauty of the natural world, while exploring the interplay between desire, nature and wilderness. In La Primavera, wilderness acts as intermediaries between the human and the natural, embodying instincts and the primal forces of desire, balanced amidst an abundance of foliage. This body of work portrays a poetic reclamation of the wild as a heterotopia of mystery, vitality, and coexistence. Furthermore, Godoy's art unveils tensions between fragility, vitality and humanity's relationship with wilderness, a kind of heterotopic haven that suggests an archive of feeling, a queer utopic project. The notion of wilderness in need of civilizing has justified settler colonialism and other forms of cultural violence. Jack Halberstam has scrutinized how wilderness plays a part in most theories of sexuality, and sexuality plays its role in various notions of wildness. Halberstam's

Constructed around literary representations of four ecological formations – desert, island, ocean, and swamp – this chapter explores how Asian American and Pacific Islander literary representations of these environments have contributed materially and conceptually to the shaping of Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Using these environments as a framework for cultural analysis allows for an exploration of multifaceted and complex Asian American identities that define themselves not only in terms of their entanglement with shifting categories of race and citizenship within the US, but also in terms of how these categories intersect and interact with the expansion of US geopower worldwide. If the development of US global hegemony during the twentieth century was intimately tied to a political geography that framed deserts, islands, oceans, and swamps as discrete territorial units that could be managed and controlled, literary representations of these same environments by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have worked to highlight the ways that they often escaped or exceeded this dominant paradigm of containment.

Soon-Tek Oh’s 1970 play, Tondemonai—Never Happen! (hereinafter Tondemonai), is a strangely neglected cultural artifact. A production of East West Players, it was the first commercially-produced play to dramatize Japanese American incarceration; and yet, despite also featuring queer kinship, it remains archived and practically forgotten in the academy. Its performance at a discursive center of Asian American cultural production disrupts a homogenized narrative in Asian American cultural studies—that the era was beset with queerphobic cultural nationalism. The play presents an opportunity to grapple with Asian American queer cultural nationalism targeting both racial castration and proto-homonationalism. After analyzing the play, I proffer a framework regarding homonationalism’s long emergence in transpacific terms, and reinterpret Lonny Kaneko’s classic 1976 short story “The Shoyu Kid” as another example of Asian American queer cultural nationalist storytelling. This article features archival stage photography of Tondemonai, which gives an impression of Asian American cultural production of the era as queerer than often presumed.

In 1996, Runnymede Trust , a British race and civil rights think tank, established a commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia resulting in the popularization of the term in popular culture and media. The commission’s ‘verdict’ raised general concerns within Western communities surrounding Muslim populations and their social integration within other migrant local population of the modern, western world order within the twenty first century. As a result, many Islamic historians, scholars and academic theologians took to publish various standpoints to reconstruct the origins of Islam in the West and most specifically in America following the events of September 11th, 2001. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, in A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order offers his audience a twist in the experience of biographic reading- diverging the history of Muslims in America with the creation of Modern America as opposed to the common assumption that the two categories are and have always been essentially apart. This book is packed with eight full chapters of explaining the reciprocated role both Muslims and America played in shaping each other’s genesis and destiny instead of speculating their compatibility. America has been home to Muslims from various ethnicities, dating back to the sixteenth century slave trade between West Africa and North America- enslaved, Muslim Africans often resorted to discreet religious rituals and communities to remain open to the public representation of Christian conversion offers by slave owners who could potentially bargain their freedom. These forced conversions and obtained freedoms however, often resulted in a lonely destiny for the ex-Muslim; being shunned out of their family back home- damned if enslaved and damned if they are freed. GhaneaBassri’s biographic record of Muslim ‘individual’ stories and institutions shows us that within the past four centuries Muslims and America have travelled down parallel paths towards the future and not distinct from one another. He takes the reader across a trip through history, pinpointing different institutional, individual, communal and systemic contributions of Muslim Americans to the creation of the contemporary American state, from the mid-sixteenth century trade commerce to the civil war, both great wars and up to the legislation of civil rights. GhaneaBassiri strives to endorse the conception, throughout his book, that like every other positive or negative experience that fades through the transition of time, so does prejudice if superseded with positive and collaborative interaction, coexistence and integration.

If I were not "queer," I would not know aids. Without knowing aids, I could not be "queer. " I would also not be "queer" if it were not for the Cold War. If it were not for the Cold War, aids could not exist. The past lives in memories like a narrative missing transitions. As Marita Sturken writes, "Both the Vietnam War and the aids epidemic have profoundly affected the experience of nationality. Amer i ca is inconceivable without them. " 1 Sturken explains that the traumas borne of the Vietnam War and aids interrupted once commonly held "truths" as well as pro gress narratives: " those of American imperialism, technology, science, and masculinity. " 2 In turn, there has been widespread cultural productions to revisit these memories and traumas in order to seek a modicum of healing, even where healing must first draw anger, and even when healing-nevertheless a cure-has remained impossible. Both of my parents were born in Nanjing, China, during World War II. At the end of World War II, followed by the Civil War and the ascendancy of the People's Republic of China under Mao, they evacuated to Taiwan as children of the po liti cally privileged Nationalist Party of China (Kuomintang, or kmt). Although they grew up under what they would describe as modest means, they did not experience the most devastating effects of more than thirty-eight years of martial law-the second-longest period of military rule in modern history after Syria and Israel-installed by the kmt to violently suppress Native re sis tance, leftists, Taiwanese in de pen dence, and/or pro-Japanese agitators.

This article engages critically with the insider-outsider divide in research with migrants and advocates a more nuanced and dynamic approach to positionality. In migration research, the insider-outsider divide typically assumes a specific form: an insider researcher is a member of the migrant group under study, whereas an outsider researcher is a member of the majority population in the country of settlement. This divide is a discursive reality that researchers must relate to, regardless of its analytical merits. Our analysis builds on the authors' experiences in twelve different fieldwork situations, where research was often conducted from hybrid positions that did not fit the archetypal insider-outsider divide. First, we discuss the relational construction of insider-outsider divides in migration research, focusing on the interplay between researcher characteristics and particular social contexts. Second, we address the specific characteristics or markers through which researchers are interpreted and positioned. These markers differ in terms of their visibility to informants, and in the extent to which researchers can modify them or communicate them selectively. Third, we examine how these characteristics are actively managed in fieldwork settings. Fourth, we identify five types of 'third positions' in migration research, positions that deviate from the archetypal insider-outsider divide: explicit third party, honorary insider, insider by proxy, hybrid insider-outsider, and apparent insider. The article explores some of the advantages and challenges inherent in different positions and argues that strategic and reflexive management of positionality should be included in ethical considerations about the research process.

In this chapter, I provide a brief retrospective of my teaching practice and professional service, rendered with the goal of promoting social justice, in a way that I hope will provide a useful point of reference to help us all clarify what is ours to do, to realize a more equitable educational practice. I hope to demonstrate how, with consciousness of our individual positionality and reflection on the impact of our practice, we can not only minimize the risk of harmful consequences that may result from teaching based on skewed self-images and implicit biases, but model more respectful and even transformative practices. I introduce a sustainable model based on an organic metaphor, one which I hope will facilitate a dynamic process of constantly engaging with a diverse community, in order to maintain a constantly fresh awareness of the imperative to proactively decenter whiteness and realize a more equitable educational practice. I began developing my own applications of the concept of decentering to my teaching about twenty years ago, when I used a collection of philosophical essays called Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a multicultural postcolonial, and feminist world (Narayan & Harding, 2000) in my master's seminar on intersectionality for cultural studies majors. More recently, in "Worth the risk: Decentring whiteness in English language teaching" (2020), JPB Gerald has cogently articulated how this concept needs to be implemented in the field of English language education. The concept of decentering can be a bitter pill for white feminists who feel they are already too often decentered in an androcentric world, and so tend to focus more closely on sexism and may neglect to sufficiently consider how it intersects with racism and other isms. But decentering is crucial to achieve true anti-racist feminism.

This study examines Nam June Paik’s artworks, <Zen for
Film> and <TV Buddha>, through the lens of Korean Sansuhwa
expressed via media. Sansu-hwa (山水畵), also described
as a Shanshui painting, is an East Asian landscape
painting. In Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics, Shanshui represents
an artistic and philosophical expression in the relationship
between humans and the cosmos (the world). It simultaneously
differentiates and connects opposing elements
shan (山)/shui (水), yang (陽)/yin (陰), subject (主)/object
(客), being (有)/non-being (無) and embodies oppositional
continuity, and thus a Daoist logic of “recursive thinking”
represented as xuan (玄). This study proposes that Paik’s
works can be interpreted through the similar aesthetics of 玄,
where subject and object continuously intermingle to achieve
unity. Furthermore, Paik’s works can be understood through
the logic of ‘chakyung (borrowed scenery, 借景),’ wherein
viewers bring the world closer from a distance through multilayered
thoughts. This exploration reveals the possibility of
interpreting Paik’s art from a wide aesthetic perspective,
seeking diversities within Korean cosmology and aesthetics.

This study adopts a transnational lens in its analysis of what “home” meant to Japanese Americans by analyzing writings by an Issei [first/immigrant generation] woman, Hatsuye Egami (1902–1961). Egami was a writer/journalist in the prewar Japanese-language literature circle in Los Angeles. She kept an “evacuation” diary in the Tulare Assembly Center, which was translated and published in English in 1995. In the Gila River War Relocation Center, Egami was involved in the publication of the Japanese language section of the camp newspaper, The Gila News Courier, in which she wrote a serial column titled “Fujin no Sekai” [Women’s World]. By juxtaposing her life experiences with her fiction and non-fiction writings, this chapter elucidates how this Issei woman strove to create a feeling of home for herself, her family, and other Japanese Americans in their forced relocation, and at the same time, searching for ways to liberate her community from the restrictive notion of home deriving from the culture of her homeland. This chapter unpacks how multi-layered notions of home empowered Egami in her resistance against the intersectional oppression of racism and sexism.

Exclusion in academic settings is a pervasive issue that profoundly impacts marginalized students, particularly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) individuals. This study examines the nature of exclusion, focusing on the role of racial microaggressions as operational mechanisms that undermine mental health and academic success. Participants completed an online survey that included measures of depression, racial trauma, racial microaggressions, and affect. Results demonstrate strong correlations between frequent microaggressions and heightened symptoms of racial trauma and depression. Despite prior evidence suggesting a protective role, ethnic identity did not buffer these adverse outcomes, with higher ethnic identity sometimes exacerbating depressive symptoms. Our findings also highlight systemic exclusion in institutional structures, such as ethnocentric curricula, inequitable policies, and lack of diverse representation in leadership. These systemic barriers compound interpersonal exclusions, creating environments where BIPOC students experience isolation, invalidation, and diminished belonging. Physiologically, perceived exclusion and discrimination activate chronic stress responses, contributing to health disparities through mechanisms such as epigenetic changes. While systemic racism contributes to these patterns, this study underscores the urgency of institutional reform to promote fairness and inclusivity. Efforts to address exclusion must extend beyond interpersonal interactions to structural changes in curricula, policy, and representation. These findings enhance our understanding of exclusion’s psychological and impacts, suggesting pathways for targeted interventions that promote belonging, mental health, and academic equity for marginalized students.