Browse

The migrations of Manilamen, Bengali Muslim peddlers, and Chinese merchants and coolies extend the history of Asian Americans in the South into the early nineteenth and twentieth century. Between 1950 and 2000, the Asian American population in the American South increased more than one hundred times, much higher than the national average and the greatest increase among all regions of the United States. Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black–white relations, this book explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South, and discusses the formation of past and emerging Asian American communities in the region. As the chapters illustrate, Asian Americans have remade the Southern landscape with a visible, vital presence in many towns, suburbs, and cities. Avoiding the usual focus on the East and West Coasts, the book examines the historical and contemporary significance of Asian American migration, religious identities, and racial formations in the South. several chapters attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region, reintroducing the South within a historical web of global networks across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic.

This pioneering social history of Little Saigon examines the institutionalization and preservation of a Southern California ethnic enclave and its people through the politics of rescue. It argues that Little Saigon’s emergence and growth was fuelled by American guilt over losing the war and Vietnamese gratitude for being rescued from communism. Thus the largest of diasporic Vietnamese communities, along with most of its counterparts nationwide, was framed as the least a guilt-ridden country could do to atone for its Cold War failures. The politics of rescue helps to explain why Little Saigon enjoyed a level of mainstream moral, economic, and political support historically unknown to most other Asian Americans. As for the Vietnamese exiles, the politics of rescue placed extreme pressure on them to act like model minorities in order to justify an unpopular war that killed 58,000 Americans and nearly invalidated American Exceptionalism. By becoming Refugee American, the losers of the Vietnam War could cast themselves as winners of the postwar, whereby Vietnamese and Americans, rather than forgetting, could mutually affirm a tragic past by rewriting it.

This book tells the history of anti-Chinese politics in Mexican culture. It reveals the hidden influence that anti-Chinese racism, or antichinismo, has had on the formation of the revolutionary government and mestizo national identity. The imagined racial figure of Chinese men created a profound impact in Mexican society. The book employs an Asian Americanist critique to evaluate Mexico as a racial state to discuss the political function of antichinismo at various points of national crisis. After the revolution, the social rights mandate of the 1917 constitution created a new rationality for the legitimacy and authority of the national state – to care for the good of the indigenous population. This book shows how Mexican politics relied upon racism against Chinese people to create polemical notions of the public good that helped generate new relationships between the government and the governed. The book is divided chronologically to attend to three major phases of antichinismo: the disposable worker, the killable subject, and the pernicious defiler. Through discourses of Chinese racial difference, diverse Mexican actors created alternative visions of the nation and helped rework the relationships of rule and consent. A regional approach to telling this national story illustrates that people took up antichinismo for different reasons but coalesced through the state ideology of revolutionary government’s mestizo nationalism.

This book explores the crisis in contemporary Afghan women's lives by focusing on two remarkable Afghan professional women working on behalf of their Afghan sisters. The book's compelling narrative follows the stories of Judge Marzia Basel and Jamila Afghani from 2005 through 2013, providing an oft-ignored perspective on the personal and professional lives of Afghanistan's women. Contending with the complex dynamics of a society both undergoing and resisting change, Basel and Afghani speak candidly—and critically—of matters like international intervention and patriarchal Afghan culture, capturing the ways in which immense possibility alternates and vies with utter hopelessness. Strongly rooted in feminist theory and interdisciplinary historical and geopolitical analysis, the book sheds new light on the struggle against the powerful forces that affect Afghan women's education, health, political participation, livelihoods, and quality of life. It also suggests how a new dialogue might be started in which women from across geopolitical boundaries might find common cause for change and rewrite their collective stories.

This book describes how Filipino exiles and immigrants in the United States played a crucial role in the grassroots revolution that overthrew the fourteen-year dictatorship of former president Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. A member of one of the major U.S.-based anti-Marcos movements, the author tells the story of how small groups of Filipino exiles—short on resources and shunned by some of their compatriots—overcame fear, apathy, and personal differences to form opposition organizations after Marcos's imposition of martial law and learned to lobby the U.S. government during the Cold War. In the process, the author draws from multiple hours of interviews with the principal activists, personal files of resistance leaders, and U.S. government records revealing the surveillance of the resistance by pro-Marcos White House administrations. The first full-length book to detail the history of U.S.-based opposition to the Marcos regime, it provides valuable lessons on how to persevere against a well-entrenched opponent.

Constrained by traditions restricting their movements and speech, the Maithil women of Nepal and India have long explored individual and collective life experiences by sharing stories with one another. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes including a kind of magical realism, these tales allow women to build community through a deeply personal and always evolving storytelling form. This book examines how these storytellers weave together their own life experiences—the hardships and the pleasures—with age-old themes. In so doing, the book demonstrates, they harness folk traditions to grapple personally as well as collectively with social values, behavioral mores, relationships, and cosmological questions. Each chapter includes stories and excerpts that reveal Maithil women's gift for rich language, layered plots, and stunning allegory. In addition, the book provides ethnographic and personal information that reveal the complexity of women's own lives, and includes works painted by Maithil storytellers to illustrate their tales. The result is a fascinating study of being and becoming that will resonate for readers in women's and Hindu studies, folklore, and anthropology.

This book rethinks the hegemonic and sentimental optimism around the arts and creative economy by politicizing a global discursive regime that effectively asks the poor to eat heritage. Critical scholarship largely views creative economy as new, as applicable to the de-industrializing global North, and as neoliberal commodification and governmentality. It neglects complex and intersecting histories of national, colonial, development, and progressive politics; longstanding uses of creative practices to remake economies and polities; and spatial specificities that give a global discourse traction. Attending to historical, spatial, and ethnographic complexities, this book probes discursive planning and activist politics intersectionally. Focusing on India, the analysis juxtaposes nationalist and progressive histories alongside critical ethnographies of two activist performance troupes: Communist-affiliated, Jana Natya Manch, and the indigenous Chhara’s (former ‘criminal tribe’) community-based Budhan Theatre. The subtle invasions of commodification, heritage, and management into performance make activist theater a crucial site for considering what counts as creativity in the cultural politics of creative economy. A transnational feminist approach drives this exploration of precarious lives, livelihoods, and ideologies at the intersection of heritage, planning, and performance. By analyzing the creators, performers, and activists involved—individuals at the margins of creative economy and society—it builds a provocative argument. Their creative practices may survive, challenge, and even reinforce the economies of death, displacement, and divisiveness used by the urban poor to survive

The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions. The book examines the relation between the government and local communities for heritage preservation and cultural tourism in the age of runaway urbanization by focusing on the moments of mobilizing and representing folk traditions in both socialist and late socialist Yan'an. This ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices—paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults—within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, the book reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, it shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change. The book uses “Yan'an and folk culture” to connote a historical model of the Chinese Communist Party appropriating folk traditions to promote rural reform and national state campaigns.

This first book-length study of media images of multiracial Asian Americans, tracing the codes that alternatively enable and prevent audiences from recognizing the multiracial status of Asian Americans. The book's perceptive readings of popular media—movies, television shows, magazine articles, and artwork—indicate how and why the viewing public often fails to identify multiracial Asian Americans. Using actor Keanu Reeves, the Matrix trilogy, and golfer Tiger Woods as examples, the book suggests that this failure is tied to gender, sexuality, and post-racial politics. Also considering alternative images such as reality TV star Kimora Lee Simmons, the television show Battlestar Galactica, and the artwork of Kip Fulbeck, this incisive study offers nuanced interpretations that open the door to a new and productive understanding of race in America.