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On December 8, 1941, artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) awoke to find himself branded an “enemy alien” by the U.S. government in the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The historical crisis forced Kuniyoshi to rethink his pictorial strategies and to confront questions of loyalty, assimilation, national and racial identity that he had carefully avoided in his prewar art. As an immigrant who had proclaimed himself to be as “American as the next fellow,” the realization of his now fractured and precarious status catalyzed the development of an emphatic and conscious identity construct that would underlie Kuniyoshi's art and public image for the remainder of his life. This book offers an analysis of Kuniyoshi's pivotal works. It examines Kuniyoshi's imagery and writings as vital means for him to engage, albeit often reluctantly and ambivalently, in discussions about American democracy and ideals at a time when racial and national origins were grounds for mass incarceration and discrimination. The book also investigates the activities of Americans of Japanese descent outside the internment camps and the intense pressures with which they had to deal in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It foregrounds broader historical debates of what constituted American art and illuminates the complicating factors of race, diasporas, and ideology in the construction of an American cultural identity. The book historicizes and elucidates the ways in which “minority” artists have been, and continue to be, both championed and marginalized for their cultural and ethnic “difference” within the twentieth-century American art canon.

Korean adoptees have a difficult time relating to any of the racial identity models because they are people of color who often grew up in white homes and communities. When Korean adoptees attempt to immerse into the Korean community, they feel uncomfortable and unwelcome because they are unfamiliar with Korean customs and language. This book looks at how Korean adoptees engage with their various identities and begin the journey toward self-discovery and empowerment. The book examines assimilation into a White middle-class identity during childhood. Although their White identity may be challenged at times, for the most part adoptees feel accepted as “honorary” Whites among their families and friends. “Opening Pandora's Box” discusses the shattering of adoptees' early views on race and racism and the problems of being raised colorblind in a race-conscious society. “Engaging and Reflecting” is filled with adoptee voices as they discover their racial and transracial identities as young adults. “Questioning What I Have Done” delves into the issues that arise when Korean adoptees explore their multiple identities and the possible effects on relationships with parents and spouses. “Empowering Identities” explores how adoptees are able to take control of their racial and transracial identities by reaching out to parents, prospective parents, and adoption agencies and by educating Korean and Korean Americans about their lives. The final chapter reiterates for adoptees, parents, adoption agencies, and social justice activists and educators the need for identity journeys and the empowered identities that can result.

California roll, Chinese take-out, American-made kimchi, dogmeat, monosodium glutamate, SPAM—all are examples of what this book calls “dubious” foods. Strongly associated with Asian and Asian American gastronomy, they are commonly understood as ersatz, depraved, or simply bad. This book contends that these foods share a spiritual fellowship with Asians in the United States in that the Asian presence, be it culinary or corporeal, is often considered watered-down, counterfeit, or debased manifestations of the “real thing.” The American expression of Asianness is defined as doubly inauthentic—as insufficiently Asian and unreliably American when measured against a largely ideological if not entirely political standard of authentic Asia and America. By exploring the other side of what is prescriptively understood as proper Asian gastronomy, the book suggests that Asian cultural expressions occurring in places such as Los Angeles, Honolulu, New York City, and even Baton Rouge are no less critical to understanding the meaning of Asian food—and, by extension, Asian people—than culinary expressions that took place in Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai centuries ago. In critically considering the impure and hybridized with serious and often whimsical intent, the book argues that while the notion of cultural authenticity is troubled, troubling, and troublesome, the apocryphal is not necessarily a bad thing: The dubious, as in the case of Asian foods, can be and is often quite delicious.

Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, Sonia Ryang writes Eating Korean: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity as much as an eater as a researcher. Her encounters with key Korean food items including cold noodle soup, pancakes, barbecued beef, and bibimbap, rice with mixed vegetables, in four different locations of Los Angeles, Baltimore, Hawaii (Kona and Honolulu), and Iowa City are at once entertaining, insightful, yet deeply moving, while asking the reader to stop and think about food we eat every day in close connection to colonial histories, ethnic displacements, and global capitalism. The book is dedicated to Sidney Mintz, a prominent anthropologist and the author’s mentor.

This innovative work provides a new model for the analysis of ethnic and racial settlement patterns in the United States and Canada. Ethnoburbs—suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas—are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual, and often multinational communities in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration but does not necessarily constitute a majority. This book documents the processes that have evolved with the spatial transformation of the Chinese American community of Los Angeles and that have converted the San Gabriel Valley into ethnoburbs in the latter half of the twentieth century, and it examines the opportunities and challenges that occurred as a result of these changes. Traditional ethnic and immigrant settlements customarily take the form of either ghettos or enclaves. This book gives readers a socio-spatial analysis of the evolution of a new type of racially defined place. The San Gabriel Valley tells a unique story, but its evolution also speaks to those experiencing a similar type of ethnic and racial conurbation. In sum, the book sheds light on processes that are shaping other present (and future) ethnically and racially diverse communities. The concept of the ethnoburb has redefined the way geographers and other scholars think about ethnic space, place, and process.

What are the challenges to the food system in Hawai‘i? Food and Power explores issues facing the way we eat and produce (or do not produce) food in Hawai‘i. Given Hawai‘i’s island geography, high dependence on imported food has been portrayed as the primary problem and localization has been the dominant solution proposed. But the book argues that much more is needed to transform the food system to something that is just, equitable, as well as secure and healthy. The chapters in this book point out that the challenges are much more diverse: energy-intensive farming, gendered and racialized farming population, controversies over the ownership and benefits/costs of biotechnology, high food insecurity for marginalized communities, and stratified access to nutritious foods. Defying the reductive approach that looks only at calories or tonnage of food produced/consumed in the state as the indicator of the soundness of food system, the book points out how food problems are necessarily layered with other socio-cultural and economic problems and uses food democracy as the guiding framework. The chapters explore various issues, from agriculture, land use, and colonialism to biotechnology, agricultural tourism, and farmers' markets, and explore how these issues relate to movements toward food democracy.

Spend time in New York City and, soon enough, you will encounter some of the Japanese nationals who live and work there. NYC is also home to one of the largest overseas Japanese populations in the world. Among them are artists and designers who produce cutting-edge work in fields such as design, fashion, music, and art. Part of the so-called“creative class” and a growing segment of the neoliberal economy, these Japanese migrants are usually middle-class and college-educated. They move to NYC in the hope of realizing dreams and aspirations unavailable to them in Japan. Yet the creative careers they desire are competitive, and many end up working illegally in precarious, low-paying jobs. Though they often migrate without fixed plans for return, nearly all eventually do, and their migrant trajectories are punctuated by visits home. This book offers a portrait of these Japanese creative migrants living and working in NYC. At its heart is a universal question—how do adults reinvent their lives? In the absence of any material or social need, what makes it worthwhile for people to abandon middle-class comfort and home for an unfamiliar and insecure life? The book explores these questions in four different venues patronized by New York's Japanese. The story of Japanese migrant artists in NYC is both a story about Japan and a way of examining Japan from beyond its borders.

The thirteen essays in this book come from Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Malaysia, South Africa, and Hawai‘i. With a shared focus on the specific local conditions that influence the ways in which life narratives are told, the book engages with a variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, history, media studies, and literature, to challenge claims that life writing is an exclusively Western phenomenon. Addressing the common desire to reflect on lived experience, the book enlists interdisciplinary perspectives to interrogate the range of cultural forms available for representing and understanding lives.

The disproportionate U.S, military presence in Okinawa, which began with the 1945 battle followed by twenty-seven years under U.S. military occupation, continues to this day. It has brought deadly accidents, serious crimes, including rape and murder, environmental destruction, and economic stagnation to what remains Japan’s poorest prefecture. These small islands bear 70 percent of the total U.S. military presence in Japan on 0.6 percent of the nation’s land area with less than 1 percent of its population. Yet, even as this burden of bases continues to impose dangers and disruptions, approximately 200 Okinawan women every year have married American servicemen and returned with them to live in the United States. Former Okinawa Times reporter Etsuko Takushi Crissey traveled throughout their adopted country, conducting wide-ranging interviews and a questionnaire survey of women who married and immigrated between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s. She asked how they met their husbands, why they decided to marry, what the reactions of both families had been, and what life had been like for them in the United States. She concentrates especially on their experiences as immigrants, wives, mothers, working women, and members of a racial minority. Many describe severe hardships they encountered. Crissey presents their diverse personal accounts, her survey results, and comparative data on divorces, challenging the widespread notion that such marriages almost always fail, with the women ending up abandoned and helpless in a strange land. She compares their experiences with international marriages of American soldiers stationed in Europe and mainland Japan.

This book focuses on the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of auto/biography concentrates as much on other members of one's family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory. This book centers on how Asian American family memoirs expand the limits and function of life writing by reclaiming history and promoting community cohesion. It argues that identity is shaped by not only the stories we have been told, but also the stories we tell, making these narratives important examples of the ways we remember our family's past and tell our community's story. In the context of auto/biographical writing or filmmaking that explores specific ethnic experiences of diaspora, assimilation, and integration, this work considers two important aspects: These texts re-imagine the past by creating a work that exists both in history and as a historical document, making the creative process a form of re-enactment of the past itself. Each chapter centers on a thematic concern germane to the Asian American experience. The final chapter analyzes the discursive possibilities of the filmed family memoir. The book concludes the work with a metaliterary engagement with the history of the author's own Asian diasporic family as she demonstrates the profound interconnection between forms of life writing.

Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, Don Lee's Country of Origin, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. These and a host of other Asian North American detection and mystery titles were published between 1995 and 2010. Together they reference more than a decade of monitoring that includes internment, campaign financing, espionage, and post-9/11 surveillance involving Asian North Americans. However, these works are less concerned with solving crimes than with creating literary responses to the subtle but persistent surveillance of raced subjects. This book reveals how the Asian North American novels' fascination with mystery, detection, spying, and surveillance is a literary response to anxieties over race. According to the book, this allegiance to a genre that takes interruptions to social norms as its foundation speaks to a state of unease at a time of racial scrutiny. The book is broadly about oversight and insight. The race policing of the past has been subsumed under post-racism. Detective fiction's focus on scrutiny presents itself as the most appropriate genre for revealing the failures of a so-called post-racialism in which we continue to deploy visually defined categories of race as social realities. The book provides a compelling analysis of mystery and detective fiction by Lee, Nina Revoyr, Choi, Suki Kim, Sakamoto, and Hamid, whose work exploits the genre's techniques to highlight pervasive vigilance among Asian North American subjects.

This book contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal. This book demonstrates that this theatrical logic of segregating the real from the staged grew out of the manner in which internment was agitated for and instituted by the U.S. government and media. During the war, Japanese Americans struggled to define themselves within the web of this theatrical logic. The political spectacles staged by the FBI and the American mass media were heir to a theatricalizing discourse that can be traced back to Commodore Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853. The book provides a detailed reconstruction of the FBI’s raids on Japanese American communities. It also makes clear how wartime newspapers framed the evacuation and internment so as to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with their former neighbors of Japanese descent. The book juxtaposes analysis of these political spectacles with a look at cultural performances staged by Issei and Nisei at two of the most prominent “relocation centers”: California’s Manzanar and Tule Lake. The camp performances enlarge our understanding of the impulse to create art under oppressive conditions. Taken together, wartime political spectacles and the performative attempts at resistance by internees demonstrate the logic of racial performativity that underwrites American national identity.

Begun as a conversation among scholars of Japanese American studies in Japan and the United States, Transpacific Japanese American Studies is conceived of as an engagement across national archives, literatures, and subject positions to excavate personal investments, epistemologies, and social contexts. Is it possible to achieve a truly equal exchange in a field that defines itself as “Japanese American” studies and in a conversation conducted mainly in the English language? All of the contributors to this volume were asked to consider those foundational questions, and most discussed their subjectivities and work over the course of several years in meetings held in Japan and the US. The outcome, Transpacific Japanese American Studies, is a candid, self-conscious appraisal of scholars and their subject positions and personal and political investments.

People outside and within colleges and universities often view these institutions as fair and reasonable, far removed from the inequalities that afflict society in general. Despite greater numbers of women, working class people, and people of color—as well as increased visibility for LGBTQ students and staff—over the past fifty years, universities remain “ivory towers” that perpetuate institutionalized forms of sexism, classism, racism, and homophobia. This book builds on the rich legacy of historical struggles to open universities to dissenting voices and oppressed groups. Each chapter is guided by a commitment to praxis—the idea that theoretical understandings of inequality must be applied to concrete strategies for change. The common misconception that racism, sexism, and homophobia no longer plague university life heightens the difficulty to dismantle the interlocking forms of oppression that undergird the ivory tower. The book demonstrates that women, LGBTQ people, and people of color continue to face bias and discrimination on campuses throughout the United States. Curriculum and pedagogy, evaluation of scholarship, and the processes of tenure and promotion are all laden with inequities both blatant and covert. The chapters critically examining personal and collective struggles, and they analyze antiracist, feminist, and queer approaches to teaching and mentoring, research and writing, academic culture and practices, growth and development of disciplines, campus activism, university–community partnerships, and confronting privilege. The book offers a proactive approach encompassing institutional and cultural changes that foster respect, inclusion, and transformation.

In 1854 Yung Wing, who graduated with a bachelor's degree from Yale University, returned to a poverty-stricken China, where domestic revolt and foreign invasion were shaking the Chinese empire. Inspired by the United States and its liberal education, Yung believed that having more Chinese students educated there was the only way to bring reform to China. Since then, generations of students from China—and other Asian countries—have embarked on this transpacific voyage in search of modernity. What forces have shaped Asian student migration to the United States? What impact do foreign students have on the formation of Asian America? How do we grasp the meaning of this transpacific subject in and out of Asian American history and culture? This book explores these questions in the crossings of Asian culture and American history. Beginning with the story of Yung Wing, the book is organized chronologically to show the transpacific character of Asian student migration. It examines Chinese students' writings in English and Chinese, maintaining that so-called “overseas student literature” represents both an imaginary passage to modernity and a transnational culture where meanings of Asian America are rearticulated through Chinese. It also demonstrates that Chinese student political activities in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s have important but less examined intersections with Asian America. In addition, the book offers a reflection on the development of Asian American studies in Asia to suggest the continuing significance of knowledge and movement in the formation of Asian America.