Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Emerging from mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points analogously serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection that considers–almost fifty years after its student protest founding--the possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline. Unequivocally, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies investigates the multivalent ways in which the field has at times and—more provocatively, has not—responded to various contemporary crises, particularly as they are manifest in prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic, and exclusionary politics at home, ever-expanding imperial and militarized practices abroad, and neoliberal practices in higher education.

Contributor: Viet Thanh Nguyen Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the short story collection, The Refugees. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Flashpoints for Asian American Studies offers an ambitious, bracing, and wide-ranging critique of Asian American studies by practitioners within the field. It calls for a wholesale reconsideration of how Asian American studies operates inside and outside universities; how it theorizes, selects, and defines its subjects and constituencies; and how it functions as an academic and political project. This volume presents a highly original reassessment from the inside of Asian American studies that is unparalleled in terms of its breadth and sustainment.---—Daryl Maeda, University of Colorado, Boulder --- This collection offers a bold and timely discussion of key debates in Asian American studies provoked by the institutionalization of Asian American studies in the neoliberal university. In a context of budget crises and also persistence of anti-Asian racism, the essays by a diverse group of scholars offer frank, sometimes autobiographical, reflections from the trenches about questions of incorporation, diversity management, interracial solidarity, public scholarship, and survival. This is a book I have been waiting to read, especially in the era of and Black Lives Matter and BDS activism and with Trump’s election, as it offers important lessons for faculty, administrators, and students about how Asian American studies can resist the logics of multiculturalism and austerity.---—Sunaina Maira, University of California, Davis