Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Born out of mid-century social movements, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection which considers the contemporary possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline.

Schlund-Vials Cathy :

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (UConn). She is the author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work.

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (UConn). She is the author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work.

Nguyen Viet Thanh :

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.Viet Thanh Nguyen (Afterword By)
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.

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (Edited By)
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (UConn). She is the author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work.

—Daryl Maeda:
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.

—Sunaina Maira:
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.