Global Asian American Popular Cultures

A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media.

Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints—such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce—have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of “Asian” and “Asian American” are counterbalanced within global popular culture.

Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering new and critical analyses of popular cultures that account for emerging textual fields, global producers, technologies of distribution, and trans-medial circulation, this ground-breaking collectionexplores the mainstream and the margins of popular culture.

Shilpa Davé is Assistant Professor of Media and American Studies and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.Nishime LeiLani :

LeiLani Nishime is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington.Oren Tasha :

Tasha Oren is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Anita Mannur,co-editor of Eating Asian America:
A welcome and necessary book, Global Asian American Popular Cultures is nothing short of impressive. Working at the very cutting edge of contemporary Asian American cultural studies, the essays collected here are thoughtful and innovative and represent some of the most incisive voices in Asian American studies. An invaluable toolkit for a new generation of thinkers interested in how to do Asian American cultural critique.

Cynthia Wang, California State University, Los Angeles:
In a world of increased transnational flows of media, information, and bodies,Global Asian American Popular Culturesis a highly welcome addition to scholarship that is increasingly considering the ways in which Asian America participates in a globalized perspective of identity and culture....With the repeated erasure of Asian American experiences both domestically and globally, the essays in this collection do crucial work in teasing out the ways in which Asian Americans negotiate their position within racialized power structures through their own creative works, mainstream media representation, engagement with their communities, their own familial experiences, and the relatively new digital landscape....This volume opens up conversations about the ways in which Asian American identities cross national borders through transnational flows of culture, thereby infusing the field of Asian American studies with a breath of fresh air.