Celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase our Asian American Studies titles for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Readers can get 30% these books with the code TAAAS22 at checkout through our shopping cart.

Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities, by erin Khuê Ninh, asks, How does it feel to be model minority—and why would that drive one to live a lie? “As an Asian American daughter of immigrants, reading Passing for Perfect, I felt my life understood. erin Khuê Ninh has explained our plight—the mad scramble for refuge, the guilt over our parents’ sacrifices, and our trust that education will save us. This book will give us strength against the attackers who blame us for what’s wrong with America. We shall overcome violence with knowledge.”—Maxine Hong Kingston Read more here

Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, by Long T. Bui, presents a study of the stereotype and representation of Asians as robotic machines through history. “In this powerful and indispensable historiography, Long Bui puts to rest any lingering doubt about the pernicious pervasiveness of the model machine myth that has long cast Asians as technologized nonhumans in American cultural and economic histories…. Bui provides rigorous analyses of the implications and damages of the myth as well as bold provocations for interventions and change.”—Betsy Huang, Associate Professor of English and Dean of the College at Clark University Read more here

Pedagogies of WoundednessIllness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority, by James Kyung-Jin Lee considers what happens when illness betrays Asian American fantasies of indefinite progress? “In this powerful and indispensable hist“James Kyung-Jin Lee’s Pedagogies of Woundedness is a poignant and moving work of criticism about illness and mortality. Beginning with a remarkable connection between the seeming invulnerability of Asian Americans as a model minority and their prevalence in the medical profession, Lee proceeds to explore the many ways that Asian Americans have written about bodies, health, and death. One comes away from his insights wiser and braver about what we all must face.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, University Professor at the University of Southern California, and author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Read more here

CULTURAL STUDIES

Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media: Civic Engagement, Contested Issues, and Emerging Identities, by James S. Lai, examines how social media has changed the way Asian Americans participate in politics. “Lai’s timely book provides a nuanced analysis of the ideological and other divisions among Asian Americans, scrupulously refusing to homogenize or essentialize them.”—Claire Jean Kim, Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine Read more here

Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, by Elora Halim Chowdhury, illuminates how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can generate possibilities for gender justice. “This book enables a timely understanding of contemporary Bangladesh through the cinematic lens of 1971.”—Nayanika Mookherjee, Professor of Political Anthropology at Durham University, UK Read more here

Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano, explores transnational giving practices as political projects that shape the Filipino diaspora. “Giving Back is a compelling ethnography about the politics of diaspora giving, tying the personal, the family, the community, the state, and the global in a critical stroke of brilliance, empathy, and alternative visions of philanthropy and volunteerism in the lives of Filipinos in America….Mariano’s critical examination of the politics of diaspora giving is a must-read for Filipinos and anyone participating in transnational philanthropy.”—Pacific Historical Review Read more here

Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique, by Crystal Mun-hye Baik, examines the insidious ramifications of the un-ended Korean War through an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works.  “Crystal Baik’s Reencounters offers a vital archive of desire, violence, silence, and decolonial possibility while crafting a much-needed critical framework for thinking and feeling through the diasporic memory work of contemporary Korean/American artists and cultural producers.”—Eleana Kim, University of California, Irvine Read more here

BIOGRAPHY

Prisoner of Wars: A Hmong Fighter Pilot’s Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life, by Chia Youyee Vang, with Pao Yang, Retired Captain, U.S. Secret War in Laos, recounts the life of Pao Yang, whose experiences defy conventional accounts of the Vietnam War. “It is rare to read personal accounts from those who fought as surrogate soldiers of the American Armed Forces in Laos and to hear about the experiences of our T-28 pilots, because so many of them were killed during the war. Vang did a wonderful job of capturing the experiences of Pao Yang, one of the Hmong T-28 pilots who was shot down and captured by the communists. I will definitely use this book as a requirement for my Introduction to Hmong History class.”—Lee Pao Xiong, Director and Professor of the Center for Hmong and East Asian Studies, Concordia University Read more here

Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood, by George Uba, is an evocative yet unsparing examination of the damaging effects of post-internment ideologies of acceptance and belonging experienced by a Japanese American family. “This is a lovely addition to the rich literature somehow created out of a moment in history where an entire generation of Japanese Americans had every dream they’d ever had taken from them, all at once.”—Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery Medal– and National Book Award–winning author of Kira-Kira and The Thing about Luck Read more here

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration, by Rachel Schreiber, recounts the remarkable story of a Jewish activist who joined her incarcerated Japanese American husband and son in an American concentration camp.   “Rachel Schreiber, an expert on Jewish women labor activists, presents a highly useful biographical sketch of an important figure in Elaine Black Yoneda. Avoiding the extremes of mythologizing or demonizing her subject, she offers a balanced account that historians specializing in women’s history, labor history, and Japanese American history will heartily welcome to the scholarly works in these areas of inquiry.“—Brian Hayashi, Professor of History at Kent State University Read more here

LITERARY STUDIES

Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War, by Joo Ok Kim, examines the racial legacies of the Korean War through Chicano/a cultural production and U.S. archives of white supremacy. “Crucially, Kim’s juxtaposition and brilliant analysis of unlikely archival materials and cultural texts make an original and exceedingly important contribution to our understandings of the links between the Korean War and U.S. racial, carceral, and settler colonial formations. This is a rigorous and impressive interdisciplinary cultural study.”—Jodi Kim, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside Read more here

Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America, Edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Alice Y. Hom, and Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Preface by David L. Eng, offers a vibrant array of scholarly and personal essays, poetry, and visual art that broaden ideas and experiences about contemporary LGBTQ Asian North America “[T]hese voices from queer Asian North America attest to the brilliance, fierceness, and raucous pleasures of queer diasporic world-making, theorizing, and cultural production. A landmark achievement.”—Gayatri Gopinath, Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University Read more here

Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures, by Erin Suzuki, compares and contrasts the diverse experiences of Asian and Pacific Islander subjectivities across a shared sea. “Ocean Passages demonstrates how transpacific studies can evolve and continue to be a generative framing for counterhegemonic, decolonial research across disciplines.” —Lateral Read more here

Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas, by Quynh Nhu Le, illuminates the intersecting logics of settler colonialism and racialization through analysis of contemporary Asian and Indigenous crossings in the Américas. Association for Asian American Studies’ Humanities and Cultural Studies: Literary Studies Book Award, 2021 Read more here

Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora, by Kavita Daiya, examines “what remains” in migration stories surrounding the 1947 Partition of India. “Daiya’swide scholarly purview ranges across literature, cinema, graphic novels, and the creative arts, as she assembles a rich archive of contemporary reflection and critical relevance.”— Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University Read more here

Following Artists into Orphaned Space

This week in North Philly Notes, Mrill Ingram, author of Loving Orphaned Space, writes about providing a new vision for the ignored and abused spaces around us.

Recently I had the opportunity to launch my new book, Loving Orphaned Space, the art and science of belonging to Earth, at a Madison, Wisconsin based community arts organization called Art + Literature Laboratory. I was really pleased to be able to celebrate the book at a center dedicated to expanding community participation and access to the arts. The book is rooted in research I pursued on art-science collaboration, which revealed to me a new perspective on how we sideline the arts as an optional, even leisure pursuit. I’ve learned how the arts can assist all of us in navigating the everyday and imagining and enacting a better future. It’s also provided a powerful new perspective for my writing on the environment. Because so many of us don’t experience the power art can play, we often don’t recognize what we are missing. Sharing that insight was one of the reasons I wrote my book.

Following artists around is likely to pull a person out of their comfort zone. It certainly has done so for me. For example, in my writing, I am compelled to center emotional impulses and images I might have previously sidelined. The roots of this book lie in what began as a very personal preoccupation with the scattered bits of open space so many of us are surrounded by, much of it dedicated to infrastructure and often abused. Why did I care about these spaces? Why did I want to know more about each one of them? By following artists (literally) as they venture into such spaces, occupying them in a variety of ways, my personal, individual feelings expanded into something more social, that involved feelings of belonging and connectedness, respect, and responsibility, as well as delight and surprise. Wow! All that in a street terrace!

In the book I describe the energy and the politics of keeping infrastructure spaces such as drainages, stormwater basins, abandoned gas stations, right of ways, so policed and “empty.” It is an active process, an “orphaning” that quite literally, disappears space by keeping ecological and social relationships simple. This takes physical effort – I’m talking about fencing, channelizing, lighting, herbiciding, and cementing. Brownfields are orphaned by the toxicity of pollutants they are storing. I want us to think about what this purposeful disciplining of space costs us. I’m also talking about a psychic erasure. We literally do not recognize this space as Earth. Our culture normalizes so much land as a commodity, something anonymous, bought and sold, and with infinite possible futures but no history.

Open space is an enormous amount of territory, representing some 25% to over 40% of land in many cities. This is true around the world, as cities expand, and shrink, at different rates than their populations shift. In the wake of the pandemic, this kind of territory is being increasingly seen as a “solution” to problems like polluted stormwater, flooding, urban heat islands, lack of green space in neighborhoods. But I think there’s more here. I see these as spaces of struggle. Their distribution is deeply influenced by histories of racism and discrimination. Through my work with artists, I came to understand such spaces as portals through which people like me, our privilege revealed by how easily we disappear all this space, can catch a glimpse of important history and relationships and recognize potential for action.

I share stories of artists who’ve helped me to see this disappeared space in new ways, but also present a general framework to help us appreciate the work of art in building new connections and producing new results. I argue that the arts, by engaging with science and technologies of infrastructure in new ways, can transform those processes, shifting the purpose and the outcomes of technical endeavors for new benefits and ends, including ways to address inequities. In the book, I describe discoveries in phytoremediation, a process by which plants help dismantle soil pollutants, produced by a Chicago based artist, and a new model for capturing dirty water running off roofs and parking lots. I also celebrate ways in which artists build unconventional relationships, including with nonhuman beings, that can free us up to realize new projects and to experience and feel in new ways. I write about this kind of expansive and emergent relationship building as artists’ “diplomacy,” a term inspired by Isabelle Stengers.

It took me a while to put many of these pieces together in a way that felt coherent enough to deserve a book. In some ways the process of “loving” orphaned space is just beginning for me. I see them anew every day. In preparing for the talk at the book launch, for example, I looked at an image of open space distribution in St. Paul, Minnesota. For the first time, I put together the lack of open space in what is a very open city, with the I-90 corridor, which, when built in the 1960s, obliterated parts of a thriving predominantly Black neighborhood. Many businesses were lost and 1 in every 8 Black households in Minneapolis lost a home. The neighborhood lives on, still rich, but adjacent to a thundering expressway with the health threats, disconnectedness, and loss of property values that freeways bring.

This kind of recognition is the opening of the orphaned space portal. To venture in, and to occupy, involves many skills I learned from artists. They are certainly not the only ones doing this work, nor should they be. But for me, they’ve enabled me to shift my perspective on the land around me. They’ve provided me with examples of how careful listening, telling stories, and building relationships inside and out, can connect humans to each other and to other beings in new ways that transcend notions of a functioning system and enter the realm of loving.

Listen Up! Temple University Press Podcast, Episode 5: Jennifer Lin, author of Beethoven in Beijing

This week in North Philly Notes, we debut the latest episode of the Temple University Press Podcast, host Sam Cohn interviews author Jennifer Lin about her book, Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s History Journey to China, which provides an eye-opening account of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s unprecedented 1973 tour. A companion volume to Lin’s documentary of the same name, this photo-rich oral history takes readers to the People’s Republic of China during the time when Western music was banned.

The Temple University Press Podcast is where you can hear about all the books you’ll want to read next.

Click here to listen

The Temple University Press Podcast is available wherever you find your podcasts, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Overcast, among other outlets.

About this episode

Eugene Ormandy was the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1971 when ping pong diplomacy was starting to thaw U.S.-China relations. (An American table tennis team was invited to Beijing—the first American group of any kind asked to visit mainland China since 1949). Wondering about the possibility of having the Orchestra visit, Ormandy’s idea soon became a reality with some assistance from the White House, and President Richard Nixon, and National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, among others. In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra embarked on a 10-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai to perform a series of concerts. This historic event is retold in Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing, which recounts this remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange.

What Representations of Disability Add to Postcolonial Literature

This week in North Philly Notes, Christopher Krentz, author of Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, writes about the significance and utility of disabled characters in novels from the Global South.

About two decades ago, the scholar Ato Quayson noted that postcolonial literature is full of disabled characters, an intriguing insight that sent me searching for examples. Among those I quickly found:

• In Chinua Achebe’s classic novel about Nigeria, Things Fall Apart (1958), the Igbo clan’s formidable war medicine is associated with a one-legged woman;
• A partially deaf, cracking, impaired character narrates Salman Rushdie’s Booker-Prize-winning Midnight’s Children (1981); incredibly, he connects telepathically with other children born in the first hour of India’s independence;
• Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) focuses on a cognitively disabled man of color who traverses through a war-torn South Africa and is beset by hunger;
• Edwidge Danticat’s story “Caroline’s Wedding,” from her collection Krik? Krak! (1996) tells of a beloved Haitian-American sister in New York City who has a missing forearm;
• Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) recounts how an ungainly disabled daughter in small-town India is largely kept out of sight by her upper-middle-class family;
• In Chris Abani’s short novel Song for Night (2007), the narrator is a boy soldier in a war in Nigeria who has had his vocal cords severed and communicates with others through an improvised sign language;
• The narrator of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) is an exuberant boy in India who has a bent spine and goes around on all fours as a result of a chemical plant disaster;
• The story in Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015) is related by an albino woman in Zimbabwe who encounters both intense stigma rooted in traditional metaphysical beliefs and unexpected kindness.

And there are so many more examples! 

The examples made me realize that, far from being incidental, disabled characters are integral to the energy and vitality of literature in English from the Global South. These are great stories, and part of their greatness is how writers repeatedly deploy disability in creative, original ways. Through figures of disability, authors make any number of pressing topics more vivid, including such issues as the effects of colonialism and apartheid, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster. 

Furthermore, even at their most fantastic, such representations relate to the more than half a billion disabled people who live in the Global South, often in precarious circumstances. Disabled character can be both realistic and metaphorical.

In 2006, a few years after Quayson’s observation, the United Nations adopted its first human rights treaty of the twenty-first century: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). I began to wonder if the prominence of disability in postcolonial literature should be linked to the gradual and global emergence of rights for disabled people—especially since both happened concurrently in the last half century or so. The representation of disabled people in this literature, I concluded, both directed and reflected this change in how disabled people are seen. 

In the last fifteen years, a new interdisciplinary field, the study of human rights and literature, has drawn connections and examined relations between fiction and human rights issues. As Joseph Slaughter puts it in Human Rights Inc., fiction—especially the bildungsroman in his case—is uniquely about rights as it typically serves to portray the relationship of an individual to society. Scholars in the field have used literature to explore the paradoxes surrounding human rights. Most of all, they show that literature can serve as a valuable form of witnessing human rights violations, making such issues more personal to readers in different times and places and compelling them to care. The first step in achieving rights, advocates realized back in the 1960s, is not laws or treaties but rather winning the public’s imagination.

While the study of human rights and literature has frequently dealt with postcolonial literature, it has not had much to say about disability. I hope Elusive Kinship can begin to fill that lacuna, enhancing our appreciation of literature in English from the Global South and nudging us toward making the world more hospitable for everyone.