Beginning with “Is Diversity for White People?,” Chang’s collection of essays is a thorough look at how racial inequity functions in America today. Through personal reflection, cultural analysis, and journalism, Chang tackles topics like Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and the whiteness of Hollywood. The last essay, “The In-Betweens: On Asian Americanness,” addresses the unique predicament of Asian Americans in this country, contextualizing it within the broader discourse of race in the U.S. Chang emphasizes the necessity of Asian American communities standing in solidarity with movements like BLM; as he states in an interview, “I think racial justice impacts us all, and now is not the time to be neutral.”

A mix of personal anecdotes, journalism, and legal analysis, Yellow offers an intersectional way of dissecting race beyond Black and white. Wu questions the absence of the Asian perspective in America’s discussion around race and touches on the complex ideas that have led to our understanding of Asian America via the model minority myth, perpetual foreigner stereotype, affirmation action, interracial marriage, and more.

We may think that jokes about cheap junk being “made in China” are a recent phenomenon. The truth is that this anxiety surrounding Asian influences, or “yellow peril,” has been around in Europe since the Enlightenment. Scholars Tchen and Yeats compile a comprehensive archive of “yellow peril” paraphernalia and offer critical insight into this Western paranoia, shedding new light on the structures of current-day anti-Asian sentiments.

An homage to W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic The Souls of Black Folk, Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk takes a look at the complexities of being South Asian in America. Prashad gives a complex analysis of the model minority myth, particularly as it is deployed against Black America. He takes a deeper look at both Indian and American history, tracing the ways in which Indian culture and thinkers have influenced American issues, and explores not only how South Asian American identity is defined, but also how Americans define and view themselves.

A radical look into the reality of walking through the world as an Asian American, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings weaves the personal with the political and brings the tough questions around race and identity to the table. The title phrase, “minor feelings” refers to the sense of American optimism that is often forced onto Asian Americans; consequently, Asian Americans often experience a cognitive dissonance that creates a sense of failure. Going beyond the theoretical, Hong grounds us in lived experiences that perhaps create more questions than answers, and opens the table for actual discussion.

Asian American Dreams looks into the time period when the Asian population in America grew and Asian American identity began to form. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Helen Zia was born in 1950s America when there were only 150,000 Chinese Americans in the country. From the murder of Vincent Chin to the LA Riots, this book is a historical and personal account of the events that have transformed Asian identity in America. Zia is also the author of Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution, a dramatic account of the real-life stories of those who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, when Zia’s family first left for the States.

Chia-Chia Lin’s debut novel The Unpassing tells the story of a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet in Anchorage, Alaska. Against the bleak and cold backdrop of Alaskan winter, ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, falls into a coma and wakes a week later to find out his little sister Ruby was infected and died. As grief envelops the family, we see the remaining five members of the family struggle to stay afloat, navigate marginalization and alienation, and search for a sense of belonging in a foreign land. What does it mean to lose the ones you love in a place that is not home? What does it mean when there is no home to return to?

No-No Boy received practically no public recognition upon its publication in 1957, when Americans wanted to leave behind the atrocities of WWII—including the Japanese American internment and the nuclear bomb. Thanks to the efforts of Asian American writers Jeff Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong who reissued the novel in 1976, No-No Boy is now recognized as a canonical Asian American text, one that deals head-on with the long history of anti-Asian racism. The protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, refuses to serve in the American army and pledge loyalty to the U.S., remembering how the same country forced him and his family into internment. Because of his “No”s, Ichiro is forced to go to prison; and finds himself the target of his community’s anger upon his return. Okada’s novel examines both the collective and individual trauma of racialized violence against Japanese Americans.

This wide-ranging novel centers on “I Hotel”—short for the International Hotel in San Francisco—as a way to explore the Yellow Power Movement in the ’60s. The Yellow Power Movement—started by UC Berkeley students who were inspired by the Black Power Movement—is credited with coining the term “Asian American”. I Hotel is meticulously researched, including memorabilia like pamphlets and news clippings from the era; it is also radical in experimentation as well as content, exploring with multimedia modes like comic strips. Yamashita poignantly conveys the historical struggle for Asian American rights, and the many shifting identities the term “Asian American” can encompass.

Set in both New York and China, The Leavers follows a Chinese American boy whose undocumented mother Polly vanishes one day. Deming Guo—later renamed Daniel Wilkinson by his white adoptive parents—is forced to reckon with what it means to be an “all-American” whose sense of belonging has vanished. What does it mean to belong? Does assimilation mean learning a new language, a new home, a new family, a new house, or a new name? And what happens to the person you used to be?

In Castillo’s debut novel, Hero De Vera moves from a politically turbulent Philippines to suburban San Jose. America is Not the Heart explores social inequity and racism amidst the Filipinx American community, as well as what it means to pursue the “American Dream.” Castillo also pays careful attention to the code-switching that often happens for immigrant families; her characters speak Spanish, Tagalog, Pangasinan, and Ilocano. The title nods to Carlos Bulosan’s groundbreaking novel from the 1970s, America is in the Heart, which describes a Filipino migrant worker’s experiences with brutal racism on a California farm. For more books on Filipinx America, check out Castillo’s reading list.

Bascara examines how multiculturalism and globalization work to manage alterity. Revisionist historical approaches occlude chapters in America’s history as an imperial power. Bascara posits, “Confrontation with difference is the sine qua non of empire; the management of alterity is fundamentally the project and the problem of imperialism. The American Oriental is a figure that embodies the burdens and hopes of empire.” He suggests that particular moments in Asian American cultural politics make American cultural imperialism visible and explores how that was possible. A key idea in this text is Bascara’s examination of the failure of American Reconstruction and the connection to American Empire – the ways in which America fails to incorporate the colored other into the fabric of the country. This is an important connection that may help me extend my comparison between Asians and African Americans.

Cheng employs Freud’s theory of melancholia as a framework for understanding racism in America. She asserts that racism operates like melancholia; there is not a complete rejection of the other, but a suspension of the other within the national framework. The racial other is consumed and denigrated in the national psyche. Fear and sympathy as well as brutality and idealization are projected upon the racial other. Cheng is interested in the psychology of the subject that has been cast as a “lost object” or “invisible.” Cheng studies the racialization of Asian Americans and African Americans as distinct but related processes. She sees African American studies as the most established discipline in the field of race studies. Asian American studies offer a “charged site where American nationhood invests much of its contradictions, desires, and anxieties” (21).

Chuh uses a poststructuralist approach to examining the field of Asian American studies. She points to the instability of terms “Asian” and “American.” She contends, “Asian American studies may be seen as a formation of the critical landscape configured by a (poststructural) problematization of referentiality, which facilitates (postmodern) jettisoning of the authority of the meta-narrative” (5). Chuh posits “Asian American studies as a subjectless discourse” (9). Asian-American discourse must be consistently critical of U.S. nationalism and its discourses of power. She argues that a particular failure of multiculturalism is the assumption that “ethnic literatures” should be read as “artifacts of an ethnography of the Other. Otherness, here, appears principally as an idea, one devoid of the contradictions and complexities that inscribe and describe people’s lives. Chuh’s chapter on Filipino Americans points out the “forgotten” place of Filipinos in Asian American Literature. Because of American Imperialism, it has been suggested that Filipino Identity was conceived as something that could be successfully civilized by Americans. Filipinos were seen as “childlike” and in need of American protection and civilization. In America, Filipino men were hypersexualized – as a threat to white women, but ironically also feminized within the walls of American society.

Eng and Han use Freud’s theory of melancholia as a framework to understand the process of assimilation in America, specifically the experiences of loss that Asians / Asian Americans accumulate in assimilating to white America. For Asian Americans, assimilation into the melting pot ideal of the popular American myth of immigration is impossible. They remain in a suspended, conflicted, and unresolved state. Historical exclusions of Asians such as immigration laws, miscegenation, and ownership of private property – are lost in a national amnesia that instead purports myths of the model minority stereotype. Eng and Han discuss the consequences of this social problem. Depression and the “splitting of the Asian American psyche . . . on the part of the Asian American subject, who knows and does not know, at once that she or he is part of the larger group” (348). The authors assert that Asian Americans must mimic the model minority stereotype in order to be recognized at all. This mimicry is both a partial success and partial failure to assimilate into whiteness. Eng and Han employ Bhabha’s theories on colonial mimicry to domestic contexts of racialization. They note the connection between his theories of mimicry and Freud’s use of ambivalence. Both mimicry and ambivalence acknowledge the conflicts of the subject: the idealization of the external object undermined by the aggression toward the same object. Eng and Han argue that the “process of assimilation is a negotiation between mourning and melancholia” (363) noting that the racialized subject experiences conflict rather than pathological damage. They argue for increased understanding of Asian American students at the university and support Asian American studies programs.

Lim et al. provide a useful survey of Asian American cultural production in the introduction. They posit that the Asian American experience is transmigratory, mobile, and often temporary due to their movement across and between borders (national, legal, linguistic, etc.) Asian American imagination does not share a unifying narrative like African American writing, nor does it share a unifying language like Latino-American literature; instead, Asian American ethnic identity is destabilized or blurred because of the different historical experiences, languages, and cultures categorized under this rubric. The book aims to examine how Asian Americanness is constructed: “’ Asian American’ is therefore above all a literary sign and an abstract signifier whose signified contents are so shiftable, provisional, and undecidable that attempts to contain them will always result in incomplete narratives” (4). The book is organized into three sections: 1) Canonical / Foundational prose texts such as Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, 2) Memoirs and Autobiographies, and 3) Emergent Poetic talents.

Lowe resists a Pan-Asian identity, rejects mimicry and homogeneity. She argues that the material reality of Asian Americans is an essential part of achieving justice as well as understanding the construction of Asian American identity. The “Asian immigrant” has been defined against the American citizen, often marginalized as the “yellow peril” threatening to displace European immigrants (4). Historically, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Asian Indians have been given a simulacrum of inclusiveness only when they are “domesticated” though always the “foreigner within” (5). Not quite “absorbed” into American sphere, AAs are the “model minority” that are at odds with the cultural, racial and linguistic forms of the nation. Chapter One outlines key historical periods and laws that overdetermined lives of AAs in America (exclusionary and at odds with democratic equality). Chapter Two offers a critique against the canonization of AA literature and marks the difference of AA as unique field of study that resists uniformity and silencing of the white, European canon.

Mullen’s fascinating work examines the political and ideological connections between African-Americans and Asians across several decades, beginning with DuBois’ imaginings and ideologies of an Afro-Asian connection. Mullen’s text helps ground my research in the examination of ideology of the other: what similarities and differences exist between the racialization of each group and how do they benefit from working together. This work, though, does not offer much help with formative analysis of literature though its most helpful pieces illuminate the psychological states and political projects of writers such as DuBois and Richard Wright. By making connections to Asian culture, DuBois imagined Asia operating as “fraternal twin” of African in a struggle to decolonize the modern world (xii). This dialectic relationship was a means to crush hierarchies of race within America. By continually expanding what seemed a “local” racial problem within America to a “global” problem of racism, DuBois found political mobilization. Mullen examines the parallels between the colonizing of Asia and Africa and the economic and political routes that each group has sought to achieve equality.

Said’s seminal work posits Orientalism as a European discourse that became a systematic discipline to manage and produce the orient politically, sociologically, scientifically, etc. The distribution of this geopolitical awareness is what authorized the domination and exploitation of the people in the Orient. The representations of the Orient work to legitimize European oppression. The binaries created by the Occident and the Orient are cast: “The Oriental is irrational, depaved (fallen), childlike, “different”; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal” (880). Said’s text supports my argument regarding the imposed subjectivities of Filipino and Indian characters who seek liberation from these constructs.

San Juan’s chapter four includes an important analysis of Hagedorn’s Gangster of Love. He suggests that the language of colonizer is abrogated and reappropriated for purpose of critique and transformation (106) in some Filipino texts. In this manner, the looks at the carnivalesque potential of English and how various forms of English or World Englishes; rejects universal “standard” of English. He suggests the causal novel of realism from 19^th century bourgeois Europe is blended with picaresque mode of feudal times (grotesque characters and sexual encounters in The Gangster of Love. The stylized fabrications suggest the emergence of new, future forms of life to escape the Yo-yo cycle/ return of the repressed (132). The reconstitution of family and identity rejects mainstream ideals (Rocky, Elvis, Keiko). He suggests that the novel mobilizes submerged energies of life towards national liberation; sexual and gender emancipation. Keiko represents the uneven development of a hybrid identity (135). Rocky represents a synthesizing trope of fragmented lives – a collective presence (not a hybrid but rejects systems of oppression).

Takaki’s work provides historical background of distinct Asian American groups, paying particular attention to the different ways in which each group was treated in America. He addresses the diversity within this group and claims, “We need to re-vision” history to include Asians in the history of America, and to do so in a broad and comparative way” (7). He examines the commodification of colored people. The waves of immigration are analyzed in the context of political movements, notably the post 1965 wave of Asians immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished national-origins quotas and provided for the “annual admission of 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere” (419). This wave of Asian immigrants was the most highly skilled of any immigrant group (420).