Becoming Bilingual, or Notes on Numbness and Feeling

Nguyen, who was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2016), unwaveringly and unabashedly deconstructs how Asian American studies has become professionalized and entrenched, and in that sense, has both succeeded and failed.

What Is Passed On (Or, Why We Need Sweetened Condensed Milk for the Soul)

Dialogically fixed to the previous chapter, “On Asian/American Memory, Illness, and Passing” engages the personal as a means of reflecting upon the political. In particular, Worrall-Soriano—whose recently published cancer memoir, What Doesn’t Kill Us (2014) has received much critical acclaim—reflects upon how the field of Asian American studies, notwithstanding its preoccupations with state-authorized conflict and trauma, has historically failed to deal with widespread stigmatizations involving illness. Worrall-Soriano maps these omissions via a creative non-fiction exploration of her familial past; such forays, which assume the form of intergenerational palimpsest, bring to light the degree to which Asian American studies remains—in the face of teleology and despite critical movement—a post-traumatic stressed engagement.

Buddhist Meditation as Strategic Embodiment: An Optative Reflection

Chapter 15 seriously scrutinizes the relationship of Buddhism, “one of America’s racialized other religious darlings,” to Asian American studies, which has yet to consistently recognize religion as a legitimate site upon which to map race, gender, and sexuality. Suh argues that “the common Buddhist units of measure and authenticity” —for instance, Orientalized monks and Eastern meditation— “are uncritically reproduced in larger Asian American discourses that continue to overlook the non-devotional and non-meditative practices of Buddhist laity.” Suh’s essay counters those discourses by engendering a new way of seeing meditation politics as a means of ameliorating bodily alienation and internalized white supremacy.

Transpacific Entanglements

Concentrated on U.S. militarization, U.S. war-making, and militarized refugees, this chapter contemplates the multivalent entanglements and interweavings that are part and parcel of U.S. empire over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Outsourcing, Terror, and Transnational South Asia

In dialogue with the previous chapter, Nadkarni examines the ways in which South Asian subjectivity and racial formation lay bare the polemics of contemporary economic discourse (specifically with regard to outsourcing), present-day War on Terror racializations, and postcolonial/neo-colonial registers.

No Muslims Involved: Letter to Ethnic Studies Comrades

This chapter considers the ways in which Muslim Americans and subjectivity have been—from the outset—integral to Ethnic Studies as a distinct political, racial, and identarian project.

The Racial Studies Project: Asian American Studies and the Black Lives Matter Campus

Situated adjacent to present-day student protests calling for more diversity with regard to program, department, and faculty hiring, Sharma recounts the contested formation of Asian American studies at her home institution, Northwestern Univversity.

Five Decades Later: Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned Poet

Uyematsu considers the past/present/future applications of the Asian American movement and activism via a reflection on her foundational essay, “The Emergence of Yellow Power.”

Crisis, Conundrum, and Critique

The introduction provides a historical context for the project (which spans mid-century student activist movements and more recent debates involving Asian American activism and racial formation). The introduction also provides overviews for each of the three sections and the chapters contained therein.

Planned Obsolescence, Strategic Resistance: Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Neoliberal University

This chapter takes as a starting point the ways in which Ethnic Studies, as university/institutional initiative, was rendered precarious from the outset via joint appointments, soft funding lines, and non-binding budget commitments. The chapter then shifts to a reading of neoliberal university logics and provides strategies to subvert disciplinary “obsolescence” via a turn to critical/comparative Asian/Asian American studies.