Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Ethnic Studies - American - Asian American Studies & Pacific Islander Studi

Harbin of the 1920s was viewed by Westerners as a world turned upside down. The Chinese government had taken over administration of the Russian-founded Chinese Eastern Railway concession, and its large Russian population. This account of the decade-long multi-ethnic and multinational administrative experiment in North Manchuria reveals that China not only created policies to promote Chinese sovereignty but also instituted measures to protect the Russian minority. This multi-faceted book is a historical examination of how an ethnic, cultural, and racial majority coexisted with a minority of...

Relative Histories focuses on the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of auto/biography concentrates as much on other members of one's family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases--as Rocio G. Davis proposes for the auto/biographies of ethnic writers--crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory. Davis centers on how Asian American family memoirs expand the limits and function of life writing by...

This beautiful and poignant biography of Issei artist Kamekichi Tokita uses his paintings and wartime diary to vividly illustrate the experiences, uncertainties, joys, and anxieties of Japanese Americans during the World War II internment and the more optimistic times that preceded it. Tokita emigrated from Japan in the early twentieth century and settled in Seattle's Japanese American immigrant community. By the 1930s, he was established as a prominent member of the Northwest art scene and allied with the region's progressive artists. His art shares qualities of American Realism while it...

Farmers in Laos, U.S. allies during the Vietnam War, refugees in Thailand, citizens of the Western world the stories of the Hmong who now live in America have been told in detail through books and articles and oral histories over the past several decades. Like any immigrant group, members of the first generation may yearn for the past as they watch their children and grandchildren find their way in the dominant culture of their new home. For Hmong people born and educated in the United States, a definition of self often includes traditional practices and tight-knit family groups but also a...

Depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies. Hollywood has made clear that Asian American men lack the qualities inherent to the heroic heterosexual male. This restricting, circumscribed vision of masculinity--a straitjacketing, according to author Celine Parrenas Shimizu--aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen.

Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies looks to cinematic history to reveal the dynamic ways Asian American men, from Bruce Lee to Long Duk Dong, create and claim a...