Best Asian American Studies Books
Here you will get Best Asian American Studies Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Author: by Cathy Park Hong
English
224 pages
1984820389
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousnessBrilliant … To read this book is to become more human. Claudia Rankine, author of CitizenIn development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America.
Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocativeand its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
2. See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
Author: by Valarie Kaur
One World
English
416 pages
An urgent manifesto and a dramatic memoir of awakening, this is the story of revolutionary love. In a world stricken with fear and turmoil, Valarie Kaur shows us how to summon our deepest wisdom. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love How do we love in a time of rage?
How do we fix a broken world while not breaking ourselves? Valarie Kaurrenowned Sikh activist, filmmaker, and civil rights lawyerdescribes revolutionary love as the call of our time, a radical, joyful practice that extends in three directions: to others, to our opponents, and to ourselves.
It enjoins us to see no stranger but instead look at others and say: You are part of me I do not yet know. Starting from that place of wonder, the world begins to change: It is a practice that can transform a relationship, a community, a culture, even a nation.
Kaur takes readers through her own riveting journeyas a brown girl growing up in California farmland finding her place in the world; as a young adult galvanized by the murders of Sikhs after 9/11; as a law student fighting injustices in American prisons and on Guantnamo Bay; as an activist working with communities recovering from xenophobic attacks; and as a woman trying to heal from her own experiences with police violence and sexual assault.
3. The Making of Asian America: A History
Author: by Erika Lee
1476739412
Simon & Schuster
English
A comprehensivefascinating (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on the subject, with a new afterword about the recent hate crimes against Asian Americans.
In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. In her sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States (Huffington Post).
The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both despised minorities and model minorities, revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country.
4. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Author: by Barbara Demick
Random House
English
336 pages
An eye-opening account of life inside North Koreaa closed world of increasing global importancehailed as a tour de force of meticulous reporting (The New York Review of Books) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen yearsa chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime todayan Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life.
She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them.
5. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Author: by Amy Chua
Penguin Books
English
256 pages
Courageous and thought-provoking. David Brooks, The New York TimesBreathtakingly personal … [Chua’s] tale is as compelling as a good thriller. The Financial Times”[F]ascinating…. The most stimulating book on the subject of child rearing since Dr. Spock.” Seattle Post-IntelligencerChua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is a quick, easy read.
It’s smart, funny, honest and a little heartbreaking … Chicago Sun-Times At once provocative and laugh-out-loud funny, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ignited a global parenting debate with its story of one mother’s journey in strict parenting. Amy Chua argues that Western parenting tries to respect and nurture children’s individuality, while Chinese parents typically believe that arming children with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence prepares them best for the future.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chua’s iron-willed decision to raise her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, the Chinese way and the remarkable, sometimes heartbreaking results her choice inspires. Achingly honest and profoundly challenging, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is one of the most talked-about books of our times.
6. No-No Boy (Classics of Asian American Literature)
Author: by John Okada
English
232 pages
0295994045
“No-No Boy has the honor of being among the first of what has become an entire literary canon of Asian American literature,” writes novelist Ruth Ozeki in her new foreword. First published in 1957, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them.
It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel’s importance and popularized it as one of literature’s most powerful testaments to the Asian American experience. No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life “no-no boys.” Yamada answered “no” twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States.
Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle. As Ozeki writes, Ichiro’s “obsessive, tormented” voice subverts Japanese postwar “model-minority” stereotypes, showing a fractured community and one man’s “threnody of guilt, rage, and blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world.”The first edition of No-No Boy since 1979 presents this important work to new generations of readers.
7. The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
Author: by Patrick Radden Keefe
Anchor
English
414 pages
In this thrilling panorama of real-life events, Patrick Radden Keefe investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown managed a multi-million dollar business smuggling people.
Keefe reveals the inner workings of Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them.
Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.
8. The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America
Author: by Bradford Pearson
English
400 pages
1982107030
The impeccably researched, deeply moving, never-before-told tale about a World War II incarceration camp in Wyoming and its extraordinary high school football teamfor fans of The Boys in the Boat and The Storm on Our Shores. In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West.
Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, many established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits.
Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectatorsyet there was little hope. That is, until the fall of 1943, when the camp’s high school football team, the Eagles, started its first season and finished it undefeated, crushing the competition from nearby, predominantly white high schools.
9. America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States
Author: by Erika Lee
English
480 pages
1541672615
This definitive history of American xenophobia is “essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society” (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist). The United States is known as a nation of immigrants.
But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era.
Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their “strange and foreign ways.” Americans’ anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America.
Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an epilogue reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.
10. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities
Author: by Craig Steven Wilder
Bloomsbury Publishing
English
432 pages
A groundbreaking exploration of the intertwined histories of slavery, racism, and higher education in America, from a leading African American historian. A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution’s complex and contested involvement in slavery-setting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country.
But Brown’s troubling past was far from unique. In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy. Many of America’s revered colleges and universities-from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC-were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color.
Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them.
11. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (American Poets Continuum)
Author: by Lucille Clifton
1934414905
BOA Editions Ltd.
English
Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry”The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years.”-Publishers Weekly”All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it.”-Publishers Weekly”If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it.”NPR”The ‘Collected Clifton’ is a gift, not just for her fans…
But for all of us.”-The Washington Post”The love readers feel for Lucille Cliftonboth the woman and her poetryis constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness.”Toni Morrison, from the ForewordThe Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 19652010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton’s published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems.
The unpublished poems feature early poems from 19651969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prizewinning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton’s lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet’s career.
12. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaii
Author: by Candace Fujikane
University of Hawaii Press
English
336 pages
Asian Settler Colonialism is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawaii. Contributors from various fields and disciplines investigate aspects of Asian settler colonialism to illustrate its diverse operations and impact on Native Hawaiians. Essays range from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S.
Military to critiques of Asian settlers’ claims to Hawaii in literature and the visual arts.
13. Citizen 13660 (Classics of Asian American Literature)
Author: by Mine Okubo
English
240 pages
0295993545
Mine Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese descent – nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens – who were forced into “protective custody” shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, Okubo’s graphic memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, illuminates this experience with poignant illustrations and witty, candid text.
Now available with a new introduction by Christine Hong and in a wide-format artist edition, this graphic novel can reach a new generation of readers and scholars. Read more about Mine Okubo in Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef.
14. On Gold Mountain
Author: by Lisa See
Vintage (February 7, 2012)
English
402 pages
In 1867, Lisa See’s great-great-grandfather arrived in America, where he prescribed herbal remedies to immigrant laborers who were treated little better than slaves. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws prohibiting interracial marriage.
Lisa herself grew up playing in her family’s antiques store in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, listening to stories of missionaries and prostitutes, movie stars and Chinese baseball teams. With these stories and her own years of research, Lisa See chronicles the one-hundred-year-odyssey of her Chinese-American family, a history that encompasses racism, romance, secret marriages, entrepreneurial genius, and much more, as two distinctly different cultures meet in a new world.
15. Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard (American Lives)
Author: by Fan Shen
English
282 pages
0803293364
In 1966 twelve-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China’s Cultural Revolution. Disillusion soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he’d helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored.
A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen’s Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man’s harrowing experience during a time of terror. It is also, in spite of circumstances of remarkable grimness and injustice, an unlikely picaresque tale of adventure full of courage, cunning, wit, tenacity, resourcefulness, and sheer luckthe story of how Shen managed to scheme his way through a hugely oppressive system and emerge triumphant.
Gang of One recounts how Shen escaped, again and again, from his appointed fate, as when he somehow found himself a doctor at sixteen and even, miraculously, saved a few lives. In such volatile times, however, good luck could quickly turn to misfortune: a transfer to the East Wind Aircraft Factory got him out of the countryside and into another terrible trap, where many people were driven to suicide; his secret self-education took him from the factory to college, where friendship with an American teacher earned him the wrath of the secret police.
16. Not Yo' Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution (Volume 60) (American Crossroads)
Author: by Nobuko Miyamoto
English
344 pages
0520380657
A mold-breaking memoir of Asian American identity, political activism, community, and purpose. Not Yo’ Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamotoartist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art.
Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sandconsidered to be the first Asian American folk album.
Her narrative intersects with the stories of Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riotsand how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation.
