Book Recommendations for Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month
As Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month continues, we have book recommendations for you! Check out the six titles below, curated by Researcher Services Librarian David Michalski. All are available through the library. If you missed the AAPI resources shared by our Archives and Special Collections team earlier this month, find them here.
Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation by Rick Bonus and Antonio T. Tiongson
This volume brings together leading scholars to chart a reflective course through the complicated field of Filipinx American experience, arguing that the enduring impact of imperialism, labor extraction, and trauma that marks Filipinx American history, provides a critical perspective to analyze state power and its effect on contemporary social life.
Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton by Long T. Bui
Long T. Bui provides an historical overview of the racialization of Asians and Asian Americans as robots, tracing how its various iterations were born out of political and economic conflict and racial anxieties. Bui deconstructs this stereotype by showing its relation to other models of racialization, and by documenting resistance to it in the form of the cultural interventions and activism by Asian American artists.
Chinese Americans in the Heartland: Migration, Work and Community by Huping Ling
Recent demographic changes have made cities in the US midwest interesting sites for the study of Asian American experience. Huping Ling draws on diverse data and historical sources, as well as interviews and observations to craft a portrait of Asian American Chicago and St. Louis, one that challenges the stereotypical conceptions of both the midwest, and Asian American lives.
Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory by Linda Ho Peché, Alex-Thai Dinh Vo, and Tuong Vu
Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies brings together researchers whose work in Vietnamese American history and the Vietnam War pushes the frontiers of our knowledge beyond long-standing U.S.-centric scholarship. The essays historicize immigration within US imperialist objectives and helps develop a context to better understand how the Vietnamese American diaspora created its unique cultures, civic lives, and community formations.
Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 by Jeannie Natsuko Shinozuka
Biotic Borders focuses on US environmental policy reactions implemented to curb species migrations from Asia. It examines the context wherein officials chose chemical warfare over less destructive biological measures, showing how trans-pacific biological exchanges were configured as an Asiatic menace, one that not only proved formative in shaping the fields of invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology, but one that also transformed conceptions of race.
Immigrant Agency: Hmong American Movements and the Politics of Racialized Incorporation by Yang Sao Xiong
Yang Sao Xiong conducts a sociological study of Hmong American grassroots movements in the United States between the 1990s and 2000s to explain how Hmong Americans, despite being one of America’s most economically impoverished ethnic groups, were able to establish strong networks, develop political power, and have their interests represented in public policies.