Red Threads

Summer 2013 Annual CAAS NewsletterAsian American Studie

Red Threads

Summer 2008 Annual CAAS NewsletterAsian American Studie

Proceedings of the 2015 Asian American/Pacific Islander Nurses Association conference: Biological measures: A role in nursing self-management research

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Negotiating New Asian American Masculinities: Attitudes and Gender Expectations

The article examines how Asian-American men construct their own masculinities. Changes in Asian-American heterosexual masculinity are of great interest within the Asia-American communities and to the general public. Historically this racialized masculinity was both hypermasculanized and desexualized as a way to limit economic and racial opportunities in the U.S. While these dichotomous ideas about Asian-American masculinities are still pervasive new articulations of what it means to be male, straight, and Asian American are affecting different Asian-American communities and interpersonal relationships at home and in workplaces. Issues of Asian- American masculinities are brought up in relation to interracial dating and marriage, expectations about supporting the family and community, sexual violence within the home and sexual harassment in public spaces, racial violence stemming from economic scapegoating and white supremacist ideology, mass media portrayals of Asian-American men, and complexities about ethnic identity and politics

Displacing and Disrupting: A Dialogue on Hmong Studies and Asian American Studies

This article summarizes a roundtable discussion of scholars that took place at the Association for Asian American Studies Conference in San Francisco, 2014. Hailing from various academic disciplines, the participants explored the relationship between the emerging field of Hmong/Hmong American Studies and Asian American Studies. Questions of interest included: In what ways has Asian American Studies informed Hmong/Hmong American Studies, or failed to do so? In what ways does Hmong/Hmong American Studies enrich/challenge Asian American Studies? What are the tensions between these two fields and other related fields? How do/should the new programs in Hmong/Hmong American Studies relate to the existing Asian American Studies programs regarding curriculum, activism and/or resource allocation

[Review of] Rachel C. Lee. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation

Rachel C. Lee acknowledges that understanding Asian American experiences merits the study of transglobal migrations of persons and capital. Rather than criticize this scholarly trend in Asian American studies (and, I would add, in ethnic studies more broadly), Lee integrates into them a greater attention to gender. Like much of historical and social scholarship, works on the Asian American diaspora tend to neglect gender. By examining how gender figures into the various ways in which four Asian American writers imagine America, Lee reminds us that gender, like race, always matters

The Legibility of Asian American Activism Studies

This essay examines “Asian American Activism studies” and asks:  What changes through the legibility of Asian American activism studies?  What does Asian American activism research uniquely offer?  We offer a historiographical analysis examining topical themes as well as theoretical and methodological interventions across time.  We provide an overview of the articles in this special issue.  We discuss future directions, attending to the ways that research on activism remains surprisingly sparse in certain major areas within Asian American studies as well as to the ways that particular trends within the field are anticipated to shape activism studies

American Orientalism and Cosmopolitan Mixed Race: Early Asian American Mixed Race in the American Literary Imagination

This paper offers and initial examination of representations of Asian American mixed race during the long period of Asian exclusion and enforced anti-miscegenation when racial mixing was legally proscribed. I argue that this literature must be understood through two categories Orientalist texts that produce and reproduce dominant discourses about Asian American mixed race and cosmopolitan texts written by mixed-race figures circling in vanguard cliques of art and literature. After tracking the representations of early Asian American mixed race in U.S. literature, this paper offers an analysis of the writing of Asian American mixed-race authors themselves in order to expand and push current theorizations

Play(ing) in the Pear Garden: Theater and the Makings of the Asian American Identity

The article is a brief recollection of Asian American theater in the twentieth century, concerning the playwrights, actors, directors, and productions that reflect the struggle of Asian American identity

The Abrahamic Pilgrimage Story in Sermons: An Ontological-Narrative Foundation of Asian American Life in Faith

Sang Hyun Lee and many other Asian American scholars have found that the Abrahamic pilgrimage story has been an ontological-narrative backbone of Asian American faith constructs. This article further explores their previous research by suggesting three distinct theological narrative styles of the given Abrahamic pilgrimage saga: the allegorical- typological narrative style, the illustrative narrative style, and the eschatologicalsymbolic narrative style. However, though distinct, the styles are closely associated with one another. I will show sermon excerpts by Asian American preachers that are good examples of the theological-spiritual embodiment of the three styles