[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

[Review of] Carl Gutierrez-Jones. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse

In this ambitious book, Carl Gutierrez-Jones musters ideas from Critical Race Studies, Critical Legal Studies, and literary scholarship to explicate the relationship between Chicanos and the law. Contrary to the notion that American jurisprudence is a neutral, value-free institution, the author argues that, as Chicano and especially Chicana artists have depicted, the legal system\u27s emphasis on individual responsibility ignores the economic and social milieu entangling Chicanos. The broad scholarship, incisive analysis, and careful reasoning make this book a valuable contribution to our understanding of the Chicano experience

Sacred Hoop Dreams: Basketball in the Work of Sherman Alexie

The game of basketball serves as a fitting metaphor for the conflicts and tensions of life. It involves both cooperation and competition, selflessness and ego. In the hands of a gifted writer like Sherman Alexie, those paradoxes become even deeper and more revealing. In his short story collections, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Toughest Indian in the World, his debut novel, Reservation Blues, and his recent young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie uses basketball to explore the ironies of American Indian reservation life and the tensions between traditional lifeways and contemporary social realities. So central is basketball to the Lone Ranger and Tonto short story collection, in fact, that the paperback edition\u27s cover depicts a salmon - the Coeur d\u27Alene Indians are fishermen - flying over a basketball hoop

[Review of] Phillipa Kafka. (Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women\u27s Writing

Phillipa Kafka\u27s clever book title turns on her deconstruction of what she sees as a simultaneous patriarchal and racist orientation of some contemporary literary criticism, akin to the unquestioned, naturalized supremacy presumed by agents of political imperialism such as missionaries. By focusing on what she sees as feminist and postfeminist writing by contemporary Asian American women authors -- specifically, their attention to gender asymmetry -- she demonstrates that we can read these works as a collective strike against the sexism of much (male) postcolonial, Marxist, and deconstructionist criticism and the racism of much (white) feminist criticism. Her readings of Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng, Gish Jen, R. A. Sasaki, and Cynthia Kadohata represent a provocative, new framework for understanding recent literature by Asian American women

[Review of] Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza. The Scar of Race

Into the murky, politically-charged waters of contemporary racial politics shines this welcome ray of light. Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, using clever research design and innovative techniques, clarify the changing meaning of race in today’s political landscape and conclusively dismiss many strongly-held, but nonetheless inaccurate, assumptions about whites’ attitudes toward African Americans

On the Existence and Uniqueness of Global Solutions for the KdV Equation with Quasi-Periodic Initial Data

We consider the KdV equation $$\partial_t u +\partial^3_x u +u\partial_x u=0$$ with quasi-periodic initial data whose Fourier coefficients decay exponentially and prove existence and uniqueness, in the class of functions which have an expansion with exponentially decaying Fourier coefficients, of a solution on a small interval of time, the length of which depends on the given data and the frequency vector involved. For a Diophantine frequency vector and for small quasi-periodic data (i.e., when the Fourier coefficients obey $|c(m)| \le \varepsilon \exp(-\kappa_0 |m|)$ with $\varepsilon > 0$ sufficiently small, depending on $\kappa_0 > 0$ and the frequency vector), we prove global existence and uniqueness of the solution. The latter result relies on our recent work \cite{DG} on the inverse spectral problem for the quasi-periodic Schr\"{o}dinger equation.Comment: 26 pages, to appear in J. Amer. Math. So

Comment: Citation Statistics

Comment on "Citation Statistics" [arXiv:0910.3529]Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS285C the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Bayes Linear Programming Language [B/D]

Bayes linear methodology provides a quantitative structure for expressing our beliefs and systematic methods for revising these beliefs given observational data. Particular emphasis is placed upon interpretation of and diagnostics for the specification. The approach is similar in spirit to the standard Bayes analysis, but is constructed so as to avoid much of the burden of specification and computation of the full Bayes case. This report is the first of a series describing Bayes linear methods. In this document, we introduce some of the basic machinery of the theory. Examples, computational issues, detailed derivations of results and approaches to belief elicitation will be addressed in related reports.