An explanation of the design of the journal\u27s new website as well as a summary of the content of this volume

Brada-Williams, Noelle

English

SJSU ScholarWorks

Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies             4 (2013) i-iii.  	  	   i	   Introduction: A New Site  The cover of this volume of Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies is a photograph supplied by the poet-turned-visual-artist, Truong Tran, of his work Faultlines. His interview by Wei Ming Dariotis begins this volume.  The title, “On-ramp to the Apocalypse,” is a reference to the beloved hometown of both interviewer and interviewee: San Francisco. Here in California, fault lines evoke not only the cracks in the Earth’s surface that produce the earthquakes that have shaped our landscape but the fissures and cracks within our communal and personal identities as well. The intersection between location and personal identity has been on my mind a lot in the past six months as I have been preparing to launch volume four and also to move the journal to a whole new website.  As I write, Berkeley Electronic Press is designing the new site.  We hope that the new design will provide easier, user-friendlier access for our readers, authors, and referees.  It will certainly be more colorful than our original site.   In the past year I have also been working on entries on the histories of the Chinese American and Japanese American communities for a reference book on the literature of John Steinbeck.  During this time I was reminded anew of how much Asian Americans have been part of the California experience, and in turn, how much California has been a part of the Asian American experience.  Chinese immigrants made up twenty percent of the workforce of the new state in the 1850’s.  Even after more than a century and half—sixty years of which was spent under official exclusion—the California landscape is still marked by the labor of early Chinese immigrants in the tracks of the Central Pacific railroad, in small mining towns in the Sierras, in farms and orchards created from drained swampland, and through the building of urban Chinatowns.  After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants came to California.  While they went into many of the same industries that the earlier Chinese immigrants had populated, such as farming and fishing, the Japanese Americans’ legal ability to start families in California allowed them to use the labor of whole families, coupled with a focus on innovation, to redefine agriculture in the state.   Time and again, California has served as the new site for Asians seeking a home in America.  Los Angeles has become the single largest population of people of Korean descent outside of Korea.  Readers of Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart are aware of the deep history Filipino Americans have in California, where 43% of all Filipino Americans now reside.  Since 1975 the two largest communities of Vietnamese Americans have been built in California: Orange County, where I grew up, and San Jose, where I now live.  The area around San Jose is also known as Silicon Valley. Work in high tech firms has lured many South Asians to the area and California now has the highest population of peoples of Indian descent in the country.  Relatively new but growing communities of Western Asian Americans such as Afghan and Iranian Americans also have their largest communities in California (Fremont and Los AALDP|Volume Four 	  	   ii	  Angeles respectively).  Nearly a third of all Asian Americans counted in the 2010 census (17.3 million in U.S.) live in California (5.6 million). With these histories and demographics is mind, I chose for the new color scheme of the journal the deep blues of the Pacific Ocean and the gold of the dry California hills.  This color scheme also echoes the colors of San Jose State University, the institutional host of our journal and the oldest public university in the state, as well as the colors of the University of California campuses where I and several of my editorial board members received our educations. Coincidentally, these are also the colors of the academic regalia for one who has received a PhD in the Humanities.  That coincidence struck me as a sign that I needed to use my education to give back to the state that gave me both my education and my identity. In addition to the color scheme, we also needed a banner heading that would serve us well for many years as a kind of logo.  But how can you represent the study and teaching of the literature of very diverse communities in one image? We needed something abstract enough to be able to encompass all that our future contributors might write about, but which also accurately represents our focus: the close and careful analysis of Asian American literature and culture and ideas on how to guide our students in achieving this as well. Our solution is a close up of the varied textures of actual books of Asian American literature.  My students are often surprised by how varied Asian American literature actually is and I have to admit that until I began thinking about the banner, I had not realized how physically different the textures of published books can be.   This journal has been fortunate to receive submissions from authors in a large range of locales, including Canada, Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, as well as many parts of the United States.  I have also heard from readers from around the globe.   But while we can learn from people and ideas from all over the world, most of us live and teach in very specific locales.  The first two submissions in this volume remind us how location both shapes our identities and our tasks as teachers. Jane Hseu’s “Teaching Race and Space Through Asian American and Latino Performance Poetry: I Was Born with Two Tongues’ Broken Speak and Sonido Ink(quieto)’s Chicano, Illnoize” draws on her teaching of spoken word poetry to her Chicagoland students.  Her essay examines how Chicago-based Latino and Asian American artists articulate resistance using hybrid cultural forms.  In “Shattering the Binary: Teaching Critical Thinking Through John Okada’s No-No Boy,” Sarita Cannon discusses lessons learned while teaching Okada’s novel of the aftermath of internment to students in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Her essay also illustrates how different understandings of American history can be in classrooms across the United States and how widely varying our students’ reactions to literary text are.  The final three essays all deal with gender in some way.   Robin E. Field’s “You No Real Man”: Constructing Gender, Sexuality, and the Asian American Subject in Jana Monji’s “Kim” focuses on a story in the often-taught anthology, Bold Worlds: A Century of Asian American Writing, to show how one can use the story to effectively teach the basics of gender theory, queer theory, and Asian American culture and history.  In “Commodified Desire: Negotiating Asian AALDP|Volume Four 	  	   iii	  American Heteronormativity,” Paul McCutcheon examines the gender politics of H.T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands, noting the way that the logic of its Marxist analysis of capital accepts heteronormativity as an ideal even as it illustrates how heteronormativity	  is	  an	  “impossibility”	  for	  Asian	  American	  men	  in	  the	  early	  20th	  century	  political	  and	  economic	  context.	  	  Danielle	  Crawford	  examines	  Maxine	  Hong	  King’s	  use	  of	  food	  and	  foodways	  in	  rethinking	  the	  masculinity	  of	  Chinese	  men	  in	  this	  same	  period	  in	  her	  essay “’vinegar soup improved his womb’: Food, Appetite, and the Redefining of Asian American Masculinity in Kingston’s China Men.” This volume closes with two reviews: Erin Lodeesen’s review of Cathy Schlund-Vials’ War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory and Margaret Rhee’s review of Juliana Chang’s Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature.  In future issues AALDP plans to branch out into reviewing literature (as well as critical books) with the specific focus of how these texts can be used in the classroom.  In moving to our new site we also want to renew our commitment to the open access of scholarly material.  Last year one company that has virtually monopolized the distribution of scholarly material in the sciences made	  a	  36%	  profit	  margin	  on	  revenues	  of	  $3.2	  billion.	  	  Scholarship	  is	  too	  important	  to	  be	  packaged	  and	  its	  access	  limited	  in	  the	  interests	  of	  profit	  margins.	  	  I	  want	  to	  thank	  the	  contributors,	  referees,	  and	  readers	  of	  this	  journal	  for	  their	  continued	  commitment	  to	  our	  project	  of	  making	  scholarship	  on	  the	  teaching	  and	  analysis	  of	  Asian	  American	  texts	  free	  to	  all.	  	  We	  hope	  this	  volume	  is	  of	  use	  to	  you	  in	  whatever	  site	  you	  may	  find	  yourself	  teaching	  or	  reading	  Asian	  American	  literature.	   ----Noelle Brada-Williams San José State University San Jose, California, U.S.A.        

Introduction: A New Site

San Jose State University

Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies             
4 (2013) i-iii.  	  
	   i	  
 
Introduction: A New Site 
 
The cover of this volume of Asian American Literature: Discourses & 
Pedagogies is a photograph supplied by the poet-turned-visual-artist, Truong 
Tran, of his work Faultlines. His interview by Wei Ming Dariotis begins this 
volume.  The title, “On-ramp to the Apocalypse,” is a reference to the beloved 
hometown of both interviewer and interviewee: San Francisco. Here in 
California, fault lines evoke not only the cracks in the Earth’s surface that 
produce the earthquakes that have shaped our landscape but the fissures and 
cracks within our communal and personal identities as well. The intersection 
between location and personal identity has been on my mind a lot in the past six 
months as I have been preparing to launch volume four and also to move the 
journal to a whole new website.  As I write, Berkeley Electronic Press is 
designing the new site.  We hope that the new design will provide easier, user-
friendlier access for our readers, authors, and referees.  It will certainly be more 
colorful than our original site.   
In the past year I have also been working on entries on the histories of the 
Chinese American and Japanese American communities for a reference book on 
the literature of John Steinbeck.  During this time I was reminded anew of how 
much Asian Americans have been part of the California experience, and in turn, 
how much California has been a part of the Asian American experience.  Chinese 
immigrants made up twenty percent of the workforce of the new state in the 
1850’s.  Even after more than a century and half—sixty years of which was spent 
under official exclusion—the California landscape is still marked by the labor of 
early Chinese immigrants in the tracks of the Central Pacific railroad, in small 
mining towns in the Sierras, in farms and orchards created from drained 
swampland, and through the building of urban Chinatowns.  After the Chinese 
Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants came to California.  While they went 
into many of the same industries that the earlier Chinese immigrants had 
populated, such as farming and fishing, the Japanese Americans’ legal ability to 
start families in California allowed them to use the labor of whole families, 
coupled with a focus on innovation, to redefine agriculture in the state.   
Time and again, California has served as the new site for Asians seeking a 
home in America.  Los Angeles has become the single largest population of 
people of Korean descent outside of Korea.  Readers of Carlos Bulosan’s America 
is in the Heart are aware of the deep history Filipino Americans have in 
California, where 43% of all Filipino Americans now reside.  Since 1975 the two 
largest communities of Vietnamese Americans have been built in California: 
Orange County, where I grew up, and San Jose, where I now live.  The area 
around San Jose is also known as Silicon Valley. Work in high tech firms has 
lured many South Asians to the area and California now has the highest 
population of peoples of Indian descent in the country.  Relatively new but 
growing communities of Western Asian Americans such as Afghan and Iranian 
Americans also have their largest communities in California (Fremont and Los 
AALDP|Volume Four 	  
	   ii	  
Angeles respectively).  Nearly a third of all Asian Americans counted in the 2010 
census (17.3 million in U.S.) live in California (5.6 million). 
With these histories and demographics is mind, I chose for the new color 
scheme of the journal the deep blues of the Pacific Ocean and the gold of the dry 
California hills.  This color scheme also echoes the colors of San Jose State 
University, the institutional host of our journal and the oldest public university 
in the state, as well as the colors of the University of California campuses where I 
and several of my editorial board members received our educations. 
Coincidentally, these are also the colors of the academic regalia for one who has 
received a PhD in the Humanities.  That coincidence struck me as a sign that I 
needed to use my education to give back to the state that gave me both my 
education and my identity. 
In addition to the color scheme, we also needed a banner heading that 
would serve us well for many years as a kind of logo.  But how can you represent 
the study and teaching of the literature of very diverse communities in one 
image? We needed something abstract enough to be able to encompass all that 
our future contributors might write about, but which also accurately represents 
our focus: the close and careful analysis of Asian American literature and culture 
and ideas on how to guide our students in achieving this as well. Our solution is 
a close up of the varied textures of actual books of Asian American literature.  
My students are often surprised by how varied Asian American literature 
actually is and I have to admit that until I began thinking about the banner, I had 
not realized how physically different the textures of published books can be.   
This journal has been fortunate to receive submissions from authors in a 
large range of locales, including Canada, Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, as well as many 
parts of the United States.  I have also heard from readers from around the globe.   
But while we can learn from people and ideas from all over the world, most of us 
live and teach in very specific locales.  The first two submissions in this volume 
remind us how location both shapes our identities and our tasks as teachers. 
Jane Hseu’s “Teaching Race and Space Through Asian American and 
Latino Performance Poetry: I Was Born with Two Tongues’ Broken Speak and 
Sonido Ink(quieto)’s Chicano, Illnoize” draws on her teaching of spoken word 
poetry to her Chicagoland students.  Her essay examines how Chicago-based 
Latino and Asian American artists articulate resistance using hybrid cultural 
forms.  In “Shattering the Binary: Teaching Critical Thinking Through John 
Okada’s No-No Boy,” Sarita Cannon discusses lessons learned while teaching 
Okada’s novel of the aftermath of internment to students in the San Francisco 
Bay Area.  Her essay also illustrates how different understandings of American 
history can be in classrooms across the United States and how widely varying 
our students’ reactions to literary text are.  
The final three essays all deal with gender in some way.   Robin E. Field’s 
“You No Real Man”: Constructing Gender, Sexuality, and the Asian American 
Subject in Jana Monji’s “Kim” focuses on a story in the often-taught anthology, 
Bold Worlds: A Century of Asian American Writing, to show how one can use the 
story to effectively teach the basics of gender theory, queer theory, and Asian 
American culture and history.  In “Commodified Desire: Negotiating Asian 
AALDP|Volume Four 	  
	   iii	  
American Heteronormativity,” Paul McCutcheon examines the gender politics of 
H.T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands, noting the way that the logic of its Marxist 
analysis of capital accepts heteronormativity as an ideal even as it illustrates how heteronormativity	  is	  an	  “impossibility”	  for	  Asian	  American	  men	  in	  the	  early	  20th	  century	  political	  and	  economic	  context.	  	  Danielle	  Crawford	  examines	  Maxine	  Hong	  King’s	  use	  of	  food	  and	  foodways	  in	  rethinking	  the	  masculinity	  of	  Chinese	  men	  in	  this	  same	  period	  in	  her	  essay “’vinegar soup improved his womb’: Food, Appetite, 
and the Redefining of Asian American Masculinity in Kingston’s China Men.” 
This volume closes with two reviews: Erin Lodeesen’s review of Cathy 
Schlund-Vials’ War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory and 
Margaret Rhee’s review of Juliana Chang’s Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic 
Enjoyment and Asian American Literature.  In future issues AALDP plans to branch 
out into reviewing literature (as well as critical books) with the specific focus of 
how these texts can be used in the classroom.  
In moving to our new site we also want to renew our commitment to the 
open access of scholarly material.  Last year one company that has virtually 
monopolized the distribution of scholarly material in the sciences made	  a	  36%	  profit	  margin	  on	  revenues	  of	  $3.2	  billion.	  	  Scholarship	  is	  too	  important	  to	  be	  packaged	  and	  its	  access	  limited	  in	  the	  interests	  of	  profit	  margins.	  	  I	  want	  to	  thank	  the	  contributors,	  referees,	  and	  readers	  of	  this	  journal	  for	  their	  continued	  commitment	  to	  our	  project	  of	  making	  scholarship	  on	  the	  teaching	  and	  analysis	  of	  Asian	  American	  texts	  free	  to	  all.	  	  We	  hope	  this	  volume	  is	  of	  use	  to	  you	  in	  whatever	  site	  you	  may	  find	  yourself	  teaching	  or	  reading	  Asian	  American	  literature.	  
 
----Noelle Brada-Williams 
San José State University 
San Jose, California, U.S.A. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


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Introduction: A New Site

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