Alien Encounters

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at New York University.

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction / Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu 1I. Sounds Authentic? 1. Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC / Oliver Wang 352. Silenced but Not Silent: Asian Americans and Jazz / Kevin Fellezs 69II. Popular Places 3. Homicidal Tendencies: Violence and the Global Economy in Asian American Pulp Fiction / Christopher A. Shinn 1114. Visual Reconnaissance / Joan Kee 1305. Chinese Restaurant Drive-Thru / Indigo Som 1506. The Guru and the Cultural Politics of Placelessness / Sukhdev Sandhu 161III. Consuming Cultures 7. Cooking up the Senses: A Critical Embodied Approach to the Study of Food and Asian American Television Audiences / Martin F. Manalansan IV 1798. Performing Culture in Diaspora: Assimilation and Hybridity in Paris by Night Videos and Vietnamese American Niche Media / Nhi T. Lieu 1949. Indo-Chic: Late Capitalist Orientalism and Imperial Culture / Sunaina Maira 221IV. Troubled Technologies 10. Asian American Auto / Biographies: The Gendered Limits of Consumer Citizenship in Import Subcultures / Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Vernadette VicuÑa Gonzalez 24711. Bruce Lee I Love You: Discourses of Race and Masculinity in the Queer Superstardom of JJ Chinois / Mimi Thi Nguyen 27112. Race and Software / Wendy Hui Kyong Chun 305Bibliography 335Contributors 355Index 359

“Learned, savvy, and on the pulse, this volume does more than fill a huge gap in popular culture studies. Like the strongest of new entries, it might end up rearranging the entire field.”-Andrew Ross, author of Fast Boat to China: Lessons from Shanghai “This wonderfully rich collection of essays shows the particular import of the realm of popular culture and its study. Such a critical assessment of the practices, production, consumption, and variegated sites of Asian American popular culture and politics demonstrates the broad horizons which can and should ground Asian American criticism.”-Kandice Chuh, author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique “Alien Encounters . . . offers the best introduction to Asian American popular cultural studies to date. The contributors illuminate an impressive range of unstudied or understudied youth cultures, musics, art, media, performance, and everyday practices and discourses.” - Glen Mimura (Journal of Asian American Studies) “Alien Encounters, though mostly academic, contains a wide spectrum of writing. . . . This book’s version of the Vietnamese-American experience is essentially positive because it concentrates, not on a sense of displacement and loss, but on adaptation to a new environment.” - Bradley Winterton (Taipei Times) “This volume of essays on Asian Americans and popular culture is a welcome addition to interdisciplinary and cultural studies, as well as scholarship on ethnic studies. The collection brings together a variety of subjects and viewpoints, highlighting elements attendant upon popular culture such as race, nation, and gender.” - Crystal S. Anderson (MELUS)