Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Viet Thanh Nguyen (Afterword By) Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the short story collection, The Refugees. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (Edited By) Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (UConn). She is the author of Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work.

• Introduction: Crisis, Conundrum, and CritiqueCathy J. Schlund-VialsPart I Ethnic Studies Revisited1. Five Decades Later: Reflections of a Yellow Power Advocate Turned PoetAmy Uyematsu2. Has Asian American Studies Failed?Timothy Yu 363. The Racial Studies Project: Asian American Studies and the Black Lives Matter CampusNitasha Sharma4. Planned Obsolescence, Strategic Resistance: Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Neoliberal UniversityCathy J. Schlund-Vials5. Un-homing Asian American Studies: Refusals and the Politics of CommitmentAnita MannurPart II Displaced Subjects6. No Muslims Involved: Letter to Ethnic Studies ComradesJunaid Rana7. Outsourcing, Terror, and Transnational South AsiaAsha Nadkarni8. Asian American Studies and Palestine: The Accidental and Reluctant PioneerRajini Srikanth9. Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory Solidarities across Settler StatesCandace FujikanePart III Remapping Asia, Recalibrating Asian America10. Transpacific EntanglementsYên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama11. Tensions, Engagements, Aspirations: The Politics of Knowledge Production in Filipino American Studies Martin F. Manalansan12. Asian International Students at U.S. Universities in the Post-2008 Collapse EraCynthia Wu13. Asians Are the New . . . What? Kandice ChuhPart IV Toward an Asian American Ethic of Care14. Asian Americans, Disability, and the Model Minority MythYoonmee Chang15. Buddhist Meditation as Strategic Embodiment: An Optative ReflectionSharon A. Suh16. What Is Passed On (Or, Why We Need Sweetened Condensed Milk for the Soul)Brandy Liên Worrall-Soriano17. An Ethics of GenerosityMin Hyoung SongAfterword: Becoming Bilingual, or Notes on Numbness and FeelingViet Thanh NguyenAcknowledgmentsList of Contributors Index

"This collection offers a bold and timely discussion of key debates in Asian American studies provoked by the institutionalization of Asian American studies in the neoliberal university. In a context of budget crises and also persistence of anti-Asian racism, the essays by a diverse group of scholars offer frank, sometimes autobiographical, reflections from the trenches about questions of incorporation, diversity management, interracial solidarity, public scholarship, and survival. This is a book I have been waiting to read, especially in the era of and Black Lives Matter and BDS activism and with Trump's election, as it offers important lessons for faculty, administrators, and students about how Asian American studies can resist the logics of multiculturalism and austerity." -- -Sunaina Maira University of California, Davis "Flashpoints for Asian American Studies offers an ambitious, bracing, and wide-ranging critique of Asian American studies by practitioners within the field. It calls for a wholesale reconsideration of how Asian American studies operates inside and outside universities; how it theorizes, selects, and defines its subjects and constituencies; and how it functions as an academic and political project. This volume presents a highly original reassessment from the inside of Asian American studies that is unparalleled in terms of its breadth and sustainment." -- -Daryl Maeda University of Colorado, Boulder