AARC Books

Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson

Pheng Cheah
Jonathan Culler
2004

Benedict Anderson, professor at Cornell and specialist in Southeast Asian studies, is best known for his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). It is no understatement to say that this is one of the most influential books of the last twenty years. Widely read both by social scientists and humanists, it has become an unavoidable document. For people in the humanities, Anderson is particularly interesting because he explores the rise of nationalism in connection with the rise of the novel.

Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

SanSan Kwan
Kenneth Speirs
2004

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.From Naomi Zack's "American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues" to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger's "...

America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945

Colleen Lye
2004

America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.

Sampling Many Pots: A Historical Archaeology of a Multi-Ethnic Bahamian Community

Laurie Wilkie
Paul Farnsworth
2005

The enslaved population of Clifton Plantation was an early 19th-century cultural melange including native Africans, island-born Creoles, and African-American slaves brought by the owners from the American South as part of the Loyalist resettlement. This study of the multi-ethnic African community explores the diverse ways that members of this single plantation community navigated the circumstances of enslavement and negotiated the construction of New World identities within their families and with their neighbors.Focusing on the household and community levels of social integration at...

Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders

Mary L. Dudziak
Leti Volpp
2006

This collection focuses broadly on the role of law in the construction of U.S. borders and takes up an important question raised by the global turn in American studies scholarship: once territory becomes less critical to scholarship in the discipline, what constitutes the frame of American studies?For this project, a "border" is not simply a territorial boundary. Borders are created through formal legal controls on entry and exit, through the construction of rights of citizenship and noncitizenship, and through the regulation of American power in other parts of the world. Where legal...

AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics

Shannon Steen
Heike Raphael-Hernandez
2006

How might we understand yellowface performances by African Americans in 1930s swing adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, Paul Robeson's support of Asian and Asian American struggles, or the absorption of hip hop by Asian American youth culture?AfroAsian Encounters is the first anthology to look at the mutual influence of and relationships between members of the African and Asian diasporas. While these two groups have often been thought of as occupying incommensurate, if not opposing, cultural and political positions, scholars from history, literature, media, and the...

Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights

Pheng Cheah
2007

Globalization promises to bring people around the world together, to unite them as members of the human community. To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are transforming our understanding of humanity and its prerogatives. Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human that underwrite our understanding of globalization. Cheah asks whether the contemporary international division of...

Shanghai Splendor: A Cultural History, 1843-1945

Wen-hsin Yeh
2007

Rich with details of everyday life, this multifaceted social and cultural history of China's leading metropolis in the twentieth century offers a kaleidoscopic view of Shanghai as the major site of Chinese modernization. Engaging the entire span of Shanghai's modern history from the Opium War to the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, Wen-hsin Yeh traces the evolution of a dazzling urban culture that became alternately isolated from and intertwined with China's tumultuous history. Looking in particular at Shanghai's leading banks, publishing enterprises, and department stores, she...

Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire

Sukanya Banerjee
2010

In this remarkable account of imperial citizenship, Sukanya Banerjee investigates the ways that Indians formulated notions of citizenship in the British Empire from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Tracing the affective, thematic, and imaginative tropes that underwrote Indian claims to formal equality prior to decolonization, she emphasizes the extralegal life of citizenship: the modes of self-representation it generates even before it is codified and the political claims it triggers because it is deferred. Banerjee theorizes modes of citizenship decoupled...

Derrida and the Time of the Political

Pheng Cheah
Suzanne Guerlac
2009

An intellectual event, Derrida and the Time of the Political marks the first time since Jacques Derrida’s death in 2004 that leading scholars have come together to critically assess the philosopher’s political and ethical writings. Skepticism about the import of deconstruction for political thought has been widespread among American critics since Derrida’s work became widely available in English in the late 1970s. While Derrida expounded political and ethical themes from the late 1980s on, there has been relatively little Anglo-American analysis of that later work or its relation to...