AARC Books

Translating Mo'Um

Cathy Park Hong
2002

By Cathy Park Hong: "Deft, edgy, dystopic, assiduous in their loathing of the famous fascination of the exotic, Cathy Park Hong's poems burst forth in searing flashes of ire and insight. She gives no quarter to either Korean or English. Without creative interference, without mistranslation, language to her is history's 'cracked' thorax, a resented 'dictation,' and a constant personal embarrassment. Her poems are 'islands without flags,' 'the ocean a slate gray/ along the wolf-hued sand.' Translating Mo'Um is striking both for its stabbingly original, vinegary...

Dance Dance Revolution

Cathy Park Hong
2008

By Cathy Park Hong: Named one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Science Fiction Books in 2007, Dance Dance Revolution is a genre-bending tour de force told from the perspective of the Guide, a former dissident and tour guide of an imagined desert city.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

Cathy Park Hong
2021

By Cathy Park Hong: Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the...

Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism

Elora Shehabuddin
2021

By Elora Shehabuddin: Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Muslim women, like other women around the world, have been engaged in their own struggles for generations: as individuals and in groups that include but also extend beyond their religious identity and religious practices. The...

Lament in the Night

Shōson Nagahar
Andrew Leong
2012

By Shōson Nagahar. Translated by Andrew Way Leong. Lament in the Night collects two remarkable novels by the author Shōson Nagahara, translated from the Japanese for the first time. The title novel, originally published in 1925, follows itinerant day laborer Ishikawa Sazuko as he prowls the back alleys and bathhouses of Los Angeles, looking for a meal, a job or just someone to hold onto. The second novel, The Tale of Osato, follows a young mother working her way through bars and nightclubs...

Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies

Lisa Hirai Tsuchitani
Harvey Dong
Russell Jeung
Karen Umemoto
Eric Mar
Arnold Pang
2019

By Lisa Hirai Tsuchitani. This book shares the narratives of nine remarkable students. For each of these Asian Americans, their ethnic heritages and racialized experiences, their family backgrounds, their education, and the social movements of their day intersected so that they became agents of change. Specifically, they organized and mobilized fellow students and community members to establish and further Asian American Studies (AAS) on their campuses. AAS has since grown not only to offer a relevant curriculum for and about these students, but...

Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism

Wen-hsin Yeh
1996

Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective.Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and...

Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African-American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1845-1950

Laurie Wilkie
2000

Historians' conception of plantation life in the American South, both post- and antebellum, derives almost exclusively from the written record, hence mainly from the white owners' perspectives. In Creating Freedom, historical archaeologist Laurie Wilkie pulls the half-opened curtain wider by seeking out the experiences of the majority of people who made their home on plantations: the African American laborers. Specifically, Wilkie examines the lives of four black families who lived at Oakley Plantation in south Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish over the course of one hundred years....

Nisei Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics

Jere Takahashi
1997

In Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics, Jere Takahashi challenges studies that describe the Japanese American community's essentially linear process toward assimilation into U.S. society. As he develops a complex and nuanced account of Japanese American life, he shows that a diversity of opinion and debate about effective political strategy characterized each generation of Japanese Americans. As he investigates the ways in which each generation attempted to advance its interests and concerns, he uncovers the struggles over key issues and introduces the...

Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea

Laura C. Nelson
2000

This insightful analysis of the ways in which South Korean economic development strategies have reshaped the country's national identity gives specific attention to the manner in which women, as the primary agents of consumption, have been affected by this transformation. Past scholarship on the culture of nationalism has largely focused on the ways in which institutions utilize memory and "history" to construct national identity. In a provocative departure, Laura C. Nelson challenges these assumptions with regard to South Korea, arguing that its identity has been as much tied to...