AARC Books

Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism

Elaine H Kim
Chungmoo Choi
1997

Dangerous Women addresses the themes of Korean nationalism and gender construction, as well as various issues related to the colonialization and decolonialization of the Korean nation. The contributors explore the troubled category of "woman," placing it in the specific context of a marginalized and colonized nation. But Korean women are not merely configured here as metaphors for an emasculated and infantilized "homeland;" they are also shown to be products of a problematic gender construction that originates in Korea, and extends even today to Korean communities beyond Asia....

Making More Waves: New Writing By Asian American Women

Elaine H Kim
Lilia V. Villanueva
Asian Women United of California
1997

Asian-American women writers of all ages explore a complex range of identities through poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs, most of which have never been published. The contributors take on little explored topics and expand the limits of ethnic-based identity, resisting stereotypes and breaking silences. Candid and memorable, their essays, stories, and poetry change popular assumptions and engage readers.

East To America: Korean American Life Stories

Elaine H Kim
Eui-Young Yu
1997

In this collection of powerful, candid oral histories, a wide cross section of Korean Americans renders a portrait of a community grappling with racial tensions, class and gender differences, and differing notions of family and home.

#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation

Abigail De Kosnik
Keith P. Feldman
2019

#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName;...

A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America

Keith P. Feldman
2017

A Shadow over Palestine brings a new, deeply informed, and transnational perspective to the decades and the cultural forces that have shaped sharply differing ideas of Israel’s standing with the United States—right up to the violent divisions of today. Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1985, author Keith P. Feldman reveals the centrality of Israel and Palestine in postwar U.S. imperial culture. Some representations of the region were used to manufacture “commonsense” racial ideologies underwriting the conviction that liberal democracy must coexist with racialized conditions of...

What is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature

Pheng Cheah
2016

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature’s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah...

Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

Mel Chen
2012

In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this...

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...

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...

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.