AARC Books

New Routes for Diaspora Studies

Sukanya Banerjee
Aims McGuinness
Steven C. McKay
2012

Study of diasporas provides a useful frame for reimagining locations, movements, identities, and social formations. This volume explores diaspora as historical experience and as a category of analysis. Using case studies drawn from African and Asian diasporas and immigration in the U.S., the contributors interrogate ideas of displacement, return, and place of origin as they relate to diasporic identity. They also consider how practices of commensality become grounds for examining identity and difference and how narrative and aesthetic forms emerge through the context of diaspora.

Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation

Pheng Cheah
Bruce Robbins
1998

As nationalism and the nation-state have recently come under siege, a resurgent cosmopolitanism has emerged as a viable and alternative political project. In Cosmopolitics, a renowned group of scholars and political theorists offers the first sustained examination of that project, its inclusive and often universalist claims, and its tangled and sometimes volatile relationship to nationalism.

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...

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
Hokulani K. Aikau
2019

Many people first encounter Hawai‘i through the imagination—a postcard picture of hula girls, lu‘aus, and plenty of sun, surf, and sea. While Hawai‘i is indeed beautiful, Native Hawaiians struggle with the problems brought about by colonialism, military occupation, tourism, food insecurity, high costs of living, and climate change. In this brilliant reinvention of the travel guide, artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai‘i's culture and complex...

Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
2021

In Empire's Mistress Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper, who was the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. If mentioned at all, their relationship exists only as a salacious footnote in MacArthur's biography—a failed love affair between a venerated war hero and a young woman of Filipino and American heritage. Following Cooper from the Philippines to Washington, D.C. to Hollywood, where she died penniless, Gonzalez frames her not as a tragic heroine, but as someone caught within the violent histories of U.S....

Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai'i and the Philippines

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
2013

In Securing Paradise, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez shows how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawai`i and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. She does so by interpreting fiction, closely examining colonial and military construction projects, and delving into present-day tourist practices, spaces, and narratives. For instance, in both Hawai`i and the Philippines, U.S. military modes of mobility, control, and surveillance enable scenic tourist byways. Past and present U.S. military posts...

After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century

Colleen Lye
Christopher Nealon
2022

After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx...

Roots of the Issei: Exploring Japanese American Newspapers

Andrew Leong
2018

Roots of the Issei presents a complex and nuanced picture of the Japanese American community in the early twentieth century: a people challenged by racial prejudice and anti-Japanese immigration laws trying to gain a foothold in a new land while remaining connected to Japan. Against this backdrop, Andrew Way Leong examines the emergence of generational terms that have long been used to organize Japanese American narratives: issei (first generation), nisei (second generation), and sansei (third generation). In the process, he suggests these widely-used generational concepts are in...

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.

Comintern Aesthetics

Amelia Glaser
Steven Lee
2020

Edited by Amelia Glaser and Steven S. Lee: Founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 to instigate a world revolution, the Comintern sought to advance not only the proletarian struggle but also a wide variety of radical causes, including fighting against imperialism and racism in settings as varied as Ireland, India, the United States, and China. Notoriously, and from the organization’s outset, these causes grew ever more subservient to Soviet state interest and Stalinist centralization. Comintern Aesthetics shows how the cultural and political networks emerging from the...