LMU Library Staff Picks

• Civic Engagement of Asian American Student Leaders by Ma. Glenda Lopez Wui; Cameron S. White

  Call Number: MAIN STACKS LC2633.6 .L67 2023

  ISBN: 9781666903553

  Publication Date: 2023

  Civic Engagement of Asian American Student Leaders examines the civic lives of Asian American youth and analyzes their civic engagement through in-depth interviews with fifteen student leaders from a Tier One university in Southeast Texas. This book provides a counter-narrative to the portrayal of Asian Americans as apolitical and less interested in civic matters. Such depictions arise from the characterization of Asian Americans as model minority who mainly focus on economic success and are socially and economically integrated in American society. However, the stories of the student leaders, cultivated by Ma. Glenda Lopez Wui and Cameron S. White, illustrate that their challenging racialized experiences inspired their civic involvement. Their civic engagement creates empowerment in terms of asserting their ethnic identity, imbibing leadership qualities and long-term commitment to civic engagement, and subverting stereotypes against Asian Americans. The book paints a more varied picture of Asian American youth civic engagement that is not entirely anchored in ethnic identity or non-political involvement, contrary to articulations of existing studies. Wui and White hope that the student leaders' narratives shed better light on the civic commitments of Asian Americans to American society especially in these times when there is increased bias and racial prejudice in the current atmosphere and culture.
• Corky Lee's Asian America by Corky Lee; Mae Ngai

  Call Number: MAIN STACKS TR681.A75 L44 2024

  ISBN: 9780593580127

  Publication Date: 2024

  A collection of over 200 breathtaking photos celebrating the history and cultural impact of the Asian American social justice movement, from a beloved photographer who sought to change the world, one photograph at a time. Known throughout his lifetime as the "undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate," the late photojournalist Corky Lee documented Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for fifty years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country. Corky Lee's Asian America is a stunning retrospective of his life's work--a selection of the best photographs from his vast collection, from his start in New York's Chinatown in the 1970s to his coverage of diverse Asian American communities across the country until his untimely passing in 2021. Corky Lee's Asian America traces Lee's decades-long quest for photographic justice, following Asian American social movements for recognition and rights alongside his artistic development as an activist social photographer. Iconic photographs feature protests against police brutality in New York in the 1970s, a Sikh man draped in an American flag after 9/11, and a reenactment of the completion of the transcontinental railroad of 1869 featuring descendants of Chinese railroad workers, and his last photos of community life and struggle during the coronavirus pandemic. Asian American writers, artists, activists, and friends of Lee reflect on his life and career and provide rich historical and cultural context to his photographs, including a foreword from writer Hua Hsu and contributions from artist Ai Weiwei, filmmaker Renee Tajima-Pena, writer Helen Zia, photographer Alan Chin, historian Gordon Chang, playwright David Henry Hwang, and more. Featuring never-before-seen photographs alongside his best-known images, Corky Lee's Asian America represents Lee's mission to chronicle a history of inclusion, resistance, ethnic pride, and patriotism. This is a remarkable documentation of vital moments in Asian American history and a timely reminder that it's also a history that we continue to make.
• Eating More Asian America: a Food Studies Reader by edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur.

  Call Number: E-book

  ISBN: 9781479831357

  Publication Date: 2025

  veritable feast for the senses, Eating More Asian America show us how critical eating studies has done more and gone further than we expected when Eating Asian America came out over a decade ago. It is in striving for more that our field continues to grow. The twenty-one chapters of the book leave us satiated but also wanting more and gesturing to the possibility of ever more abundant futures.
• Extravagant Camp: the Queer Abjection of Asian America by Chris A. Eng.

  Call Number: E-book and MAIN STACKS HQ73.4.A78 E54 2025

  ISBN: 9781479834686

  Publication Date: 2025

  Extravagant Camp takes as its point of critical departure the multiple valences of the word “camp”: the camp, as a geopolitical space and process of concentrating racialized populations, and the campy as a mode of queer expressiveness. Engaging its double meaning, Chris A. Eng explores how camp and encampment have contoured the figure of the Asian American. The book follows campy performances that imaginatively restage the camps that have been central to dominant narratives of Asian American history: Chinese railroad labor, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnam War refugee resettlement, and counterinsurgency camps across US imperial entanglements in the Philippines. Illuminating an eclectic ensemble of performances that grapple with Asian American history—from classical works in the Asian American literary tradition to emerging works of theater and film—Extravagant Camp uncovers Asian American camp as a prevalent yet underappreciated cultural strategy for contesting accounts of Asian American racialization that overly rely on terms of abjection.
• Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture by Eric Nakamura (Editor)

  Call Number: OVERSIZE E184.A75 G53 2024

  ISBN: 9781770467132

  Publication Date: 2024

  Celebrating the pop culture phenomenon that redefined what it meant to be Asian-American with tributes from Margaret Cho, Randall Park, Jia Tolentino, and more. Los Angeles, 1994. Two Asian-American punk rockers staple together the zine of their dreams featuring Sumo, Hong Kong Cinema and Osamu Tezuka. From the very margins of the DIY press and alternative culture, Giant Robot burst into the mainstream with over 60,000 copies in circulation annually at its peak. Giant Robot even popped right off the page, setting up a restaurant, gallery, and storefronts in LA, as well as galleries and stores in New York and San Francisco. As their influence grew in the 90s and 00s, Giant Robot was eventually invited to the White House by Barack Obama, to speak at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and to curate the GR Biennale at the Japanese American National Museum. Home to a host of unapologetically authentic perspectives bridging the bicultural gap between Asian and Asian-American pop culture, GR had the audacity to print such topics side-by-side, and become a touchstone for generations of artists, musicians, creators, and collectors of all kinds in a pre-social media era. Nowhere else were pieces on civil rights activists running next to articles on skateboarding and Sriracha. Toy collectors, cartoonists, and street style pioneers got as many column inches as Michelle Yeoh, Karen O, James Jean, and Haruki Murakami. Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian-American Pop Culture features the best of the magazine's sixty-eight issue run alongside never-before-seen photographs, supplementary writing by long-term contributing journalist Claudine Ko, and tributes from now-famous fans who've been around since day one. Margaret Cho, Daniel Wu, and Randall Park celebrate Giant Robot's enduring legacy alongside pioneering pro-skateboarder Peggy Oki, contemporary art giant Takashi Murakami, culinary darling Natasha Pickowicz, and critically acclaimed essayist Jia Tolentino.
• Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption by Jennifer Lin LeMesurier

  Call Number: MAIN STACKS GT2850 .L447 2023

  ISBN: 9780814215371

  Publication Date: 2023

  "You are what you eat," but what if you're seen as a rat eater, bat lover, or MSG user? In Inscrutable Eating, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier considers how everyday assumptions about Asian food influence the perception of Asian and Asian American identity within the US racial landscape, demonstrating that beliefs about how certain people eat are inseparable from attitudes that support hierarchies around race, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect theory, and Asian American studies, LeMesurier analyzes messages in US popular culture about Asian eating to develop the concept of gut orientations: rhetorically dominant ways of interacting with food that scale upward to feelings of desire and disgust toward social groups. Looking at examples from fears around MSG to uproar over wet markets as the source of COVID-19, she argues that these "gut" reactions establish certain racial views as common-sense truths rather than cultural biases, reinforcing dominant norms about what belongs on whose plate, or who belongs at what table. In demystifying marginalizing discourse around food and eating, LeMesurier shows how exposing the tacit, felt ideas of consumption is necessary to contest broader forms of discrimination.
• Louder Than the Lies: Asian American Identity, Solidarity, and Self-Love by Ellie Yang Camp

  Call Number: MAIN STACKS E184.A75 C35 2024

  ISBN: 9781597146616

  Publication Date: 2024

  What does it mean to be Asian American? How does our racialization in the United States shape our lives and our worldviews? With candor and care, Ellie Yang Camp, a Taiwanese American educator, offers a set of ideas and frameworks to guide us toward a more nuanced understanding of these questions. Drawing on her experiences and observations from history, conversations with Asian American peers, and lessons derived from other people of color, Camp unpacks the confusing dynamics that underlie anti-Asian stigmas and stereotypes in the US. From the model minority myth to yellowface to anti-Blackness among Asian communities, Camp presses into hard questions and moments of discomfort, naming fears so that we might dispel them. Key stories of resistance reveal the importance of solidarity, both among the diverse people under the Asian American umbrella and with all who are exploited by white supremacy. Acknowledging that racism is a system thrust upon us to control us, Camp fuels our boldness to challenge tropes, dismantle prejudices, and embrace self-determination as an act of radical liberation.
• Nature Unfurled: Asian American Environmental Histories by Connie Y. Chiang (Editor)

  Call Number: E-book and MAIN STACKS GE197 .N42 2024

  ISBN: 9780295753188

  Publication Date: 2024

  Explores Asian Americans' diverse connections and interactions with the natural world. As immigrants and laborers, gardeners and artists, activists and vacationers, Asian Americans have played, worked, and worshipped in nature for almost two centuries, forging enduring relationships with diverse places and people. In the process, their actual or perceived ties to the environment have added to and amplified xenophobia and racist tropes. Indeed, white constructions of Asian Americans as the yellow peril, the perpetual foreigner, and the model minority were often intertwined with their environmental activities. At the same time, Asian Americans also harnessed environmental resources for their own needs, challenging restrictions and outmaneuvering their detractors in the process. Expansive and groundbreaking, Nature Unfurled examines the links between Asian American and environmental history from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. With provocative essays on topics such as health in urban Chinatowns, Japanese oysters on Washington tidelands, American Indian and Japanese American experiences at the Leupp boarding school and isolation center, Southeast Asian community gardens, and contemporary Asian American outdoor recreation, this collection underscores the vibrancy of the field of Asian American environmental history.
• Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work by David C. Oh; Seong Jae Min

  Call Number: E-book and MAIN STACKS PN4867.2 .O4 2023

  ISBN: 1978831455

  Publication Date: 2023

  Combining critical race studies with cultural production studies, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work is the only academic book to examine the ways that racial identification and activation matters in their understanding of news. This adds to the existing literature on race and the sociology of news by examining intra-racial differences in the ways they navigate and understand White newsrooms. Employing in-depth interviews with twenty Asian American journalists who are actively working in large and small newsrooms across the United States, Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work argues that Asian American reporters for whom racial identities are important questioned what counted as news, questioned the implicitly White perspective of objectivity, and actively worked toward providing more complex, substantive coverage of Asian American communities. For Asian American reporters for whom racial identity was not meaningful, they were more invested in existing professional norms. Regardless, all journalists understood that news is a predominantly and culturally White institution. Recipient of the NCA Asian Pacific American Caucus & Communication Studies Division Outstanding Book Award.
• War, Race, and Culture by Gordon H. Chang

  Call Number: MAIN STACKS E184.E15 C43 2025

  ISBN: 9781503642591

  Publication Date: 2025

  Writing history, the systematic effort to understand the human past, is a demanding intellectual endeavor. For historian Gordon H. Chang, it has also been a personal and moral enterprise intimately connected to his commitment to realizing a better world. This career-spanning anthology brings together significant essays, developing conversations across his broad-ranging research interests and personal history and engaging a range of topics, from diplomatic history and Asian American history to art history. The book begins with a preface that reflects on the rise of Asian American studies as a field and the author's own scholarly trajectory. Each essay is accompanied by new headnotes that provide context. Essays examine the many ways that race, especially regarding Asian Americans, connects important historical episodes and social issues. Themes of geopolitical conflict, race, and transnational methods link writing produced over several decades, illustrating the arc of an intellectual career and the development of the field of Asian American studies. Ultimately, this book highlights Chang's abiding interest in providing historical context for issues facing Asian Americans, particularly during a time of rising geopolitical tensions and anti-Asian violence.

• Asian American Culture and Assimilation

  Dylan Simburger, PhD candidate, University of Arizona, discusses Asian American culture and assimilation, including the effect of the model minority myth, diverse expectations, and the impact of discrimination. Chapter 1: Dylan Simburger Shares Interests in Researching Asian Americans and Assimilation Theory -- Chapter 2: Dylan Simburger Discusses the Effect of the Model Minority Myth on Asian Americans -- Chapter 3: Dylan Simburger Discusses Diverse Expectations of and for Asian Americans -- Chapter 4: Dylan Simburger Discusses How Discrimination Can Change the Path of Asian Americans -- Chapter 5: Dylan Simburger Discusses Overt Forms of Racism Since the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown -- Chapter 6: Dylan Simburger Discusses Changes in How People Accept Asian Americans and How Research of Asian Americans Differs From Research on Other Minority Groups -- Chapter 7: Dylan Simburger Discusses the Importance of Understanding Different Forms of Assimilation -- Chapter 8: Dylan Simburger Discusses Sociological Theories, Influence of, and Expanding Research on the Experiences of Asian Americans -- Chapter 9: Dylan Simburger Discusses Key Takeaways for Understanding Asian Americans.
• Asian American Stories of Resilience and Beyond

  Volume 1 reflects the complexities of Asian American experiences: Queer filmmaker Quyên Nguyen-Le recovers and articulates the legacy of their mother's nail salon for their refugee family, and Filipino-American filmmaker Frances Rubio records and captures the experience of being distanced from her sick father, who has been isolated in his facility during the pandemic.
  Volume 2 reflects the complexities of Asian American experiences: Filipinx filmmaker Bree Nieves and her cousin grapple with what remains of their dreams, after losing one of their fathers during the pandemic; and Chanthon Bun, who lost his legal protection to live in the U.S. after conviction, must tread carefully after being released - ICE could detain and deport him.
• Breaking the Model: Stories of Asian American History and Presence.

  "Asian American", coined by activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee in 1968, was a movement to build solidarity between the many AAPI ethnic groups struggling against racism and for their civil rights. While not perfect in its current or past definitions, often centring East Asian Americans, the term symbolizes a critical turning point in our history showcasing radical cross-racial solidarity. Breaking the Model: Stories of Asian American History and Presence brings together four different short documentaries exploring immigration, genealogy, gentrification and resilience within America. A Portrait of Us (Sarah Park, 17 min): a short documentary that follows two Korean grandparents as they navigate a modern-day reckoning of their immigration story and grandparenthood. Conversations at the Register (Brandon Soun and Lan Nguyen, 9 min) The film tells the story of KH Supermarket, a Cambodian-owned grocery store in the heart of Cambodia Town, Long Beach that was forced to close due to gentrification. What Remains (Ginger Yifan Chen, 5 min), directed by Ginger Yifan Chen. Over a series of photographs, Georgette Quan tells the story of her family's shrimping business, from the age of the Chinese Exclusion Act to its present-day status as a state park. Sincerely Miné Okubo (Yuka Murakami, 16 min), directed by Yuka Murakami. Picturesque biography of Miné Okubo, a Japanese-American artist best known for her graphic memoir Citizen 13660 (1946), chronicling the WWII incarceration while she was an internee.