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I am kind of excited that Asian studies scholars are looking into Asian/American transpacific studies, as this has been my intellectual home when writing my book. Scholars in both fields have been doing this work for a while. Here are some works I really admire 1/?
David Palumbo-Liu's Asian/American (1999) the / you see in Asian/American is because for P-L "Asian/American marks both the distinction installed between 'Asian' and 'American' and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement." You can be Asian, Asian American, or in-between. 2/?
Nguyen and Hoskins' Transpacific Studies (2014) is an anthology with both Asian and Asian American studies scholars from N America and Asia. 3/?
Lisa Yoneyama's Cold War Ruins (2016) looks at "transborder redress culture" among movements seeking redress for Japanese war crimes, JA redress, and US bases in Okinawa. 4/?
Tak Fujitani's Race for Empire (2011) compares Japanese and American respective instrumentalization of Koreans and Japanese Americans as military draftees and how this took the form of "polite racism." 5/?
Laura Madokoro's Elusive Refuge (2016) discusses the migrant crisis on the HK/PRC border that was not called a refugee crisis and the way that these migrants were positioned in the US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, among other places. 6/?
Gerald Horne's Facing the Rising Sun (2018) looks at African American intellectuals' desire to see the rise of a non-white power led them to support an increasingly fascist Japan. 7/?
Lily Wong's Transpacific Attachments (2018) looks at the representation of Chinese, Sinophone and American women as sex workers in Chinese, Taiwanese, and American literature and film.
Richard Jean So's Transpacific Community looks at the social connections between Chinese and American leftists in the pre-Cold War period.
Monica Kim's The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War is a really fascinating account of how interrogations were conducted during the Korean War. Did you know that some of the earliest interrogators were Japanese Americans from the MIS? I definitely did not.
Brian Hu's Worldly Desires (2018) looks at Sinophone cinematic cosmopolitanism. His chapter on the wooden, exotic, and strangely infantile charms of the ABC actor even when they are British or half-Vietnamese is really interesting. Also he talks about the movie Gen Y Cops.
