Subtitle: A Reader
Editors: Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song
Subject: Asian American Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2725-2
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2726-0
Pages: 480 pp.
Description: An interdisciplinary collection of essays, historical documents, and fiction that introduces readers to the many issues fueling the growth of Asian American Studies

"The obvious need for, and utility of, this reader is a tribute to the maturing of Asian American studies as a field, which has discovered and produced more than enough material in the last three decades for editors Wu and Song to select for both breadth and depth. Veteran instructors will find the familiar and a few surprises, while those teaching Intro to Asian American Studies for the first time can construct a syllabus by closely following the reader's outline."- Evelyn Hu-DeHart, editor of Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization

This anthology is the perfect introduction to Asian American studies, as it both defines the field across disciplines and illuminates the centrality of the experience of Americans of South Asian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Filipino ancestry to the study of American culture, history, politics, and society.

The reader is organized into two parts: "The Documented Past" and "Social Issues and Literature." Within these broad divisions, the subjects covered include Chinatown stories, nativist reactions, exclusionism, citizenship, immigration, community growth, Asia American ethnicities, racial discourse and the Civil Rights movement, transnationalism, gender, refugees, anti-Asian American violence, legal battles, class polarization, and many more.

Among the contributors are such noted scholars as Gary Okihiro, Michael Omi, Yen Le Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Ronald Takaki; writers such as Sui Sin Far, Bienvenido Santos, Sigrid Nunez, and R. Zamora Linmark, as well as younger, emerging scholars in the field.

Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu is senior lecturer in the American Studies program at Tufts University. She is also the program and education director of the Tufts Arts and Sciences Office of Diversity Education and Development. Min Song is an assistant professor of Ethnic American Literature at Boston College.