Queering Contemporary Asian American Art takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity, queer bodies and forms, kinship and affect, and digital identities and performances. Using the verb and critical lens of “queering” to capture transgressive cultural, social, and political engagement and practice, the contributors to this volume explore the connection points in Asian American experience and cultural production of surveillance states, decolonization and diaspora, transnational adoption, and transgender bodies and forms, as well as heteronormative respectability, the military, and war. The interdisciplinary and theoretically informed frameworks in the volume engage readers to understand global and historical processes through contemporary Asian American artistic production.

A rich and compelling introduction to the history of Asian Pacific American communities as told through 101 objects, from a fortune cookie baking mold to the debut Ms. Marvel comic featuring Kamala Khan Smithsonian Asian Pacific American History, Art, and Culture in 101 Objects invites readers to experience both well-known and untold stories through influential, controversial, and meaningful objects. Thematic chapters explore complex history and shared experiences: navigation, intersections, labor, innovation, belonging, tragedy, resistance and solidarity, community, service, memory, and joy. The book features vibrant full-color illustrations of objects that embody and engage with Asian Pacific American issues, including the immigrant experience, the importance of media representation, what history gets officially documented vs. what does not, and so much more. Those objects include: Name tag for Challenger astronaut Ellison Onizuka Photograph of Hollywood actress Anna May Wong Hello Kitty bento box Stella Abrera's ballet shoes, pancaked to match her skin color Caravan’s Thailand: Songs for Life album Sewing kit of internment camp survivor May Ishimoto Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii The Devanagari typographical font patented by Hari Govind Govil Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States and include approximately 50 distinct ethnic groups, but their stories and experiences have often been sidelined or stereotyped. This spirited and beautifully illustrated book offers a vital window into the triumphs and tragedies, strength and ingenuity, and traditions and cultural identities of these communities. Smithsonian Asian Pacific American History, Art, and Culture in 101 Objects is a crucial and celebratory read.

This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of postsocialism understood as a global condition.

This edited volume presents the latest multidisciplinary research that delves into developments related to contemporary Okinawa (a.k.a Ryukyu Islands), and also engages with contemporary debates on American hegemony and Empire in a larger geographical context. Okinawa, long viewed as a marginalized territory in larger historical processes, has been characterized solely by the U.S. military presence in the islands, despite having embraced a multiplicity of social and cultural transformations since the end of the Pacific War. In this timely academic revision of Okinawa, occurring at the time of numerous debates over the building of yet another military base in the island, this volume's contributors tell a story that situates Okinawa in the context of other militarized territories and thus, goes beyond the limits of Okinawa prefecture. Indeed, the book examines the ways in which studies on Okinawa have evolved, moving away from the direct problems brought by the establishment of foreign military bases. Previous studies have explicated how Okinawa has fallen prey to power politics of more dominant nations. In expanding on these themes, this volume examines the unique social and cultural dynamics of Okinawa and its people that had never been intended by the political authorities.

"The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award–winning The Grave on the Wall."—Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly's "Big Indie Books of Fall 2024" "Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how 'exclusion zones' proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work."—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing. Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

As if John Berger's Ways of Seeing was re-written for the 21st century, Alexis L. Boylan crafts a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture in this concise introduction. The visual surrounds us, some of it invited, most of it not. In this visual environment, everything we see--art, color, the moon, a skyscraper, a stop sign, a political poster, rising sea levels, a photograph of Kim Kardashian West--somehow becomes legible, normalized, accessible. How does this happen? How do we live and move in our visual environments? This volume offers a guide for navigating the complexities of visual culture, outlining strategies for thinking about what it means to look and see--and what is at stake in doing so.

What does it mean to be queer and Asian American at the turn of the century? The writers, activists, essayists, and artists who contribute to this volume consider how Asian American racial identity and queer sexuality interconnect in mutually shaping and complicating ways. Their collective aim (in the words of the editors) is "to articulate a new conception of Asian American racial identity, its heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity -- concepts that after all underpinned the Asian American moniker from its very inception." Q & A approaches matters of identity from a variety of points of view and academic disciplines in order to explore the multiple crossings of race and ethnicity with sexuality and gender. Drawing together the work of visual artists, fiction writers, community organizers, scholars, and participants in roundtable discussions, the collection gathers an array of voices and experiences that represent the emerging communities of a queer Asian America. Collectively, these contributors contend that Asian American studies needs to be more attentive to issues of sexuality and that queer studies needs to be more attentive to other aspects of difference, especially race and ethnicity. Vigorously rejecting the notion that a symmetrical relationship between race and homosexuality would weaken lesbian/gay and queer movements, the editors refuse to "believe that a desirably queer world is one in which we remain perpetual aliens -- queer houseguests -- in a queer nation."

A distinctly queer presence permeates the history of the visual arts — from Michelangelo's David and homoerotic images on ancient Greek vases to Frida Kahlo's self-portraits and the photography of Claude Cahun and Robert Mapplethorpe. The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts is a comprehensive work showcasing the enormous contribution of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer artists to painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and architecture. International in scope, the volume includes overviews of the various periods in art history, from Classical Art to Contemporary Art and from African Art to Erotic and Pornographic Art; discussions of topics ranging from AIDS Activism in the Arts, Censorship in the Arts, and the Arts and Crafts Movement to Pulp Paperbacks and Their Covers; surveys of the representation of various subjects in the visual arts, from Androgyny to Vampires; and biographical entries on significant figures in the history of art, such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, El Greco, Leonardo da Vinci, David Hockney, Ruth Bernhard, Rosa Bonheur, Romaine Brooks, Simeon Solomon, and Nahum Zenil. Includes more than 100 illustrations and photographs.

The purpose of this Handbook is to provide students with an overview of key developments in queer and trans feminist theories and their significance to the field of contemporary performance studies. It presents new insights highlighting the ways in which rigid or punishing notions of gender, sexuality and race continue to flourish in systems of knowledge, faith and power which are relevant to a new generation of queer and trans feminist performers today. The guiding question for the Handbook is: How do queer and trans feminist theories enhance our understanding of developments in feminist performance today, and will this discussion give rise to new ways of theorizing contemporary performance? As such, the volume will survey a new generation of performers and theorists, as well as senior scholars, who engage and redefine the limits of performance. The chapters will demonstrate how intersectional, queer and trans feminist theoretical tools support new analyses of performance with a global focus. The primary audience will be students of theatre/ performance studies as well as queer /gender studies. The volume’s contents suggest close links between the formation of queer feminist identities alongside recent key political developments with transnational resonances. Furthermore, the emergence of new queer and trans feminist epistemologies prompts a reorientation regarding performance and identities in a 21st-century context.

Introduces key terms, research frameworks, debates, and histories for Asian American Studies Born out of the Civil Rights and Third World Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American Studies has grown significantly over the past four decades, both as a distinct field of inquiry and as a potent site of critique. Characterized by transnational, trans-Pacific, and trans-hemispheric considerations of race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, gender, sexuality, and class, this multidisciplinary field engages with a set of concepts profoundly shaped by past and present histories of racialization and social formation. The keywords included in this collection are central to social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies and reflect the ways in which Asian American Studies has transformed scholarly discourses, research agendas, and pedagogical frameworks. Spanning multiple histories, numerous migrations, and diverse populations, Keywords for Asian American Studies reconsiders and recalibrates the ever-shifting borders of Asian American studies as a distinctly interdisciplinary field. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.