DIVA psychoanalytic study that argues for the centrality of sexuality in the construction of Asian-American identity, and of racial identity in general./div

This collection presents the first scholarly attempt to map the rapidly emerging field of mixed-race literature, defined as texts written by authors who represent multiple cultural and literary traditions. It also situates these literatures in relation to contemporary fields of literary inquiry.

This book is an innovative work that takes a fresh approach to the concept of race as a social factor made concrete in popular forms, such as film, television, and music. The essays push past the reaffirmation of static conceptions of identity, authenticity, or conventional interpretations of stereotypes and bridge the intertextual gap between theories of community enactment and cultural representation.

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."

Months before Alma López's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition. Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America). Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

As new comparative perspectives on race and ethnicity open up, scholars are identifying and exploring fresh topics and questions in an effort to reconceptualize ethnic studies and draw attention to nation–based approaches that may have previously been ignored. This volume, by recognizing the complexity of cultural production in both its diasporic and national contexts, seeks a nuanced critical approach in order to look ahead to the future of transnational literary studies. The majority of the chapters, written by literary and ethnic studies scholars, analyze ethnic literatures of the United States which, given the nation’s history of slavery and immigration, form an integral part of mainstream American literature today. While the primary focus is literary, the chapters analyze their specific topics from perspectives drawn from several disciplines, including cultural studies and history. This book is an exciting and insightful resource for scholars with interests in transnationalism, American literature and ethnic studies.

Re-narrating the story of Noah and Schreber, William F. Pinar's new book offers a compelling interpretation of race relations in education. In his signature style, Pinar argues that race is a patriarchal production and a gendered contract between father and son.

Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts.a Racial Asymmetries aspecifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the authorOCOs ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. a Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu FosterOCOsa Atomik Aztex, Sabina MurrayOCOsa A CarnivoreOCOs Inquiry aand Sigrid NunezOCOsa The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, a Racial Asymmetries aemploys an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds. a Stephen Hong Sohn ais Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the co-editor ofa Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits."

From the 1870s to the second decade of the twentieth century, more than fifty exhibitions of so-called exotic people took place in Denmark. Here large numbers of people of Asian and African origin were exhibited for the entertainment and ’education’ of a mass audience. Several of these exhibitions took place in Copenhagen Zoo, where different ’villages’, constructed in the middle of the zoo, hosted men, women and children, who sometimes stayed for months, performing their ’daily lives’ for thousands of curious Danes. This book draws on unique archival material newly discovered in Copenhagen, including photographs, documentary evidence and newspaper articles, to offer new insights and perspectives on the exhibitions both in Copenhagen and in other European cities. Employing post-colonial and feminist approaches to the material, the author sheds fresh light on the staging of exhibitions, the daily life of the exhibitees, the wider connections between shows across Europe and the thinking of the time on matters of race, science, gender and sexuality. A window onto contemporary racial understandings, Human Exhibitions presents interviews with the descendants of displayed people, connecting the attitudes and science of the past with both our (continued) modern fascination with ’the exotic’, and contemporary language and popular culture. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology and history working in the areas of gender and sexuality, race, whiteness and post-colonialism.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial/ethnic population in the United States. Especially since the 1990s, readings by Asian American biblical scholars have been increasing to meet the particular theological and pastoral concerns of their Christian racial/ethnic seminarians, clergy, and churches. Gale A. Yee is one of their major interpreters, becoming the first Asian American and first woman of color president of the oldest professional guild devoted to the critical study of the Bible, the Society of Biblical Literature. This book is an anthology of her major, ground-breaking essays on Asian American theorizing and analysis of the biblical text. It is a retrospective of her growth of over almost three decades in wrestling with questions like “What is Asian American biblical hermeneutics and how does one undertake it?”