Holding Space: A Shortlist Exploring the Complexity of Asian American Identity Part 2

In this book, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to

discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.S. multiculturalism. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

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.

The interdisciplinary and theoretically informed frameworks in the volume engage readers to understand global and historical processes through contemporary Asian American artistic production. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

The question of cultural identity lies at the heart of current debates in cultural studies and social theory. At issue is whether those identities which defined the social and cultural world of modern societies for so long are in decline,

giving rise to new forms of identification and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject. Questions of Cultural Identity offers a wide-ranging exploration of this issue. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

In this work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late 18th- and early 19th- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism.

Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees.

But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both “despised minorities” and “model minorities,” revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study Anne Anlin Cheng argues that we have to understand racial grief not only as the result of racism but also as a foundation for racial identity. Her investigations reveal the common...

interests that social, legal, and literary histories of race have always shared with psychoanalysis, and situates Asian-American and African-American identities in relation to one another within the larger process of American racialization. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

In The Multiracial Experience, Maria P. P. Root challenges current theoretical and political conceptualizations of race by examining the experience of mixed-race individuals. Articulating questions that will form the basis for future discussions of race and identity, ...

the contributors tackle concepts such as redefining ethnicity when race is less central to the definition and how a multiracial model might dismantle our negative construction of race. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

Charting its historical conditions and the expansive contexts of its emergence, Min challenges the notion of Asian American art as a site of reconciliation or as a way for marginalized artists to enter into the canon or mainstream art scene.

Unnamable insists that in order to reassess Asian American art and its place in art history, we need to let go not only of established viewing practices, but potentially even the category of Asian American art itself. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

In Unruly Visions, Gopinath brings queer studies to bear on investigations of diaspora and visuality, tracing the interrelation of affect, archive, region, and aesthetics through an examination of a wide range of contemporary queer visual culture.

Spanning film, fine art, poetry, and photography, these cultural forms reveal the intimacies of seemingly disparate histories of (post)colonial dwelling and displacement and are a product of diasporic trajectories. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

In Unseeing Empire Bakirathi Mani examines how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across ...

South Asia and North America, Mani outlines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic artists, their photographic work, and their viewers. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

In Unsettled Visions the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary Asian American visual art. Machida focuses on ...

works produced during the watershed 1990s, when surging Asian immigration had significantly altered the demographic, cultural, and political contours of Asian America, and a renaissance in Asian American art and visual culture was well underway. (Book jacket excerpt)

In White Gaze, Dizon works with an archive of National Geographic magazines to explore the mechanics of the "white gaze”, writing a decolonial counterpoint to a way of imaging the world centered on the West.

Lê uses Dizon's images as a starting point for his poetic exploration of the legacies of war and imperialism. His text speaks to absence as much as presence with a story of war and empire told in fragments, phrases, words hanging on the page. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)

Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia. Written by two scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, movies, ...

propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, this is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation. (Publisher’s summary excerpt)