2024 Award Citations

Outstanding Achievement: Indecent Hours by James Fujinami Moore (Four Way Books)

James Fujinami Moore’s Indecent Hours wakes you up and you’lI find yourself in the future, surrounded by carrion and shitake light. Amid the evocations of the visceral in these poems are journeys of memory and experience, ones that recount things as myriad as bad apples in Vermont, the invisible Buddha of Kyoto, and Tinder-recommended Hot Witches in Salem. Moore’s poetry recalls such historical events as the 1982 match between Ray Mancini and Duk-koo Kim (which led to the death of the Korean boxer) and the World War II Japanese American incarceration. Yet the present is also accounted for when, for instance, a poem relays the casual racism of its narrator being asked, while at a urinal, if he knew Bruce Lee. Moore is a gifted writer who infuses his poems with humor and an intoxicating candor. In one poem, a speaker declares “I am so tired of talking about Manzanar. / Lord let me talk about anything / else instead. The moon, the sea, even fucking flowers…” Later, a poem is titled “I want to tell you about even the fucking flowers.” History, survival, pleasure – all are tended to with fierce imagination. These poems are tonally percussive, viscerally intimate, and lyrically incisive.

Honorable Mentions:

Customs by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf Press)

All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran (Penguin Random House)

Outstanding Achievement: Nuclear Family by Joseph Han (Counterpoint Press)

Tender, funny, and filled with linguistic experiments, Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family is a compelling narrative that traverses literal and figurative landscapes of family, intergenerational trauma, and queerness. Linking together the novel’s exploration of such liminal spaces is a consciousness crafted by an agile and inventive authorial interpretation. Such a perspective makes this novel wholly original in its scope and memorable for its voice resonating with poignancy and humor.

Honorable Mention: Mother Ocean Father Nation by Nishant Batsha (Ecco, HarperCollins)

Nishant Batsha’s Mother Ocean Father Nation is an engaging novel that offers thoughtful characterizations throughout, while examining themes of family, identity, and dislocation. Batsha’s gift of rendering complex interiority and the fullness of one’s inner life made this novel standout.

Outstanding Achievement: Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire by Helen Jin Kim (Oxford University Press)

In Race for Revival, Helen Jin Kim traces not only the rise of Christianity in South Korea as a response to the Cold War, but also how this rise revived evangelical crusades in the U.S. More than mimicking their imperial progenitors like BIlly Graham, Korean protestant leaders had their own aspirations in the new world order. This remarkable and meticulous study is only possible through diligent archival research and oral histories conducted over two continents and in two languages. The intermingling religious histories of the U.S. and Korea forecast the rise of Christian Right from the Reagan era to this day and add an important layer of heterogeneity to our conception of Asian America. It’s a timely contribution to both the field of transpacific history and our understanding of how religion continues to shape politics today.

Honorable Mention: Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State by Moon-Ho Jung (University of California Press)

A literal tour-de-force, Moon-Ho Jung’s Menace to Empire traces colonial violence across the Pacific. Jung centers the international connections among Asian radicals who confronted colonial power, adeptly linking revolutionary movements in the Philippines, India, Hawai’i, Japan. As Jung shows, U.S. authorities merged fears of the yellow peril and the red scare, surveilled and suppressed anti-colonial activism and, in the process, created the origins of the national security state. Jung identifies panethnic, anticolonial struggles emerging from the Philippine-American war through World War II, long before the established periodization. This multisited history tells a powerful alternative genealogy of Asian American history and anti-Asian racism that undermines the liberal narrative of the United States as a nation of immigrants. 

Honorable Mention: Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898-1946 by Tessa Winkelmann (Cornell University Press)

Tessa Winkelmann’s insightful study of interracial social relations in the U.S. Philippine colony and commonwealth in Dangerous Intercourse foregrounds the terrain of race, gender, and sex as a foundational area of inquiry in understanding the reach and limits of imperial power. Her deft use of a range of multilingual sources, and her readings of colonial materials against the grain deepen our understanding of the everyday negotiations of Filipinas under U.S. occupation. Winkelmann’s history offers a sustained analysis that centers Filipina life and desire, and expands our knowledge of the anxieties they presented for colonial authorities.

Outstanding Achievement: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung (Temple University Press)

Y-Dang Troeung’s Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia makes vital  contributions to Asian American Studies through the lens of the Cambodian experience of the Cold War. Foregrounding an approach to critical refugee studies that allows for a complex understanding of empire, militarism, and genocide as key aspects of Cambodian refugee experience, the book blends autotheory with cultural and historical analysis to give a multifaceted account of refugee subjectivity. In the process, the book engages deeply with disability studies, analyzing how representations of disability appear across a wide archive of Cambodian and Cambodian diasporic media. Refugee Lifeworlds in the process helps Asian Americanists rethink the frame of the Cold War by creating a method for bridging an understanding of state and imperial violence with the multifaceted strategies that refugees use to navigate changing conditions across dispersed geographies. Treoung ultimately offers a beautiful and devastating account of refugee life that bridges the body and politics, media and performance, and theory and experience.

HONORABLE MENTION: Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 by Jeannie Shinozuka (The University of Chicago Press)

Jeannie Shinozuka’s Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 is a pathbreaking and unique study of anti-Asian racism focusing on the histories of Japanese American communities (mostly in the US but also hemispherically). This book presses Asian American Studies to address the complexity of agrarian, public health, and environmental relationships that forge the grounds of border regulation, racialization, and settler colonialism. The author is informed by a variety of interdisciplinary approaches that bring together the biological sciences, attention to landscape, gardening, and agriculture, analysis of race in public health and law, and trade and commercial histories. Arguably, in doing so, the book goes “out on a limb” and crosses the humanities and the sciences–for example, bringing to bear the fields of entomology and public health on studies of race and ethnicity.

Honorable Mention: Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries by Jodi Kim (Duke University Press)

Jodi Kim’s Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries offers a novel approach to theorizing race and the United States empire through debt. Analyzing how the exceptionalist debt relationship of the U.S. to the rest of the world has created a settler colonial “garrison” of transpacific militarized zones, Kim reads a variety of cultural productions forge antimilitarist imaginaries that can be resources for challenging this form of empire. In the process, Kim offers new and exciting critical approaches to a number of fields including settler colonial studies, racial capitalism theories, and oceanic studies.

Outstanding Achievement: Minor Salvage by Stephen Hong Sohn (University of Michigan Press)

Innovative in framing and method, Stephen Hong Sohn’s Minor Salvage offers a novel means of interpreting Korean American literature by elevating understudied life writings and familial archives and recontextualizing them as refugee literature, thereby enfolding the Korean War and Korean America within critical refugee studies. A deeply personal work, Minor Salvage embraces family lore and history as a legitimate archive worthy of scholarly engagement alongside literary texts and films against the backdrop of military and state discourse.  Sohn crafts a clear, recuperative methodology around a set of post-Korean War texts, authors, subjects that have mostly been forgotten or are inaccessible; in giving them serious consideration, Sohn’s study highlights the capacious value of life writing as a space for deeper investigation into the recurring forced displacement of Koreans both during the war and in subsequent literary and narrative senses in the United States. Ambitious in scale, skillful in execution, and compellingly affecting, Sohn’s scholarship–through unexpected avenues–demonstrates how theory can open the fraught legacies of nationalism, militarism, and displacement to critical discernment.

Honorable Mention: Pedagogies of Woundedness by James Kyung-jin Lee (Temple University Press)

James Kyung-jin Lee’s Pedagogies of Woundedness interrogates and reframes categories of disability within Asian American studies through an examination of illness autobiographies to identify how they intervene in model minority discourse. By tracing how Asian American authors narratively negotiate the contradiction between the model minority myth’s idealized and racialized body with the realities of illness, Pedagogies posits that illness should not be seen as less than but taken on its own terms, as a form of subjectivity that deserves full consideration.  This is an exploration that astutely draws on East and South Asian demographics, all the while reconstituting how we can think critically about activism within disability studies.  Especially fascinating is Lee’s emphasis on how the reader comes into these narratives, and how they challenge and open up silences within the Asian American archive.  Richly textured and critically incisive, Pedagogies of Woundedness challenges the field to claim and engage with generative alterities of body and mind.

Outstanding Achievement: Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium by Mila Zuo (Duke University Press)

Offering a new analytic of Asian American media performance, Zuo’s theorization of vulgar beauty specifically offers a provocative, fresh way to theorize gender, race in the global which we believe will have contributions to Asian American Studies, Asian studies, diaspora studies and beyond. 

This evocative work enacts the idea of vulgarity and excess in a theoretically-rich and groundbreaking study. Fun, pleasurable, and potentially field changing for thinking through gender and race through diaspora. Mila’s writing style offers both a theorization and “how to”–she teaches us how to understand things that we don’t commonly put together. Poetically written and theoretically synesthetic, this book embodies its high-stakes theory by incorporating the five tastes/flavors with a global purview that challenges the boundaries of Asia and North America, addressing its audience’s doubled gazes, refracting circuits of desire and despair.

Honorable Mention: Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity by Takeo Rivera (Oxford University Press)

Provocatively self-critical of Asian American masculinity which may be challenging for people to comprehend, and a new way of understanding Asian American history (e.g., the killing of Vincent Chin and gendered, raced mico- and macro-aggressions then and now).  

Following the long tradition of feminist and queer Asian American scholarship that has named the masculinist impulse in the field, Rivera puts pressure on model minority myth and offers fresh insight on Asian American politics and provides a framework for rethinking intersectional, structural violence.

 Outstanding Achievement: Contesting the last frontier: race, gender, ethnicity, and political representation of Asian Americans by Pei-Te Lien and Nicole Filler (Oxford, 2022)

In mainstream politics, Asian Americans as a voting bloc or political force are rarely ever invoked. Despite their status as the fastest growing population of color, Asian Americans are rarely included with the “White,” “Black,” and increasingly “Latino” electorate; pundits blame small numbers/small influence, but have slowly begun to respond to Asian Americans’ self-positioning in the polity, the ascendancy of Asian nations abroad, and to Trump’s anti-China and “Kung Flu” demagoguery that spawned racist violence and death. To read Lien’s and Filler’s Contesting the Last Frontier in this moment is a revelation. Using rich forms of data and original mixed methodologies, the authors burst through the traditional but delimited study of electoral politics, which as a book would have been a major undertaking in and of itself; instead, they begin from the historic Asian American Movement – especially the women’s movement, which has been severely understudied in favor of the masculinist/patriarchal history of race mobilizations – and trace the arc into the electoral mainstream. To do so, they conduct oral history and in-depth interviews with past and present Asian American elected officers, filling in a major gap in (qualitative) and historical research and centering an unacknowledged and submerged legacy. Contesting the Last Frontier is a pathbreaking and trailblazing work of Asian Americanist social science. 

Honorable Mention: The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program by Pallavi Banerjee (NYU, 2022)

We are recognizing The Opportunity Trap with an honorable mention for its multiple levels of analysis and skillful bridging of empiricism and theoretical development in the study of the visa regime, the way it subordinates spouses of skilled migrants, and restructures race, gender, and family relations in the process. The book laudably connects global hierarchy, the transnational, and neoliberal racial capitalism on the one hand, to gendered and familial lives of South Asian migrants holding these visas on the other hand. The Opportunity Trap also draws on multiple forms of data, the most sophisticated of which are its in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations. This is a welcome addition to the Asian Americanist social science category.