2025 Book Award Citations

Outstanding Contribution: I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes (Tin House Books)

I Do Everything I’m Told comes fully formed. Fernandes’s work swerves across the page, weaving swagger and wryness in one poem before precisely, rawly unpicking its own weave in the next. The poems have a brilliant and wandering eye, relentlessly exploring and interrogating diasporas both external and internal. More than anything, it’s damn fun – a fun that serves both as resistance to the imperial forces shaping our lives and as a joyous celebration of Asian American life. Fernandes’s luxuriant pleasure in language jumps off the page, the speaker turning over every rock in their life to find sometimes-treasure, sometimes-nothing, and sometimes-more-rock. “Sometimes, I wonder if I would know a beautiful thing if I saw it” asks one poem. This book is a beautiful thing. It returns the lives we already have to us.

Honorable Mention: Bianca by Eugenia Leigh (Four Way Books)

Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca is remarkable. It is an unflinching exploration, profoundly willing to keep looking, digging into, and not turning away. Literature and history often reward reach, but less often is depth regarded with the emotional, psychological, and spiritual wherewithal required to maintain sustained attention. Leigh is a precise cartographer, charting how memory flattens out time – how violence can reach out of the past to inform the future, and how the grace of the present can intercede. If attention is prayer, as Mary Oliver argues, then Bianca is gospel of the tallest order, and if a poem is a private prayer overheard by us, the reader, then praise Leigh for the grace of permitting us to eavesdrop on this act of worship, for letting us in as she goes in, and as she keeps going.

Outstanding Contribution: The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (Riverhead Books)

Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation is a breathtaking work that skillfully weaves a heartrending love story with the enormity of history. A complex and classic Asian epic, Heng’s novel expands our understanding of the global Asian experience with unforgettable characters that reverberate from the past through the present.

Honorable Mention: Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin (Little, Brown and Company)

 Curtis Chin’s Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is a thoughtful and tender memoir that expands our understanding of the Asian American experience. Of particular note were Chin’s complex rendering of race beyond a White/Asian dichotomy, as well as his exploration of queerness and Rust Belt geography—all of which are in states of immense transition in contemporary America. 

Outstanding Contribution: Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change by Melissa Borja (Harvard University Press)

Borja’s path breaking monograph establishes a foundation for Hmong American studies that is transnational in scope and captures the infrastructural aspects of their migration and settlement that have significantly shaped their acculturation experiences.  In doing so Borja combines social and religious history with a detailed organizational history and critique of refugee processing and U.S. settlement agencies. Beautifully written, deeply insightful, and grounded in rigorous archival research and oral history, her thoughtful consideration of the failures of a “pluralist” incorporation of refugees in America also pushes us to think more expansively about religion, culture, and migration in Asian American studies and beyond. Borja’s study speaks to multiple scholarly fields in ways that position Hmong American studies to participate in broader conversations. 

Honorable Mention: Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941 by Genevieve Clutario (Duke University Press)

Beauty Regimes is a masterful narrative about beauty production and appearance in the colonial Philippines. Clutario insists that modern empires are not only reliant on military might, political or economic control, but also depend on and deploy a beauty regime – an infrastructure of power that disciplines and shapes appearances and whom or what is considered beautiful. Through this unique and insightful framework, she takes seriously a fragmented archive of Filipina voices that many overlook or ignore to highlight that women’s social, economic and political labor  was at the core of how people in the Philippines experienced the overlapping rule of the Spanish, American and Japanese occupiers. This book offers important lessons in both sources and methodology, as well as transimperial history.

Outstanding Contribution: Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America by Josen Masangkay Diaz (Duke University Press)

Josen Masangkay Diaz’s Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America is a tour de force model of interdisciplinary scholarship. It makes a stunning and vital contribution to Asian American Studies by compellingly shifting our understanding of the making of Filipino America. Diaz employs “configurations” to train our eye on the ever-unfolding politics of legibility. Analyzing the contours of Filipino America as not only a racialized and gendered formation but also a transnational one intricately linked to Cold War configurations of US militarism, imperial war, and anticommunist liberalism, on the one hand, and Philippine postcoloniality and dictatorship, on the other, Diaz’s book is an exceedingly important and timely study was we witness the global resurgence of authoritarianism.

Honorable Mention: Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire by Mel Y. Chen (Duke University Press)

Mel Y. Chen’s Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire is a uniquely interdisciplinary work that productively departs from conventional terrains of academic inquiry. Traversing the critical nonhuman and human transnational context of empire and settler colonialism across the 19th century, Intoxicated makes an important contribution to contemporary understandings and studies of the entanglements of intoxication, toxicity, race, disability, and sexuality. In doing so, Chen’s book also makes a broader intervention into the politics of knowledge production.

Outstanding Contribution: Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience by Vinh Nguyen (University of California Press)

With poetic verve, Vinh Nguyen’s Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience captures the multi-textured experiences of those forced to cross borders. Nguyen forcefully establishes the affectual scope of refuge as a site and as a promise of plenitude, focusing on the dialectical ways in which gratitude, resentment, and resilience structure lived relationalities. Nguyen’s crystalline prose anchors expansive readings, which traverse a broad range of refugee cultural objects and practices, including memoirs and memorialization, fiction, activist videos and physical movements. Nguyen posits a quality of “refugeetude,” which “is a relational term firmly situated in the political, one that allows us to contemplate the possibilities of refugeeness as a living and being with others” (103). In this manner, Nguyen recenters the experience of refugeetude and the way that it operates as a field for the making of refuge spaces. Refugeetude, in its intricate comparative dynamics, further relates to and exists in relation with other decolonial and antiracist struggles that grapple with the limitations and violence created by the nation-state formation, including Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation movements. Nguyen’s monograph ultimately casts light not only on the spirit of endurance modeled by the lived experience of refugees but also the tortured battles that can be required to find sustainable forms of succor.

Outstanding Contribution: Becoming Global Asia Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore by Cheryl Narumi Naruse (University of California Press)

Cheryl Narumi Naruse’s Becoming Global Asia Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore dynamically intervenes in the field of Asian American Studies through its syncretic methodologies. Naruse skillfully constellates racial, postcolonial and transpacific critique in its robust engagement with Singaporean Anglophone cultural productions. Centering on Singapore’s emergence as a figure of “Global Asia” – a configuration that Naruse argues occludes its postcoloniality – this book teases out the ambivalences and contradictions inherent in Singapore’s production of what Naruse calls “postcolonial capitalism,” defined as the ways that “capitalist cultures are motivated, rationalized, and strategized through a consciousness of colonial subordination and racial capitalism, both past and present.”. Through sustained analyses of a diverse body of texts, Naruse’s compelling study reveals the conflicted ways in which Singapore has promoted itself as a cosmopolitan site of economic affluence. Naruse homes in on specific genres—among them, anthologies, developmental career narratives, demographic studies, and princess fantasies—to advance how form and content synergistically present varied depictions of Singaporean state power and governance within various cultural objects and documents.

Honorable Mention: Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War by Audrey Wu Clark (Ohio State University Press)

 Audrey Wu Clark’s Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War gamely takes on raced and gendered representations as they emerge primarily in the novel form. Clark mines the ambivalent situatedness of the Asian American man, who operates as a kind of “player,” a tactical subject position that ultimately is informed by social oppressions, on the one hand, and transnational dynamics in the form of war, on the other. This figure of the “player” unpacks the ways that Asian American masculinities get formed in reaction to and alongside/in complicity with US imperial projects abroad; of particular critical interest is the ways that Clark performs this analysis by framing her critiques of each work within the time period of the works’ publication rather than only in terms of the time period of the work itself. Clark’s monograph exquisitely unveils a nuanced study of Asian American men, whose struggle to find connection amid the fragility of their relationships ultimately allegorize larger structures of transnational conquest and international violence. 

Outstanding Contribution: Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics by Salar Mameni (Duke University Press)

Salar Mameni’s monograph is a triumph not only in theoretical intervention but in the aesthetics of academic writing. Terracene is as textured and full of sensory power as the art that it analyzes, bringing new critical meaning to “crude aesthetics” in both its analysis and enactment.  Drawing together two important discourses on the global war on terror and the Anthropocene, Terracene offers an innovative approach to new materialist and posthumanist methodologies, one that in its “epistemic disobedience” illuminates our shared responsibilities to one another, to our myths, and to the planet. Mameni’s theoretical approach is vast, drawing from traditions as diverse as decolonial feminisms to Islamic cosmologies, yet coheres into a moving and clear readerly and sensual experience. It is also, needless to say, timely–arriving at a moment when scholarly works that address imperial violence in West Asia and the ongoing catastrophe of climate change are more imperative than ever. 

Honorable Mention: Maid for Television: Race, Class, Gender, and a Representational Economy by L.S. Kim (Rutgers University Press)

L.S. Kim’s panethnic media history of domestic workers in American television illuminates the oft-overlooked figure of the intimate other while weaving a compelling tale of racialized feminized labor in the United States. Kim explores the disruptive and pleasurable acts of agency performed by these minoritized characters and the underrecognized actors who portray them, particularly how they challenge white, heteropatriarchal notions of kinship, romance, and social relations. Kim’s impeccably researched study is a vital resource for understanding the role that the formerly ubiquitous cast of domestic servants have played in various racial and national imaginaries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Outstanding Contribution: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World by Claire Jean Kim (Cambridge University Press)

In Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, political scientist Claire Jean Kim offers a bold revision of the foundations of Asian American studies and understanding of US racial politics, arguing that the emphasis on anti-Asian racism of white supremacist structure has erased the role of anti-Blackness in Asian racialization. Influenced by Black studies thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Saidiya Hartman.  Kim drills down on the singularity of anti-Blackness and how it is distinct from other forms of racism. Drawing primarily from U.S. court rulings, congressional testimonies, public hearings, congressional debates, and organizational reports, Kim offers structural anti-Blackness as a missing piece to resolving the often paradoxical and precarious racial positioning of (East) Asian Americans as the prototypical perpetual foreigner and model minority. By re-orienting and centering structural ani-Blackness in the construction of Asian America, this book harkens an important critique of the Asian American Studies literature with a rigorous intervention and makes a landmark contribution to the advancement of Asian American scholarship to the center of social science scholarship in the US.

Honorable Mention: Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Limits of Assimilation by Dana Nakano (New York University Press)

Deeply personal, compelling, and yet theoretically sound, sociologist Dana Nakano’s research unveils why and how race still matters to these ostensibly fully assimilated Americans through an in-depth study of an ethnic theme park in Southern California. Highly accessible and well-researched, this book is an engaging ethnographic account of current Japanese American ethnic experiences as well as the history of those who were employed in the 1960s and 70s at an orientalist “Japanese” village and amusement park. As a first book, Nakano engages relatively effectively with a range of literature in sociology, anthropology, and Asian American studies to critique the conventional colorblind logic of citizenship and assimilation and innovate the concept of affective citizenship. The connections Nakano makes with historical anti-Japanese racism and its contemporary manifestations – the concept of the racial body as a perpetual racial uniform–is powerful. This book is a trailblazer in the scholarship on race, culture, and citizenship in contemporary Asian America.