Reading List – March 2025

Our monthly newsletter shares notices of new book publications that our members email us about. If you or someone whose permission you have has had a book published within the past 12 months, please share the title, subject or (inter)disciplinary area(s), and link in this form, and we will share it with members.

Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption | Jieun Lee
Analyzing contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption, Jieun Lee’s Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption challenges longstanding ideas about adoption. Lee contends that in staging adoptees’ birth family searches and reunions, theater and performance artists unsettle dominant discourses that have essentialized adoptees through ethnonationalist, gendered, and postwar humanitarian narratives in both birth and adoptive cultures. In doing so, Lee reveals how these performances engage in acts of disavowal of and resistance to mythologies of adoption and adoptee experience. Learn more.

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film | Beenash Jafri
Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. Learn more.

Worlds at the End: Los Angeles, Infrastructure, and the Apocalyptic Imagination | Pacharee Sudhinaraset
Worlds at the End attends to a body of literature that renders Los Angeles’s infrastructure, or its material foundations, as central to the rise and consolidation of colonial life. Pacharee Sudhinaraset employs a women-of-color feminist methodology to examine Indigenous, Black, Asian American, and Latinx literary works about apocalypse and the end times. Learn more.

A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US Occupation | Kornel Chang
A Fractured Liberation brings to vivid life the brief but intense moment in postwar Korea when anything seemed possible, but nothing was guaranteed. The country had been abruptly split into US and Soviet military occupation zones, but, as Kornel Chang shows, ordinary people threw themselves into achieving self-governance throughout a unified Korea. The mostly left-leaning efforts were bolstered by an eclectic group of American supporters, including New Deal liberals, Christian socialists, and trade unionists. Learn more.

The Oldtimers | Wing Tek Lum
Wing Tek Lum’s third collection of poetry, The Oldtimers, imagines life in Honolulu Chinatown circa 1900. Lum gives voice to the forgotten pioneer generation of sojourners and settlers, detailing the trials and temptations of this bachelor society living far from their homeland—their hard work, their diversions, their challenges, and, even amidst the notorious plague and fire, their perseverance. Learn more.

Suburban Refugees: Class and Resistance in Little Saigon | Jennifer Huynh
America’s suburbs are more diverse and more unequal than ever before. Focusing on Southern California’s Little Saigon, a global suburb and the capital of “Vietnamese America,” Jennifer Huynh shows how refugees and their children are enacting placemaking against forces of displacement such as financialized capital, exclusionary zoning, and the criminalization of migrants. This book raises crucial questions challenging suburban inequality and complicates our understanding of refugee resettlement—and, more broadly, the American dream. Learn more.

Nature Unfurled: Asian American Environmental Histories | Edited by Connie Y. Chiang
Expansive and groundbreaking, Nature Unfurled examines the links between Asian American and environmental history from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. With provocative essays on topics such as health in urban Chinatowns, Japanese oysters on Washington tidelands, American Indian and Japanese American experiences at the Leupp boarding school and isolation center, Southeast Asian community gardens, and contemporary Asian American outdoor recreation, this collection underscores the vibrancy of the field of Asian American environmental history. Learn more.

Global Asias: Tactics & Theories | Edited by Tina Chen and Charlotte Eubanks
Global Asias: Tactics & Theories is the inaugural volume in an exciting new series that explores critical concerns animating Global Asias scholarship. It challenges the silos of academic knowledge formation that currently make legible and organize the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas. Transits, Indigeneity, Epistemology, Language, and A/Geography: These keywords highlight potential overlaps and points of disagreement between area studies, ethnic studies, and diaspora studies. Through an inventive approach and structure, the book exemplifies how the collaborative ethos of Global Asias praxis can catalyze new methods of scholarship and pedagogy—and create innovative models of academic knowledge-production. Learn more.