Reading List – October 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.

Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption | Jenny Banh
Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption examines the attempt to transplant Disney’s “happiest place on Earth” ethos to Hong Kong—with unhappy results. Focusing on the attempted localization/indigenization of this idea in a globalized transnational park, the book delves into the three-way dynamics of an American culture-corporation’s intentions, Hong Kong, China’s government investment and Hong Konger audience, and the Hong Kong Chinese locale. The triple actors introduce an especially complex case as two of the world’s most powerful entities, the nominally Communist state of China and corporate behemoth Disney, come together for a project in the third space of Hong Kong. The situation poses special challenges for Disney’s efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success. 

Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America’s Pacific Century | K. Ian Shin
Tracing networks across both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, K. Ian Shin uncovers a diverse cast of historical actors that both contributed to US imperial stewardship and also challenged it, including Protestant missionaries, German diplomats, Chinese-Hawaiian merchants, and Chinese overseas students, among others. By examining the development of Chinese art collecting and scholarship in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, Imperial Stewards reveals both the cultural impetus behind Americans’ long-standing aspirations for a Pacific Century and a way to understand—and critique—the duality of US imperial power around the globe.

Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp | Tracy Slater
Together in Manzanar tells the fascinating and little-known story of prominent labor and antifascist activists Elaine Yoneda, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, and her husband Karl, a Kibei who had cut his union organizing teeth in Hiroshima before returning to California. This new narrative history follows the Yonedas as they navigate forced removal and incarceration during WWII, bringing with it a series of painful choices and conflicting loyalties, upheavals and violence, and a quest to survive with their children safe, their family whole, and their ethics intact.

Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong | Karen Fang
Background Artist is a kaleidescopic story about the immigrant origins of some of America’s best loved visual imagery. Sharing the inspiring story of Tyrus Wong’s remarkable 106-year life, this biography showcases the artist’s wide array of creative work, from the paintings and fine art prints he made working for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration to the unique handmade kites he designed in his retirement to fly on the Santa Monica Beach. It tells how Tyrus came to the United States as a 10-year-old boy in 1920, at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act barred him from legal citizenship. Yet it also shows how Tyrus found American communities that welcomed him and nurtured his artistic talent. Covering everything from his work as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros. to the best-selling Christmas cards he designed for Hallmark and other greeting card companies, this book celebrates a multi-talented Asian-American artist and pioneer.

Emerging from the Rubble: Asian/American Writings on Disasters | Yasuko Kase, Eliko Kosaka (Eds.)

“Emerging from the Rubble” is a sincere, erudite, and critical engagement with the history of our environmental crisis from the vantage point of transpacific Asian/American culture. With theoretical finesse and historical groundedness, the volume curates a set of wide-ranging essays to crack open the secretive linkage between imperial, colonial, racial, and environmental violence, and shows how the environmental crisis, while global in scale, is often racially and geographically specific. Calling for a reckoning with our precarity in the era of Capitalocene, it rewrites and advances the eco-critical scholarship from the nuclear fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the eco-horror in Vietnam to the dystopia of escaping the pandemic where survival must be the task of the humanities.