Asian America Through The Lens

In Asian America Through the Lens, Jun Xing surveys Asian American cinema, allowing its aesthetic, cultural, and political diversity and continuities to emerge.

"In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as ... historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"--Jacket.

Spotlighting Asian Americans on both sides of the motion picture camera, Countervisions examines the aesthetics, material circumstances, and politics of a broad spectrum of films released in the last thirty years. This anthology focuses in particular on the growing presence of Asian Americans as makers of independent films and cross-over successes. Essays of film criticism and interviews with film makers emphasize matters of cultural agency--that is, the practices through which Asian American actors, directors, and audience members have shaped their own cinematic images. One of the anthology's key contributions is to trace the evolution of Asian American independent film practice over thirty years. Essays on the Japanese American internment and historical memory, essays on films by women and queer artists, and the reflections of individual film makers discuss independent productions as subverting or opposing the conventions of commercial cinema. But Countervisions also resists simplistic readings of "mainstream" film representations of Asian Americans and enumerations of negative images. Writing about Hollywood stars Anna May Wong and Nancy Kwan, director Wayne Wang, and erotic films, several contributors probe into the complex and ambivalent responses of Asian American audiences to stereotypical roles and commerical success. Taken together, the spirited, illuminating essays in this collection offer an unprecedented examination of a flourishing cultural production. Author note: Darrell Y. Hamamoto is Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology, Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Poltics of Television Representation, and New American Destinies: a Reader in Contemporary Asian and Latino Immigration. Sandra Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial/ethnic population in the United States. Especially since the 1990s, readings by Asian American biblical scholars have been increasing to meet the particular theological and pastoral concerns of their Christian racial/ethnic seminarians, clergy, and churches. Gale A. Yee is one of their major interpreters, becoming the first Asian American and first woman of color president of the oldest professional guild devoted to the critical study of the Bible, the Society of Biblical Literature. This book is an anthology of her major, ground-breaking essays on Asian American theorizing and analysis of the biblical text. It is a retrospective of her growth of over almost three decades in wrestling with questions like “What is Asian American biblical hermeneutics and how does one undertake it?”

For student research, this reference highlights the importance of Asian Americans in U.S. history, the impact of specific individuals, and this ethnic group as a whole across time; documenting evolving policies, issues, and feelings concerning this particular American population. Asian American History Day by Day: A Reference Guide to Events provides a uniquely interesting way to learn about events in Asian American history that span several hundred years (and the contributions of Asian Americans to U.S. culture in that time). The book is organized in the form of a calendar, with each day of the year corresponding with an entry about an important event, person, or innovation that span several hundred years of Asian American history and references to books and websites that can provide more information about that event. Readers will also have access to primary source document excerpts that accompany the daily entries and serve as additional resources that help bring history to life. With this guide in hand, teachers will be able to more easily incorporate Asian American history into their classes, and students will find the book an easy-to-use guide to the Asian American past and an ideal "jumping-off point" for more targeted research.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title "Cover to cover, Screening Asian Americans, a collection of 15 essays, is fabulous."--AsianWeek.com "This scholarly book uses 15 contributors to explore the various images of Asians, many of which have been negative."-Burlington County Times This innovative essay collection explores Asian American cinematic representations historically and socially, on and off screen, as they contribute to the definition of American character. The history of Asian Americans on movie screens, as outlined in Peter X Feng's introduction, provides a context for the individual readings that follow. Asian American cinema is charted in its diversity, ranging across activist, documentary, experimental, and fictional modes, and encompassing a wide range of ethnicities (Filipino, Vietnamese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese). Covered in the discussion are filmmakers--Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ang Lee, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Wayne Wang--and films such as The Wedding Banquet, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, and Chan is Missing. Throughout the volume, as Feng explains, the term screening has a twofold meaning-referring to the projection of Asian Americans as cinematic bodies and the screening out of elements connected with these images. In this doubling, film representation can function to define what is American and what is foreign. Asian American filmmaking is one of the fastest growing areas of independent and studio production. This volume is key to understanding the vitality of this new cinema. A volume in the Depth of Field Series, edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons Peter X Feng teaches English and women's studies at the University of Delaware.

This interdisciplinary inquiry examines Asian Canadian political and cultural activism around community building, identity making, racial equity, and social justice. Informed by a postcolonial and postmodern cultural critique, it traces the trajectory of progressive cultural discourse generated by Asian Canadian cultural activists over the course of several generations. Xiaoping Li draws on historical sources and personal testimonies to convincingly demonstrate how culture acts as a means of engagement with the political and social world. He addresses topical issues of "race," ethnicity, identity, and transculturalism.

This is the Student Edition for America Through the Lens, a Grade 11 U.S. History Survey program covering Beginnings to the Present.