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Selected Books for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month

Books

The Asian Pacific American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts by George J. Leonard, ed.
Call Number: PS153.A84 A87 1999
Publication Date: 1999
Students-and their teachers-encountering literature and arts from unfamiliar cultures will welcome the special help this book provides. Instructors who are unfamiliar with Asian Pacific cultures are now being asked to explain a reference to the Year of the Rat, Obon Season, or to interpret a haiku. When Amy Tan refers to the Moon Lady or the Kitchen God, what does she mean? Is Confucianism actually a religion? This book answers these and many other questions, for students, teachers, and the librarians to whom they turn for help.
Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey by Anne Mendelson
Call Number: TX724.5.C5 M376 2016 (e-book also available)
Publication Date: 2016
Chinese food first became popular in America under the shadow of violence against Chinese aliens, a despised racial minority ineligible for United States citizenship. The founding of late-nineteenth-century "chop suey" restaurants that pitched an altered version of Cantonese cuisine to white patrons despite a virulently anti-Chinese climate is one of several pivotal events in Anne Mendelson's thoughtful history of American Chinese food. Chow Chop Suey uses cooking to trace different stages of the Chinese community's footing in the larger white society.
Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging by Tritia Toyota
Call Number: e-book
Publication Date: 2009
Envisioning America is a groundbreaking and richly detailed study of how naturalized Chinese living in Southern California become highly involved civic and political actors. Like other immigrants to the United States, their individual life stories are of survival, becoming, and belonging. But unlike any other Asian immigrant group before them, they have the resources--Western-based educations, entrepreneurial strengths, and widely based social networks in Asia--to become fully accepted in their new homes. Nevertheless, Chinese Americans are finding that their social credentials can be a double-edged sword.
Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism, 2nd ed. by Joe R. Feagin & Rosalind S. Chou
Call Number: E184.A75 C515 2016
Publication Date: 2016
The second edition of this popular book adds important new research on how racial stereotyping is gendered and sexualized. New interviews show that Asian American men feel emasculated in America's male hierarchy. Women recount their experiences of being exoticized, subtly and otherwise, as sexual objects. The new data reveal how race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the lives of Asian Americans. The book depicts Asian Americans--experiencing racism but feeling the pressures to conform to popular images of their group as America's highly achieving "model minority."
Asian America: A Primary Source Reader by Jason Oliver Chang, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, & K. Scott Wong, eds.
Call Number: e-book
Publication Date: 2017
An essential collection that brings together the core primary texts of the Asian American experience in one volume An essential volume for the growing academic discipline of Asian American studies, this collection of core primary texts draws from a wide range of fields, from law to visual culture to politics, covering key historical and cultural developments that enable students to engage directly with the Asian American experience over the past century.
Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States by Lon Kurashige
Call Number: E184.A75 K87 2016
Publication Date: 2016
From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia.
Asian American Sporting Cultures by Stanley I. Thangaraj, Constancio Arnaldo,& Christina B. Chin, eds.
Call Number: e-book
Publication Date: 2016-04-05
Delves into the long history of Asian American sporting cultures, considering how identities and communities are negotiated on sporting fields. Through a close examination of Asian American sporting cultures ranging from boxing and basketball to spelling bees and wrestling, the contributors reveal the intimate connection between sport and identity formation. Sport plays a special role in the processes of citizen-making and of the policing of national and diasporic bodies. It is thus one key area in which Asian American stereotypes may be challenged, negotiated, and destroyed as athletic performances create multiple opportunities for claiming American identities.
The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies by Cindy I-Fen Cheng, ed.
Call Number: e-book
Publication Date: 2017
Brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the field of Asian American Studies, as a generation of researchers have expanded the field with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work done in the past decades and the place of Asian Americans in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research in the field of Asian American Studies has progressed.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
Call Number: E184.O6 H64 2020
Publication Date: 2020
A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness and the struggle to be human. Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. She believes that "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality-- when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.
The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders by Donald Denoon, ed.
Call Number: DU28.3 .C33 1997
Publication Date: 1997
This history presents an authoritative and comprehensive introduction to the experiences of Pacific islanders from their first settlement of the islands to the present day. It addresses the question of insularity and explores islanders' experiences thematically, covering such topics as early settlement, contact with Europeans, colonialism, politics, commerce, nuclear testing, tradition, ideology, and the role of women. It incorporates material on the Maori, the Irianese in western New Guinea, the settled immigrant communities in Fiji, New Caledonia and the Hawaiian monarchy and follows migrants to New Zealand, Australia and North America.

History of Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month

May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month – a celebration of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. A rather broad term, Asian/Pacific encompasses all of the Asian continent and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island).

The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. The majority of the workers who laid the tracks were Chinese immigrants.

Like most commemorative months, Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month originated with Congress. In June 1978, Rep. Frank Horton of New York introduced House Joint Resolution 1007, which proposed that the President should “proclaim a week, which is to include the seventh and tenth of the month, during the first ten days in May of 1979 as ‘Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week.’” This joint resolution was passed by the House and Senate and was signed by President Jimmy Carter on October 5, 1978 to become Public Law 95-419 (PDF, 158kb). During the next decade, presidents passed annual proclamations for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week until 1990 when Congress passed Public Law 101-283 (PDF, 166kb) which expanded the observance to a month for 1990. Then in 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102-450 (PDF, 285kb) which annually designated May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. (https://asianpacificheritage.gov/about/)

Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month