In celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, we’re highlighting books that touch on this year’s theme: “A Legacy of Leadership and Resilience.” From environmental justice and Indigenous youth activism to Cold War-era Taiwanese student organizing, these works explore how AANHPI communities have shaped political and cultural movements and built legacies of resistance.
Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis
by Valerie Francisco-Menchavez
“[The author] shows us how Filipino caregivers are the lifeline—for their families back home struggling to make ends meet and for families here living through their loved ones’ last moments. She shows us too how Filipino caregivers are the lifeline to a better world in that they expose the most American irony: the people most essential to this country’s survival are often the ones who are made to feel most disposable. Ultimately, her gorgeously written book illustrates the power and possibilities that emerge from Filipino ways of knowing.” —Anthony Ocampo, author of Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons
Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora
by Emily L. Hue
“An important contribution to emplotting the economies of vulnerability that demand a particular performance of legible suffering from Burmese refugee or exilic artists, and the aesthetic strategies these artists deploy against their capture, not just by successive Burmese regimes but also by the global humanitarian industry and international arts market.” —Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Promise of Beauty
Transpacific, Undisciplined
edited by Lily Wong, Christopher B. Patterson and Chien-ting Lin
“This superb collection deepens and necessarily challenges our understanding of the ‘transpacific.’ It unmoors the transpacific from fixed disciplinary boundaries while demonstrating the intellectual stakes of critical scholarship that tracks the convergences between imperialism, militarization, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.” —Crystal Mun-Hye Baik, author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique
Nature Unfurled: Asian American Environmental Histories
edited by Connie Y. Chiang
“[A] stunning contribution to the fields of Asian American and environmental history. Connie Chiang has assembled an essential volume that adds new topics and communities while simultaneously revisiting subjects like Anti-Asian immigrant legislation and Japanese American internment with wholly original arguments and archives. This collection is an instant masterpiece that will change how scholars and activists understand their collective and intersecting pasts with an eye to more sustainable futures” —Julie Sze, author of Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
Waves of Belonging: Indigeneity, Race, and Gender in the Surfing Lineup
edited by Lydia Heberling, David Kamper, and Jess Ponting
“The geographic, methodological, and theoretical diversity in this volume redirects our attention from the dominant image of the white male surfer toward the Indigenous roots and routes of this ancient practice.” —Hōkūlani K. Aikau, coeditor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i
The Unknown Great: Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History
by Greg Robinson with Jonathan van Harmelen
“Drawing from his writings for a Japanese American newspaper and the Japanese American National Museum, Robinson explores new topics seldom touched on by previous historical scholarship.” —CHOICE Reviews
Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism
by Wendy Cheng
“This meticulously researched work of history relies heavily on oral history to cut through propaganda, hearsay, and supposition to get to the truth of how totalitarian governments exert control through manipulation of information and misinformation. In so doing, Cheng reveals an important portrait of a previously overlooked generation in Taiwanese and Taiwanese American history and spins a captivating true-life tale of the difficulties many Taiwanese student migrants encountered on university campuses between the 1960s–1980s.” —Electric Literature
Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation
edited by Diane C. Fujino and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez
Presenting lived experiences of the fight for transformative justice and offering lessons to ensure the longevity and sustainability of organizing, this volume “continues the social justice legacy of ethnic studies and Asian American studies” (Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, author of Moving Mountains: Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminisms and the 1977 National Women’s Conference).
Reppin’: Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice
edited by Keith L. Camacho
“In a field of literature currently so lacking, this book adds valuable nuance and complexity, demonstrating the desire and practices of Pacific and Pasifika youth to positively connect to and represent their cultures.” —Pacific Affairs
Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles
by Eric C. Wat
Winner of the 2023 Outstanding Achievement in History Award from the Association for Asian American Studies, Love Your Asian Body is “an integral piece towards understanding the queer Asian American struggle for sexual liberation and health equity” (International Examiner).
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics
edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan
This collection brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship, “with special attention to the complexities of Asian American feminist resistances, struggles, and self-creations” (Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy).
