Editor's Preface

As the field of Asian American Studies continues to grow and evolve—and as the histories of more and more Asian American ethnic groups have become multigenerational—the issues of cultural resistance and accommodation have required increasingly complex analyses. Like earlier studies of African American efforts at moving beyond victimization to both adaptive and combative agency, in the face of such oppressive forces as slavery, Jim Crow, and "color blind" liberalism, contemporary Asian American scholarship has found traditional models such as "sojourner vs. settler" and "assimilation vs. isolation" woefully inadequate as means of explaining the dynamics of individual and community self-expression in an Asian American context that is itself multilayered and multicultural. Thus, whether centered in the past or the present, works in Asian American Studies must continue to demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit that challenges old paradigms and rethinks established perspectives.

The articles offered in this issue of JAAS reflect just such a commitment to intellectual entrepreneurship. Jiemen Bao explores the development of a temple built by Thai immigrants to California's Silicon Valley, discovering that adjustment to Western capitalism has significantly altered the ways that temple members pursue the goal of merit-making that is fundamental to the Theravada Buddhist belief system. Sue J. Kim seeks to liberate the creative legacy of avant-guard Korean American writer and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha from tired debates between nationalist identity politics and postmodernist challenges of majority-controlled form, postulating in their place an amalgum of recovered history and formic independence aimed at redirecting the study of Cha's work. Minako Waseda presents a fresh look at the roles played by music in the Japanese internment camps of World War II, demonstrating that internees utilized Japanese and Western musical genres, from the classical to the popular, as avenues of both adaptation and resistance—even simultaneously at times. Each of these pieces enriches the theoretical and empirical structures of Asian American Studies in particularly stimulating ways that promise to inform and inspire subsequent entrepreneurial research.