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  • Cultural Studies Book Prize

Committee: Chandan Reddy (chair), Laura Kina, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

The process of reviewing the nominees for the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Prize was a difficult task this year, made especially so by the quality and diversity of the books being considered. It is exciting to see the rigorous and innovative contributions to Asian American studies that we had the privilege to review. The committee is pleased to recommend two books for the Cultural Studies Book Prize this year.

The first, Lucy San Pablo Burns’s Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (NYU Press, 2013), examines the generative work of Filipino and Filipino American performance practices across the twentieth century in both the United States and the Philippines. The book exemplifies interdisciplinarity ranging from archival studies and historiography to drama and performance studies. Burns’s [End Page 370] study chooses key moments in the transnational archive of Filipino embodied performance: from the 1904 exposition where Filipinos were infamously exhibited, to African American practices of brownface on vaudeville circuits, to corporeal creativity in taxi dance halls, to finally enactments of global fantasy in the staging of Miss Saigon. Throughout, Burns deftly theorizes the ways in which performing Filipinos undo the divisions between performance and work, recreation and labor, nation and empire, even race and gender. Her study forcefully works against the historical amnesia and forgetting that the disciplinary practice of “drama” and “performance” otherwise enable and demand. And her genealogical method elegantly reveals the ways in which colonial conditions are both displaced into and preserved by the postcolonial racializations that contemporary “Filipino” performance negotiates, traverses, and transforms. Impressive in its archival detail and contributions to cultural study, as well as in its nuanced materialist readings of performance, Burns’s book is an important contribution to transnational Asian American cultural and performance studies.

The second book, Mimi Nguyen’s The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012), is a poetic and ambitious book that examines Vietnamese racialization in our contemporary moment. The book argues that Vietnamese and Southeast Asian racialization occurs within a narrative context in which the United States is figured as global benefactor, offering the “gift” of freedom to the non-Western world. Within this narrative economy war migrations are rescripted as enactments of peace. Refracting her analyses through the figure of the Vietnamese refugee as the recipient of this political gift, Nguyen points to the “refugee” within U.S. immigration discourse as an agent of what she terms “liberalism’s seductions.” These seductions are crucial to the ways in which contemporary liberalism according to Nguyen continues to make U.S. empire appear as a just project to its citizens. The book’s contribution lies in its critique of U.S. culture’s investments in the refugee figure as a way to perpetuate the discourse of American exceptionalism. From the “napalm girl,” Kim Phúc’s story of trauma and forgiveness, to the transnational multiculturalism of contemporary wars that recruit refugee patriots, Nguyen locates the tragic reach of the discourse of national belonging-as-gift and belonging-as-gratitude that describes the conditions of Vietnamese refugee citizenship. [End Page 371]

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