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  • 2015 AAAS Book Awards

History

Committee: Kornel Chang (Chair), Andrea Geiger, Naoko Shibusawa

The selection committee awards the 2015 Association of Asian American Studies Outstanding History Book Prize to Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem: Exploring the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013). Bengali Harlem stood out from a stellar crop of books for its brilliant work of historical recovery and writing. In beautiful prose and telling detail, Vivek Bald tells the lost stories of South Asian Muslim peddlers and seamen, and the transnational and multiethnic lifeworlds they created in the face of exclusion, colonialism, and segregation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tracing their global pathways, he reveals how their working-class, diasporic lives became enmeshed in some of the most iconic neighborhoods of color across the United States, illuminating the ties of home, family, and community and the shared experience of racial exclusion that bound different diasporic groups of color. In doing so, Bengali Harlem does the urgent work of bringing together (im)migration and African American history, helping us see both histories in new light. Bengali Harlem reminds us once again of the stakes involved in recovering and recounting the lives of “ordinary” individuals and the everyday connections and affiliations they forged. The committee congratulates Vivek Bald on his important achievement.

Social Science Book

Committee: Pawan Dhingra (Chair), Nazli Kibria, Lynn Fujiwara

The committee made a unanimous decision to give the award to Gilda Ochoa for Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans and the Achievement [End Page 371] Gap (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). This is a theoretically grounded, empirically rich argument on how the achievement gap between Asian American and Latinos students results at least in part from the racialized and gendered assumptions, as well as differential resources, of individuals inside and outside of schools. This smart comparison of two groups, considered on the opposite ends of the education spectrum, tells us more about each group than would otherwise be evident. Asian American studies would further benefit from more research that incorporated other groups. The book makes a strong argument to reconsider the formal and informal curriculum in schools if the goal is educational achievement for all.

Cultural Studies

Committee: Lucy Burns (Chair), Leslie Bow, Mimi Nguyen

The committee granted the Cultural Studies Book Award to Vernadette Gonzalez for Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines and an Honorable Mention to Eng Beng Lim for Brown Boys and Rice Queens. Both books deserve recognition from the Association. The two monographs exemplify postcolonial Asian American studies as they equally engage multiple colonial and postcolonial histories through the relationships between “primitive” and native “children” and the Western military or benefactor “daddy” (or “joe”) in the contexts of state and nation formation (through development via tourism), postcolonial administration, and neoliberal states.

Securing Paradise

We were impressed with Gonzalez’s dexterous staging of different archives through an interdisciplinary and feminist reading of tourism and militarism in the Pacific as linked practices of U.S. empire. The book offers a focused reading of the interconnectedness of Hawaii and the Philippines, with consistent and explicit articulation of the stakes of such connectedness in all their multiple forms. One of the committee members expressed the following as a strength of the book: its attentiveness to the traction of indigeneity as an analytic incommensurate with race, even though these categories are often articulated together in military and tourist formations across the Philippines and Hawaii.

Brown Boys and Rice Queens

This volume is historical, theoretical, and text-driven; the committee also found notable the book’s theoretical ambition, working to untangle the fractious appearances of the white daddy/ native boy dyad, with particular attention to the native boy, in colonial and postcolonial performances in the Asias. The book analyzes performances within the linked processes of postcolonial national cultural formation [End Page 372] through traditions and continuing hold of colonial power through modernity. One of the committee members expressed how she admired the authorial writing voice: “the voice vis-à-vis its archive was very personable and speculative at the same time it was serious and political.”

Literary Criticism

Committee: Christopher Lee (Chair), Denise Cruz, Donald Goellnicht

The committee is...

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