Editor's Preface

When I entered the field of Asian American Studies about twenty-five years ago, I did so from the perspective of a scholar trained in models of immigration, ethnic, and women's history that my own mentors had established through hard-won struggles for recognition. As a social historian, I also represented what was then perhaps only the second generation of academicians who focused their work on the lives of ordinary people. Over the past quarter-century, the challenge of my professors to continue pushing the boundaries of theory and research methodology has proved ever more salient in responding to new scholarship. The fluidity of Asian American Studies, in terms of both topic and approach, is remarkably dynamic, routinely stimulating and stretching my intellectual capacity.

The articles offered in this issue of JAAS reflect, in different ways, the vitality of current research on Asian American themes. Sämi Ludwig offers a fresh reading of Chang-rae Lee's now classic Native Speaker that foregrounds language rather than ethnicity in exploring the novel's cultural, and multicultural, implications. Richard Sundeen, Cristina Garcia, and Lili Wang present a quantitative study of volunteering behavior among Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans that often surprises in terms of difference as well as commonality. Amar Wahab focuses on British colonialism's incorporation of South Asian plantation workers into the complexities of nineteenth-century Caribbean society, a process at once reminiscent of post-emancipation African American laborers in the United States and distinct in its expressions of resistant agency. Through their research, these scholars admirably epitomize the increasingly rich and diverse conceptual character of Asian American Studies – and the growing array of geographical sources from which our field's best work flows.