Project MUSE®: Journal of Asian American Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Asian American Studies.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1998) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Asian American StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Asian American Studies1096-85981097-2129Latest articles in Journal of Asian American Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Preface
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978400
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Our main essays in this issue offer opportunities to train our attention to the deployment of race-inflected narratives and to the exercise of decoding and deconstructing them to expose hidden story gaps, reveal multiple meanings, or offer alternative elucidations. This business of mining texts, whether situated historically or via works of fiction, is the stuff of our academic enterprise, even ardently central to the scholarly practice of Asian American studies that we are all engaged in. Monica Trieu’s “The Nation’s Storyteller: The National Park Service, the Mystery of Japanese Bellboys, and the Making of the Model Minority,” is a primary example. In her dissection, we are drawn into a narrative that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallEditor’s Preface2025-12-19text/htmlen-USEditor’s Preface2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®98392026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The Nation’s Storyteller: The National Park Service, the Mystery of Japanese Bellboys, and the Making of the Model Minority
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978401
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As the nation’s storyteller, the National Park Service strives to tell the stories of ordinary and extraordinary Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders preserved in our nation’s parks, memorials, and historic sites.Nestled within the renowned Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP)2 is the equally famous El Tovar Hotel. Since its establishment in 1905, this iconic hotel has branded itself as “a world-class destination,” attracting many prominent guests, including Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Oprah Winfrey.3 In 1940, U.S. Census records indicate that this prominent establishment employed seven Japanese American bellboys.4 Notably, they made up the entire bellboy staff at that time.5 This intriguing fact is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallThe Nation’s Storyteller: The National Park Service, the Mystery of Japanese Bellboys, and the Making of the Model Minority2025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe Nation’s Storyteller: The National Park Service, the Mystery of Japanese Bellboys, and the Making of the Model Minority2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1506982026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19“Accepting the Social Order and Harvesting Brilliant Success”: Chinese Physicians in Twentieth Century Hawai‘i
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978402
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In 1953, Richard K. C. Lee was appointed to lead the Board of Health of the Territory of Hawai‘i; when Hawai‘i became a state in 1959, Lee became the first Chinese American to head a state health department. Lee’s pathway to the top public health position reflects not only “one man’s journey,”2 as he described his life, but the path of many Chinese people in Hawai‘i, from early beginnings as immigrant laborers on sugar and pineapple plantations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the highest levels of economic and social life by the mid twentieth century. Lee was one of many from the Chinese community who entered the fields of medicine, dentistry, and public health, fields in which, by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmall“Accepting the Social Order and Harvesting Brilliant Success”: Chinese Physicians in Twentieth Century Hawai‘i2025-12-19text/htmlen-US“Accepting the Social Order and Harvesting Brilliant Success”: Chinese Physicians in Twentieth Century Hawai‘i2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1106822026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The Hunch of Racism: Racial Paranoia and Microaggressions in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978403
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In Weike Wang’s short story “Omakase,” published in The New Yorker in 2018, a Chinese American woman in a relationship with a white man attempts to ascertain whether she is experiencing racial harm.1 On the surface, not much seems to happen: the woman and the man, a relatively well-to-do couple who remain unnamed, go to a high-end omakase restaurant in New York City, share a meal, and engage in polite conversation with the restaurant staff before leaving.However, the woman’s internal monologue, which the short story is focalized around, betrays the placid external world around her. The woman’s thoughts are described as “feverish…her brain in overdrive,” swirling around questions of how being Asian does or does not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallThe Hunch of Racism: Racial Paranoia and Microaggressions in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe Hunch of Racism: Racial Paranoia and Microaggressions in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1137352026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19How Can Asian American Studies Benefit from Computational Sociology?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978404
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A few years ago, I resumed teaching Asians in America as I was unable to teach this course from the academic years of 2016–17 through 2023–24. This timeframe was a bit tumultuous for a variety of reasons, and I will briefly discuss two events that intersected with Asian American studies (AAS), the death of George Floyd (1973–2020) and COVID-19. An aphorism attributed to Samuel Clemens postulates that although history may not repeat itself, it rhymes. The public murder of George Floyd sparked riots in Minneapolis and fostered a global movement. Further, perennial invisible causes and visible symptoms seemed to rhyme with the 1965 Watts and 1992 South Central riots. All three riots entailed a history of police
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallHow Can Asian American Studies Benefit from Computational Sociology?2025-12-19text/htmlen-USHow Can Asian American Studies Benefit from Computational Sociology?2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®1730862026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Collective Past as a Community-Building Initiative: Teaching Asian American Studies Through the History of Student Activism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978405
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How can students and faculty design and implement an Asian American studies course when there is not much institutional support? College campuses in recent years have witnessed a resurgence of student activism oriented toward racial justice, and the institutionalization of Asian American studies has been one of the key demands of Asian and Asian American students.1 The student demand is especially strong in private institutions on the East Coast where the impact of the 1970s ethnic studies movement has been less visible.2 Even when administrators heeded to student demands, programs and departments usually took years to materialize in these institutions, and the students in the meantime were left with a limited
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallCollective Past as a Community-Building Initiative: Teaching Asian American Studies Through the History of Student Activism2025-12-19text/htmlen-USCollective Past as a Community-Building Initiative: Teaching Asian American Studies Through the History of Student Activism2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®781482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19“Recognition” as Pedagogy: Finding Asian American Identity in the Midwest
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978406
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Food critic, and Asian American writer, Monique Truong, at a talk at the Library of Congress in 2019 describes how encountering Asian American literature as a Yale undergraduate at the end of the 1980s, through ‘a rotating roster of adjunct instructors,” provided her with “their literal bodies—in addition to their bodies of work” as physical beacons of comradeship and pleasure of existence of a relatively unknown field, experience, and literature. Truong recalls opening an Asian American “book and seeing for the first time the body—the Asian American body. It means holding a mirror in my hands, when I have never seen my reflection before.” Truong’s visceral reaction is a social, personal, and political
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmall“Recognition” as Pedagogy: Finding Asian American Identity in the Midwest2025-12-19text/htmlen-US“Recognition” as Pedagogy: Finding Asian American Identity in the Midwest2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®383672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The Argument for an Activist South Asian American Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978407
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My entry into ethnic studies (and eventually Asian American studies) did not originate in a strictly academic milieu, but rather through more than fifteen years of community political organizing. Much of that work took place building with youth in Oakland, California, across predominantly Black, Brown, and mixed-race neighborhoods. Those organizing experiences functioned as living laboratories of struggle and resistance, where categories of identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and ability converged with critical questions of power and privilege.As my activism deepened, I gravitated toward spaces where intellectual work was explicitly informed by “boots on the ground” organizing. This alignment
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallThe Argument for an Activist South Asian American Studies2025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe Argument for an Activist South Asian American Studies2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®408072026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Challenging Deportation and Creating Communities of Care: Legacies of Asian American Activism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978408
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Since the mid-1990s, the scale and frequency of U.S. deportations has been unparalleled, with the raw numbers of deportees significantly higher than in any previous period in U.S. history. Asians are the fastest-growing undocumented racial group in the U.S., with one in six Asian immigrants having undocumented status.1 This paper is a response to Kong Pheng Pha’s call in the Journal of Asian American Studies for activist efforts to situate racism within the violence of everyday culture and within public policies and laws to facilitate intersectional organizing, creating models of care that resist historical erasure.2 This paper analyzes three historic Supreme Court cases from the nineteenth century involving Asian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallChallenging Deportation and Creating Communities of Care: Legacies of Asian American Activism2025-12-19text/htmlen-USChallenging Deportation and Creating Communities of Care: Legacies of Asian American Activism2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®752752026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion by Chris Suh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978409
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In the last decade, the field of Asian American studies has been deeply engaged with the analytic of U.S. empire, which has produced a wide range of important scholarly interventions. Historians have been at forefront of these advances in challenging the field’s often uncritical acceptance of the liberal narrative of the nation in seeking to recover the “American” roots of Asian Americans by renouncing racial exclusion and valorizing national belonging. The recent publication of Chris Suh’s book, The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion, productively contributes to these intellectual and political concerns of empire in Asian American studies by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallThe Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion by Chris Suh (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USThe Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion by Chris Suh (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®97522026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America by Adrian De Leon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978410
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In Bundok, Adrian De Leon throws the reader’s spatial and historical understanding of the colonial Philippines and the U.S. transpacific empire into disarray. By constellating institutionalized repositories of knowledge and accumulations of multimedia data (mainly images and scholarly texts) into a narrative about the hinterlands of “Filipino America,” De Leon challenges the reader to adopt an anarchic position to the normative power of the archive, the nation, the state, and capital. Bundok, a Tagalog word for mountain, has etymologically and culturally meant so much more. Bundok connotes a remote and secluded space, on the periphery of the town. U.S. soldiers, for instance, during the long Philippine American
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallBundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America by Adrian De Leon (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USBundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America by Adrian De Leon (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®81032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity by Nishant Upadhyay (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978411
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Nishant Upadhyay’s Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity interrogates the entangled dynamics of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the complicity of dominant-caste South Asians in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. This review follows Upadhyay’s anti-caste and decolonial rationale by not capitalizing the first letters of ‘brahmin,’ ‘hindu,’ ‘hindutva,’ and related terms for consistency with the book. Framing caste as a transnational formation, Upadhyay argues that brahminical supremacy—the social, political, and epistemic dominance of brahmins and upper-caste hindus—not only shapes South Asian diasporic subjectivities but also sustains anti-Blackness, white supremacy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallIndians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity by Nishant Upadhyay (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USIndians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity by Nishant Upadhyay (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®98902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 by Tessa Winkelmann (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978412
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Scholars of U.S. empire in the Philippines have increasingly emphasized that social and sexual relations were not incidental but integral to colonial rule. Tessa Winkelmann’s Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946, intervenes into this scholarship by showing how interracial social and sexual relations were a “cornerstone” (8) of U.S. empire in the Philippines, shaping the lived dynamics of power in ways that extended beyond formal political institutions. Such relations simultaneously threatened and reinforced colonial hierarchies, constituting what Winkelmann terms “dangerous intercourse.” The double valence of this phrase—referring to the always
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/86/image/coversmallDangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 by Tessa Winkelmann (review)2025-12-19text/htmlen-USDangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 by Tessa Winkelmann (review)2025-12-192025TWOProject MUSE®101502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-12-19