Sean Metzger‘s Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Indiana University Press 2014),examines how, in the past 150 years, China was rendered legible to Americans through items of clothing and adornment. Professor Metzger offers a rich and detailed study of Chinese fashion, calling it the “Sino/American interface” that marks political and cultural investments in America’s views of China and Chinese Americans. Professor Metzger does this by providing a cinematic and performance-based cultural history of four iconic objects: the queue, or man’s hair braid; the woman’s suit or the qipao; the Mao suit; and the tuxedo. Rather than simply provide a consumptive or trading history of these garments, professor Metzger traces their emergence as consolidating discourses of gender, race, politics and aesthetics. In doing so, he asks larger questions about how garments can and have been used to express ethnicity, and to render new meanings onto racialized bodies.

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Denise Cruz‘s Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) traces representations of Filipinas in literature and popular culture during periods of transitional power in the Philippines, from the transition from Spanish to American colonial power, then to Japanese Imperialism, then to independence and the Cold War, and then to contemporary global capital. Professor Cruz questions how these disruptions in power destabilized the elite classes, and provided moments of possibility for writers to shift ideas of femininity in the Philippines and for Filipinas abroad. Rather than focus solely on gender within the Philippines, Cruz considers how Filipina femininity was made through imperial networks from Spain, Japan, America and across the globe. In doing so, she exposes how the making of the Filipina was neither natural nor national, but was actually a strategic response to shifting colonial powers as well as to the demands of the global capital market. 

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Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez‘s Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2013), examines the intertwined relationship between tourism and militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines. Dr. Gonzalez questions dominant narratives of tourism as a tool of development by focusing on tourism as a means of both signifying and legitimating types of security provided by American military forces. Dr. Gonzalez uses an archive that includes literary works, travel brochures, highways, military bases and travel tours, in order to expose how tourism thrives on feelings of nostalgia, heroism and international brotherhood.

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Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2014 ), edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo, argue that Protestant Christianity has played an important role in how East Asians understood and adapted to the modern world. In particular, these articles focus on locating Christianity within East Asian political, economic, and social contexts and analyzing how Protestantism interacted with these different spheres of human activity. Articles in this anthology cover China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as Americans who claim descent from these nations, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, covering such diverse topics as Korean megachurches, Christianity and nationalism in wartime Japan, and social networks in south China. As such, this volume offers a great deal not only those who study Christianity, but to anyone interested in learning more about East Asian history.

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Martin Joseph Ponce‘s recently published book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012), traces the roots of Filipino literature to examine how it was shaped by forces of colonialism, imperialism, and migration. Rather than focusing on race and nation as main categories of analysis, Ponce uses a queer diasporic reading to consider the multiple audiences for Filipino literature. In doing so, he explores alternatives to the nation as the basis for an imagined community, and focuses instead on sexual politics and the transpacific tactics of reading.

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Leilani Nishime‘s Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014) challenges the dominant U.S. cultural narrative that imagines multiracial people as symbols of a future United States where race has ceased to function as a viable category. Nishime considers how representations of mixed race people often negate the significance of race by seeing racial mixture as an unprecedented social development that can promise a future free of race. By reading an archive of visual pop-culture that includes the celebrity of Tiger Woods, the film series “The Matrix” and reality television, Nishime considers how various narratives of multiracial Asian Americans can rupture naturalized notions of racial difference.

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Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US between the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 (University of California Press, 2013) situates this history within a broader frame of competing scientific, cultural, and political notions of racial hybridity as a detrimental or positive force, as a transformative power leading to racial degeneration or eugenic improvement. Placing special emphasis on the importance of self-narratives of some of the main figures of Teng’s account, Eurasian is built around the stories of families who lived through and contributed to early debates over Chinese-Western intermarriage in the US and China, tracing the histories of many of these families through the experiences of their children and the transformations they help shape, and understanding these stories alongside larger social and political discourses of Eurasian identity. It is a fascinating, sensitively wrought, and carefully argued book that both engages and shifts debates in the many fields that intersect in this modern history of Eurasian identity and its many voices, and offers a polyvocal accounting of the many ways that Eurasian identity was claimed by individuals and communities from British Columbia to Hong Kong.

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Ellen D. Wu‘s The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2014) charts the complex emergence of the model minority myth in fashioning Asian American stereotypes throughout the twentieth century. Wu investigates how inclusion of Asian Americans rather than exclusion can still reproduce racist attitudes against Asian Americans as well as other communities of color. In doing so, professor Wu considers the model minority myth’s multiple points of emergence from the U.S. state, countries in Asia, and Asian American communities themselves.

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Thuy Linh Tu‘s The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (Duke University Press, 2010) considers the recent rise of Asian Americans working in New York’s fashion industry, and explores how Asian-inspired fashions speak to American anxieties concerning the growing economic and cultural power of Asian nation-states. Rather than see Asian American designers as either complicit or subversive to the growing trends of Asian chic, The Beautiful Generation investigates how these designers continue to change American perspectives of fashion by making relationships between the product and the manufacturing process more intimate.

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Rick Baldoz is the author of The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (NYU Press, 2011), which investigates the complex relationship between the U.S. and Filipinos. Unlike other Asian American groups, Filipinos were considered colonial subjects of the American empire, and therefore were granted more rights and were defined as national subjects. At the same time, these Filipinos and Filipinas were still perceived as aliens, and were characterized as sexually and morally deviant. Baldoz considers how American imperial ascendancy affected the identity of the Filipino and Filipina migrants in relation to Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Chinese migrants.

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