In this episode, we discuss a special issue of The Journal of Asian American Studies: “Reckoning with the Interdiscipline.” This special issue, first conceived in 2018, reflects on fifty years since the 1968 West Coast institutionalization of ethnic studies as a distinct discipline, and forty years since the establishment of AAAS as an identifiable academic organization in 1979. With seventeen contributions from both established and early career scholars, the issue presents reflections on the trajectory of Asian American Studies as a field of study, and asks, “Is there a reason for Asian American studies? What are its preoccupations, its problems, and its possibilities in our present moment, more than fifty years on from our beginnings, in a time fraught with nativism and racial conflict? What ought Asian American studies be doing as we go forward?”

This episode features interviews with two of the three special issue editors: Lily Anne Welty Tamai and Paul Spickard. The hosts were Donna Anderson and Tandee Wang, PhD Students in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A link to the special issue can be found here.

The JAAS Podcast is a collaboration between the New Books Network and the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS). It is mixed and managed by Christopher B. Patterson, and features music by the band Necking.

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