“This, then, is my choice: I can allow the events of my life to happen to me. Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own….
Contemporaries Essays
Model Minority Militarism: Figuring the Invincible Alien/Asian
Mark Greyson, a pubescent mixed-Korean American boy, gazes up at his white father, Nolan, as they sit together on the roof of their house. “Okay, Son, bear with me,” Nolan…
The Violent World-Remaking of Anti-Colonial Asian North American Fantasy
Over the last decade, fantasy novels by Asian North American writers have consistently appeared on bestseller lists for both adult and YA fiction, won prestigious awards, and achieved their own…
Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and the Asian American Bestseller
Conceived and drafted during the COVID-19 pandemic, Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts (2022) imagines an authoritarian America in the wake of a fictional “Crisis,” a period of severe economic depression…
The Model Majority: Asian America and the Making of American Professionalism
More than two decades into the twenty-first century, Asian Americans have obtained representational visibility and institutional agency in an ever widening range of professional industries. No longer restricted to so-called…
The Arrival of Asian American Mass Culture
Mass culture is not a term that Asian American studies has taken seriously up to this point, preferring, instead, the playground of popular culture. Understandably focused on examples that recognize,…
Has Asian American Studies . . . Succeeded?
In 2011, I wrote a blog post titled, “Has Asian American Studies Failed?”1 In it, I vented my frustrations about the fact that, despite 40 years of work in Asian…
Introduction: Asian American Mass Culture
Asian Americans seem to be everywhere these days. No longer confined to ethnic enclaves or niche subcultures, they populate our television screens winning academy awards and Olympic medals. They inhabit…
Fostering Adaptive Readers
Percival Everett’s James is, among other things, a book about how to read well. Everett’s narrator James, his reimagined Jim, is a reader who relates in critical and playful ways…
Teaching Writing for the Here-and-Now
In July, I’ll teach an introduction to humanities class for a group of soon-to-be high school seniors. A month later, I’ll teach a general education writing class to first-year college…