Category: Asian & Pacific American studies

Begin Here Receives Honorable Mention for AAAS Book Award

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Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood, by Rocío G. Davis, will receive an Honorable Mention for the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) 2007 Literacy Studies Book Award. The award will be presented at this week’s AAAS Annual Meeting in Honolulu.

“Informed by the latest developments in postmodern and postcolonial autobiography theory, this vital work focuses on 50 autobiographies of childhood written by Asian Americans in North America. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Voices from Okinawa

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Despite Okinawa’s long and close relationship with the United States, most Americans know little about the rich and remarkable culture of Japan’s southernmost islands. And they know even less about the Okinawan immigrants who brought their heritage to the U.S. over one hundred years ago. In this landmark publication—the first literary anthology showcasing Okinawan Americans—their voices are heard in plays, essays, and memoirs. Through the beauty, humor, and heartbreak in Jon Shirota’s award-winning plays, the experiences of an extraordinary people are illuminated. And in personal essays and interviews, the compelling life stories are told of June Hiroko Arakawa, Philip Ige, Mitsugu Sakihara, and Seiyei Wakukawa. The distinctive cultural perspectives and literary excellence of Voices from Okinawa, edited by Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato, expand our definition of American literature, showing it to be more inclusive, complex, and multilayered than we have imagined.

Mānoa 21:1
February 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3391-6 / $20.00 (PAPER)

UH Press Author Wins Outstanding Book Award

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This month the Conference on College Composition and Communication will present it’s 2009 Outstanding Book Award to John M. Duffy for his book, Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community. As the book award committee noted in its discussion of the book, “it richly conceptualizes the study of literacy by considering its historical, personal, institutional, cultural, and transnational dimensions.”

The CCCC Outstanding Book Award is presented annually to authors or editors of a book published two years previously that makes an outstanding contribution to composition and communication studies. Books are evaluated for scholarship or research and for applicability to the study and teaching of composition and communication.

A Japanese Robinson Crusoe

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First published in 1898 and long out of print, A Japanese Robinson Crusoe, by Jenichiro Oyabe, (1867–1941) is a pioneering work of Asian American literature. It recounts Oyabe’s early life in Japan, his journey west, and his education at two historically Black colleges, detailing in the process his gradual transformation from Meiji gentleman to self-proclaimed “Japanese Yankee.” Like a Victorian novelist, Oyabe spins a tale that mixes faith and exoticism, social analysis and humor. His story fuses classic American narratives of self-creation and the self-made man (and, in some cases, the tall tale) with themes of immigrant belonging and “whiteness.” Although he compares himself with the castaway Robinson Crusoe, Oyabe might best be described as a combination of Crusoe and his faithful servant Friday, the Christianized man of color who hungers to be enlightened by Western ways.

“This is a fascinating memoir by a young Japanese who spent thirteen years (1885–1898) traveling to all parts of the world: the Kurile islands, China, Okinawa, Hawaii, the United States, Britain, Portugal, etc., before returning to his native country as a teacher and a Christian minister. Few in the world, least of all Japanese, would have seen so much of the world on their own. What he saw—and, even more revealing, how he described what he saw—adds to our understanding not only of late nineteenth-century Japan’s encounter with distant lands, in particular the United States, but also of the history of international travels, a history that constitutes an essential part of the phenomenon of globalization.” —Akira Iriye, Harvard University

Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies
January 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3247-6 / $28.00 (PAPER)

The New Ethnic Community in Urban America

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Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America, by Wei Li, is an innovative work that provides a new model for the analysis of ethnic and racial settlement patterns in the United States and Canada. Ethnoburbs—suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas—are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual, and often multinational communities in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration but does not necessarily constitute a majority. Wei Li documents the processes that have evolved with the spatial transformation of the Chinese American community of Los Angeles and that have converted the San Gabriel Valley into ethnoburbs in the latter half of the twentieth century, and she examines the opportunities and challenges that occurred as a result of these changes.

December 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3065-6 / $56.00 (CLOTH)

Hawaii’s Home Away from Home

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Why do Hawai‘i people love to go to Las Vegas?

Sam Boyd knew the answer and built a home away from home for them in the gambling Mecca of the world. How he accomplished this together with the people who helped him is the story behind California Hotel and Casino: Hawai‘i’s Home Away from Home, published by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i (JCCH) and distributed by University of Hawai‘i Press. Written by Dennis M. Ogawa and John M. Blink, the book relates a story worth telling and important lessons in business leadership.
November 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3329-9 / $20.00 (PAPER)

Celebrate the publication of California Hotel and Casino at these events and book signings in and around Honolulu:
▪ Thursday, November 13, 10:30 a.m. – Reception and free public admission to the JCCH Community Gallery, which will feature an exhibit of photographs, historical objects, and video to honor Sam Boyd as well as highlight the lasting relationship between between the California Hotel and the people of Hawai‘i. The exhibit ends January 23, 2009.
▪ Saturday, November 15, noon-1:00 pm – Borders, Windward Mall
▪ Saturday, November 15, 4:00-5:00 pm – Borders, Ward Centre
▪ Sunday, November 16, 10:30-noon – Don Quijote, Pearl City
▪ Sunday, November 16, 1:00-2:00 pm – Borders, Pearlridge Center
▪ Sunday, November 16, 3:00-4:00 pm – Don Quijote, Waipahu
▪ Monday, November 17, 10:00-11:30 am – Don Quijote, Kaheka Street (John Blink only)
▪ Monday, November 17, 1:00-2:30 pm – Don Quijote, Kailua (John Blink only)
▪ Tuesday, November 18, 10:00-noon – Marukai Wholesale Mart
▪ Tuesday, November 18, 12:30-1:30 pm – Bestsellers, Bishop Street

Scheduled Appearances for Milton Murayama

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Maui-born author Milton Murayama will be visiting Hawai‘i to sign copies of his fourth novel, Dying in a Strange Land, which completes the tetralogy of the Oyama family saga that began with his 1975 classic, All I Asking for Is My Body. Murayama followed this with Five Years on a Rock and Plantation Boy in 1994 and 1998, respectively.

Book Signings
Saturday, November 8, 2:00-3:00 pm: Barnes & Noble Lahaina
Sunday, November 9, 3:00-4:00 pm: Borders-Kahului
Tuesday, November 11, 2:00-3:00 pm: Barnes & Noble Ala Moana
Saturday, November 15, 2:00-3:00 pm: Borders-Pearlridge Center
Sunday, November 16, 2:00-3:00 pm: Borders-Ward Centre

“Revisiting Milton Murayama: From Plantation to Diaspora”
The public is also invited to attend a special event scheduled for Wednesday, November 12, from 6:30-8:30 pm at the UH-Manoa Art Auditorium. The program will feature the premiere showing of a video interview with Murayama by Gary Pak and remarks by Marie Hara and other noted Hawai‘i writers. A short reading and talk by Murayama and an autograph session will follow. Light refreshments will be served. This event is sponsored by University of Hawai‘i Press with the UH Manoa English Department, Bamboo Ridge Press, and the University of Hawai‘i Diversity and Equity Initiative, and in partnership with the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities, with additional support from the “We, The People” initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Asian Settler Colonialism

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Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i, edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, is a groundbreaking collection that examines the roles of Asians as settlers in Hawai‘i. Contributors from various fields and disciplines investigate aspects of Asian settler colonialism to illustrate its diverse operations and impact on Native Hawaiians. Essays range from analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino settlement to accounts of Asian settler practices in the legislature, the prison industrial complex, and the U.S. military to critiques of Asian settlers’ claims to Hawai‘i in literature and the visual arts.

“When Native Hawaiian activists lash out against Asian settler colonialism, we must remember what Malcolm X said: ‘The conditions that our people suffer are extreme, and an extreme illness cannot be cured with moderate medicine.’ This book takes a candid and necessary look at indigenous views of Asian settlement in Hawai‘i over the past century.” —Yuri Kochiyama, civil rights activist

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3300-8 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Hawaii at the Crossroads

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Hawai‘i at the Crossroads of the U.S. and Japan before the Pacific War, edited by Jon Thares Davidann, tells the story of Hawai‘i’s role in the emergence of Japanese cultural and political internationalism during the interwar period. Following World War I, Japan became an important global power and Hawai‘i Japanese represented its largest and most significant emigrant group. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hawai‘i’s Japanese American population provided Japan with a welcome opportunity to expand its international and intercultural contacts. This volume, based on papers presented at the 2001 Crossroads Conference by scholars from the U.S., Japan, and Australia, explores U.S.–Japanese conflict and cooperation in Hawai‘i—truly the crossroads of relations between the two countries prior to the Pacific War.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3225-4 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Hakka Soul

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Hakka Soul: Memories, Migrations, Meals, by Chin Woon Ping, chronicles the dreams, ambitions, and idiosyncrasies of her family, beginning with the death of her grandmother in pre-Independence Malaya. It was a tumultuous period when the occupying Japanese army had just been defeated, the British colonial government was losing its grip on the country, and a communist guerilla insurgency had broken out in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula. Her stories follow the family’s move to the United States and a journey to China to visit her father’s ancestral home.

Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies
August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3289-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Racial Performativity and World War II

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In The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II, Emily Roxworthy contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal. Roxworthy demonstrates that this theatrical logic of segregating the real from the staged, the authentic experience from the political display, grew out of the manner in which internment was agitated for and instituted by the U.S. government and media. During the war, Japanese Americans struggled to define themselves within the web of this theatrical logic, and they continue to reenact this trauma in public and private to this day.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3220-9 / $35.00 (CLOTH)

“This is an original and well-written analysis, contributing much to the literature on internment and, thereby, re-energizing the ideological stages of internment discourse.” —Caroline Chung Simpson, University of Washington

Milton Murayama’s Latest: Dying in a Strange Land

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Milton Murayama’s long-awaited Dying in a Strange Land brings to a close the saga of the Oyama family. Familiar faces from All I Asking For Is My Body, Five Years on a Rock, and Plantation Boy return to advance the story from the years immediately following World War II to the 1980s. After her husband sinks them deep in debt, strong-willed and pragmatic Sawa takes charge of the family. The war ends and her children leave the plantation camp for Honolulu and the Mainland, but Sawa has little time for loneliness or regret. When asked by her neighbors if she misses them, she replies, “They must look for what they want.”

June 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3197-4 / $24.95 (PAPER)

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