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Hot Topics: AAPI Heritage Month

by Samantha Silver on 2024-04-19T10:10:00-07:00 in Ethnic Studies | 0 Comments

In the spirit of celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month through May, check out these selected books from the Libraries' print and electronic collections!

Permission to Come Home by Jenny Wang

ISBN: 9781538708002

Publication Date: 2022-05-03

Strengthen your sense of well-being and embrace empowering new approaches with this invaluable investigation into mental health in the Asian American community. Asian Americans are experiencing a racial reckoning regarding their identity, inspiring them to radically reconsider the cultural frameworks that enabled their assimilation into American culture. As Asian Americans investigate the personal and societal effects of longstanding cultural narratives suggesting they take up as little space as possible, their mental health becomes critically important. Yet despite the fact that over 18 million people of Asian descent live in the United States today--they are the racial group least likely to seek out mental health services. Permission to Come Home takes Asian Americans on an empowering journey toward reclaiming their mental health. Weaving her personal narrative as a Taiwanese American together with her insights as a clinician and evidence-based tools, Dr. Jenny T. Wang explores a range of life areas that call for attention, offering readers the permission to question, feel, rage, say no, take up space, choose, play, fail, and grieve. Above all, she offers permission to return closer to home, a place of acceptance, belonging, healing, and freedom. For Asian Americans and Diaspora, this book is a necessary road map for the journey to wholeness. "Dr. Jenny T. Wang has been an incredible resource for Asian mental health. I believe that her knowledge, presence, and activism for mental health in the Asian American/Immigrant community have been invaluable and groundbreaking. I am so very grateful that she exists."--Steven Yeun, actor, The Walking Dead and Minari .

Teaching the Invisible Race by Tony DelaRosa; Liz Kleinrock (Foreword by)

ISBN: 9781119930235

Publication Date: 2023-10-24

Transform How You Teach Asian American Narratives in your Schools! In Teaching the Invisible Race, anti-bias and anti-racist educator and researcher Tony DelaRosa (he, siya) delivers an insightful and hands-on treatment of how to embody a pro-Asian American lens in your classroom while combating anti-Asian hate in your school. The author offers stories, case studies, research, and frameworks that will help you build the knowledge, mindset, and skills you need to teach Asian-American history and stories in your curriculum. You'll learn to embrace Asian American joy and a pro-Asian American lens--as opposed to a deficit lens--that is inclusive of Brown and Southeast Asian American perspectives and disability narratives. You'll also find: Self-interrogation exercises regarding major Asian American concepts and social movements Ways to center Asian Americans in your classroom and your school Information about how white supremacy and anti-Blackness manifest in relation to Asian America, both internally and externally An essential resource for educators, school administrators, and K-12 school leaders, Teaching the Invisible Race will also earn a place in the hands of parents, families, and community members with an interest in advancing social justice in the Asian American context.

I Was Their American Dream by Malaka Gharib

Call Number: JV6201 .G43 2019

ISBN: 9780525575115

Publication Date: 2019-04-30

"A portrait of growing up in America, and a portrait of family, that pulls off the feat of being both intimately specific and deeply universal at the same time. I adored this book."-Jonny Sun " A high-spirited graphical memoir . . . Gharib's wisdom about the power and limits of racial identity is evident in the way she draws."-NPR WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD . NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR . The New York Public Library . Kirkus Reviews I Was Their American Dreamis at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka'sstory is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream. Praise for I Was Their American Dream "In this time when immigration is such a hot topic, Malaka Gharib puts an engaging human face on the issue. . . . The push and pull first-generation kids feel is portrayed with humor and love, especially humor. . . . Gharib pokes fun at all of the cultures she lives in, able to see each of them with an outsider's wry eye, while appreciating them with an insider's close experience. . . .The question of 'What are you?' has never been answered with so much charm."-Marissa Moss, New York Journal of Books "Forthright and funny, Gharib fiercely claims her own American dream."-Booklist "Thoughtful and relatable, this touching account should be shared across generations."- Library Journal "This charming graphic memoir riffs on the joys and challenges of developing a unique ethnic identity."- Publishers Weekly

Contemporary Asian American Activism by Diane C. Fujino (Editor); Robyn Magalit Rodriguez (Editor)

ISBN: 9780295749792

Publication Date: 2022-04-05

In the struggles for prison abolition, global anti-imperialism, immigrant rights, affordable housing, environmental justice, fair labor, and more, twenty-first-century Asian American activists are speaking out and standing up to systems of oppression. Creating emancipatory futures requires collective action and reciprocal relationships that are nurtured over time and forged through cross-racial solidarity and intergenerational connections, leading to a range of on-the-ground experiences.Bringing together grassroots organizers and scholar-activists, Contemporary Asian American Activism presents lived experiences of the fight for transformative justice and offers lessons to ensure the longevity and sustainability of organizing. In the face of imperialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and more, the contributors celebrate victories and assess failures, reflect on the trials of activist life, critically examine long-term movement building, and inspire continued mobilization for coming generations.

The First Asians in the Americas by Diego Javier Luis

ISBN: 9780674271784

Publication Date: 2024-01-09

The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire-from Manila to Acapulco and beyond-and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas. Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain's Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they officially became "chinos" within the New Spanish caste system. Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term "chino" officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connections across ethnic groups. Social adaptation and cultural convergence, Luis argues, defined Asian experiences in the Spanish Americas from the colonial invasions of the sixteenth century to the first cries for Mexican independence in the nineteenth. The First Asians in the Americas speaks to an important moment in the construction of race, vividly unfolding what it meant to be "chino" in the early modern Spanish empire. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history and reveals the fundamental role of transpacific connections to the development of colonial societies in the Americas.

Where I Belong : Healing Trauma and Embracing Asian American Identity by Soo Jin Lee and Linda Yoon

ISBN: 9780593543351

Publication Date: 2024

An essential resource that addresses the unique experiences of trauma, healing, and mental health in Asian and Asian American communities. Coauthors Soo Jin Lee and Linda Yoon are professional therapists who witnessed firsthand how mental health issues often went unaddressed not only in their own immigrant families, but in Asian and Asian American communities. Where I Belong shows us how the cycle of trauma can play out in our relationships, placing Asian American experiences front and center to help us process and heal from racial and intergenerational trauma. This book validates our experiences and helps us understand how they fit into the broader context of our family history and the trauma experienced by previous generations. Lee and Yoon draw on their own stories, as well as those of a diverse segment of the Asian diaspora, to help us feel seen and connected to our wider community. They provide essential therapeutic tools, reflection questions, journal prompts, and grounding exercises to empower readers to identify their strengths and resilience across generations and to embrace the beauty and fullness of their own identity and culture.

And, stay tuned for new books arriving soon!

I'd Rather Burn Than Bloom by Shannon C. F. Rogers

Call Number: On Order

ISBN: 9781250845665

Publication Date: 2023-07-11

Packed with voice, Shannon C.F. Rogers' I'd Rather Burn than Bloom is a powerful YA novel about a Filipina-American teen who tries to figure out who she really is in the wake of her mother's death. Some girls call their mother their best friend. Marisol Martin? She could never relate. She and her mom were forever locked in an argument with no beginning and no end. Clothes, church, boys, no matter the topic, Marisol always felt like there was an unbridgeable gap between them that they were perpetually shouting across, one that she longed to close. But when her mother dies suddenly, Marisol is left with no one to fight against, haunted by all the things that she both said and didn't say. Her dad seems completely lost, and worse, baffled by Marisol's attempts to connect with her mother's memory through her Filipino culture. Her brother Bernie is retreating further and further into himself. And when Marisol sleeps with her best friend's boyfriend - and then punches said best friend in the face - she's left alone, with nothing but a burning anger, and nowhere for it to go. And Marisol is determined to stay angry, after all, there's a lot to be angry about- her father, her mother, the world. But as a new friendship begins to develop with someone who just might understand, Marisol reluctantly starts to open up to her, and to the possibility there's something else on the other side of that anger- something more to who she is, and who she could be.

Asian American Is Not a Color by OiYan A. Poon

Call Number: On Order

ISBN: 0807013625

Publication Date: 2024-04-30

A mother and race scholar seeks to answer her daughter's many questions about race and racism with an earnest exploration into race relations and affirmative action from the perspectives of Asian Americans Before being struck down by the US Supreme Court in June 2023, affirmative action remained one of the few remaining policy tools to address racial inequalities, revealing the peculiar contours of racism and anti-racist strategies in America. Through personal reflective essays for and about her daughter, OiYan Poon looks at how the debate over affirmative action reveals the divergent ways Asian Americans conceive of their identity. With moving sincerity and insightful study, Poon combines extensive research with personal narratives from both herself and a diverse swath of individuals across the Asian American community to reflect on and respond to her daughter's central question- What does it mean to be Asian American? Poon conducts interviews with Asian Americans throughout the US who have been actively engaged in policy debates over race-conscious admissions or affirmative action. Through these exchanges, she finds that Asian American identity remains deeply unsettled in a contest between those invested in reaching the top of the racial hierarchy alongside whiteness and those working toward a vision of justice and humanity co-constructed through cross-racial solidarity. Poon uses these contrasting viewpoints to guide her conversations with her daughter, providing a heartfelt and optimistic look at how understanding the diversity and nuances of the Asian American experience can help us envision a more equitable future.

Feel free to suggest purchases for other intriguing tomes!

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