Displays and Exhibits @ SDCC Library

Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is the first comprehensive study of the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian ancestry active in the United States before 1970. The publication features original essays by ten leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and over 400 reproductions of artwork, ephemera, and images of the artists. Aside from a few artists such as Dong Kingman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Yun Gee, artists of Asian ancestry have received inadequate historical attention, even though many of them received wide critical acclaim during their productive years. This pioneering work recovers the extraordinarily impressive artistic production of numerous Asian Americans, and offers richly informed interpretations of a long-neglected art history. To unravel the complexity of Asian American art expression and its vital place in American art, the texts consider aesthetics, the social structures of art production and criticism, and national and international historical contexts. Without a doubt, Asian American Art will profoundly influence our understanding of the history of art in America and the Asian American experience for years to come.

Asian American Histories of the United States illuminates how an over-century-long history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the United States is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century.

Transformative change through unruly resistance, defiant love, and radical care 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.

If you think McDonald's is the most ubiquitous restaurant experience in America, consider that there are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendys combined. New York Times reporter and Chinese-American (or American-born Chinese). In her search, Jennifer 8 Lee traces the history of Chinese-American experience through the lens of the food. In a compelling blend of sociology and history, Jenny Lee exposes the indentured servitude Chinese restaurants expect from illegal immigrant chefs, investigates the relationship between Jews and Chinese food, and weaves a personal narrative about her own relationship with Chinese food. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles speaks to the immigrant experience as a whole, and the way it has shaped our country.

Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, have little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local. Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. This edited volume is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in one such region, the Pacific Islands, are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics that are at once local and global, historical, and contemporary. The authors recognize that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but they also acknowledge that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities. Rather than focus on the definition of identities, they engage with the fact that identities do things, that they are performed in everyday life, that they are transformed through events and movements, and that they are constantly negotiated. By addressing the complexities of these questions over time and space, this work provides a model for future endeavors that seek to embed dynamics of gender and sexuality in a broad field of theoretical import.

This wide-ranging study of the Pacific Islands provides a dynamic and provocative account of the peopling of the Pacific, and its broad impact on world history. Spanning over 50,000 years of human presence in an area which comprises one-third of our planet - Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia - the narrative follows the development of the region, from New Guinea's earliest settlement to the creation of the modern Pacific states. Thoroughly revised and updated in light of the most recent scholarship, the second edition includes: * an overview of the events and developments in the Pacific Islands over the last decade * coverage of the latest archaeological discoveries * several new maps * an updated and expanded bibliography Steven Roger Fischer's unique text provides a highly accessible and invaluable introduction to the history of an area which is currently emerging as pivotal in international affairs. A History of the Pacific Islands traces the human history of nearly one-third of the globe over a fifty-thousand year span. This is history on a grand scale, taking the islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia from prehistoric culture to the present day through a skilful interpretation of scholarship in the field. Fischer's familiarity with work in archaeology and anthropology as well as in history enriches the text, making this a book with wide appeal for students and general readers.

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.  With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Minority invisibility has gone unnoticed in the communication discipline. It denies the existence of racial problems by consciously or unconsciously downplaying, ignoring, or over-simplifying the issues. This is evidenced from the claims of color-blindness and reverse discrimination, the belief in model minorities, and exaggerated, negative, or purposeful racial displays that permeate American culture. Using in-depth interviews with Asian-American professionals from various metropolitan areas, this study investigates these professionals' perceptions on minority invisibility and model minority status. It explores Asian Americans' ethnic consciousness on four levels, discussing how the group perceives their individual invisibility, their group members' invisibility, the invisibility of other American co-cultural groups, and finally their expectations in changing minority invisibility in the United States. The work considers diverse viewpoints on minority invisibility, model minority, satisfaction and dissatisfaction with mainstream American culture, and co-cultural ethnic relations. This study is useful to graduate and undergraduate students and researchers with an interest in race relations, Asian-American studies, co-cultural theory, and intercultural communication studies.

One Book, One San Diego 2014

The most consistent of all series in terms of language control, length, and quality of story.David R. Hill, Director of the Edinburgh Project on Extensive Reading.

In this New York Times bestseller, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan-the inspiration for the television series on Apple TV+.  In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant-and that her lover is married-she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.

The history of tattooing is shrouded in controversy. Citing the Polynesian derivation of the word "tattoo," many scholars and tattoo enthusiasts have believed that the modern practice of tattooing originated in the Pacific, and specifically in the contacts between Captain Cook's seamen and the Tahitians. Tattoo demonstrates that while the history of tattooing is far more complex than this, Pacific body arts have provided powerful stimuli to the West intermittently from the eighteenth century to the present day. The essays collected here document the extraordinary, intertwined histories of processes of cultural exchange and Pacific tattoo practices.