How America and Americans try to put ideals of religious pluralism in practice is a question at the center of my work. Because families were separated and ethnic communities were dispersed, Hmong were deprived of the material resources and critical mass of community necessary to carry out their rituals. American refugee policy made it very difficult for them to practice Hmong rituals in the US. I study Hmong refugees who came to the US in the seventies, eighties and nineties, after the war in Laos. The unique pressures on the religious practices of Asian immigrants to the United States is the subject of some of your work and your forthcoming book for Harvard University Press. Religion was a critical part of how they endured and survived. He also highlights how there was a spiritual resilience that Japanese Americans displayed. He highlights how Buddhist Japanese Americans had a pretty distinctive experience of being racialized and treated in a discriminatory way during the Second World War. That’s what Duncan Williams does in American Sutra. I don’t think we pay enough attention to the significance of religion in the construction of racial difference. This is one of my favorite books ever, and it is pretty new. This book reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation’s history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American. Next, you’ve named American Sutra by USC professor and Sōtō Zen Buddhist priest Duncan Williams. Even during exclusion, which began in the late 19th century, Chinese immigrants creatively circumvented the law and sent one family member to take advantage of opportunities in the United States to support relatives back in China. In the United States, the discovery of gold and the promise of opportunity to prosper that it seemed to offer, drew immigrants. A number of circumstances-political conflict, economic troubles, the lack of available arable land-made life really difficult for people in this region of China at that time. We need to think about the challenges they faced in China to understand why immigrants found the opportunities in the United States compelling. What push and pull factors led to the first big waves of immigration from China? It’s a fantastic example of the overall trend in the study of immigration to think about migrants’ lives as not being bounded by the nation-state, but rather lived across national borders. This book is a really fantastic example of how Chinese immigrants led lives that spanned two continents and transformed lives back in Taishan by sending remittances back to China, while building lives in the United States. We don’t take their pre-migration experiences seriously and we don’t consider how they continue to maintain connections with their home countries. We tend to think about immigrants leaving one place and beginning their lives anew in the United States. It focuses on Chinese immigrants coming to the United States from Taishan, a region in southern China, and how they found ways to live lives that were very transnational. I love this book because it upends how we think about immigration. Turning to your books, please begin by telling me about Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home by University of Texas at Austin professor Madeline Hsu. A decade ago, in the post- 9/11 world, the Association for Asian American Studies made a conscious effort to include Muslims in the category because of their unfair treatment. How Asian American is defined is an ongoing conversation. I do think Arab Americans have had a distinctive racialized experience in the United States, based on their particular history and how the U.S. There is a lot of utility in Arab Americans and Muslim Americans organizing alongside Asian Americans to achieve particular goals. Why?Ĭoalition identities, like all political alliances, depend on context. The acronym APPI represents the most recent effort to add Pacific Islanders, people from Samoa and Guam.īut generally West Asian Americans are still considered a separate group, often referred to as Middle Eastern Americans. In recent decades, people from South Asia, India and Pakistan are included.
In the seventies and eighties, the rubric of Asian American grew to include Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Historically it has been centered on East Asian American experiences – the experiences of Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans. The term Asian American developed in the late 1960s. What ancestries are commonly included under the umbrella of Asian American history?Īsian American has always been a coalitional identity that changes as political needs and social circumstances change. The history of a panethnic group of Americans is our topic today. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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