Contemporary Asian American Communities: Intersections and Divergences (Asian American History and Culture Series) - Tapa dura

"Linda Vo and Rick Bonus identify the importance of 'everyday spaces' as critical sites for understanding changes occurring in Asian Pacific American communities. Essays in this book cover a wide range of topics, including youth, ethnically diverse populations, professional sectors, gays and lesbians, the urban poor, and multiracial communities. The editors stimulate and provoke new thinking about the ways that our communities are responding to developments in politics, technology, and cultural production."-Glenn Omatsu, Associate Editor, Amerasia Journal, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, and co-editor of Asian Americans: The Movement and Moment "The strength of this book is its emphasis on specific case studies that shed light on concrete dimensions of Asian America, and in this way, Vo and Bonus bring fresh tangibility to the lived experiences of Asian Americans."-The Journal of American Ethnic History "The book delivers on its promise to demonstrate the diversity of Asian American culture by offering a veritable fest of material dealing with many aspects of the cultural experiences of Asian Americans."-Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare "This collection makes for an interesting read and can be useful for undergraduate instruction."-Social Forces

Once thought of in terms of geographically bounded spaces, Asian America has undergone profound changes as a result of post-1965 immigration as well as the growth and reshaping of established communities. This collection of original essays demonstrates that conventional notions of community, of ethnic enclaves determined by exclusion and ghettoization, now have limited use in explaining the dynamic processes of contemporary community formation. Writing from a variety of perspectives, these contributors expand the concept of community to include sites not necessarily bounded by space; formations around gender, class, sexuality, and generation reveal new processes as well as the demographic diversity of today's Asian American population. The case studies gathered here speak to the fluidity of these communities and to the need for new analytic approaches to account for the similarities and differences between them. Taken together, these essays forcefully argue that it is time to replace the outworn concept of a monolithic Asian America. Author note: Linda Trinh Vo is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Rick Bonus, Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, is the author of "Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space" (Temple).