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The word goes back to Greek alphabētos, combining alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek

The history of Asian American and Pacific Island art in the 20th century has been attracting increasing numbers of scholars thanks to its richness, its expansiveness, and the fact that it has been relatively unexplored. The term “Asian American” was first created in ...

In 2012, the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian American Experience in Seattle, Washington, held an exhibition titled “Asian American Arcade: The Art of Video Games.” The exhibition’s goal was to “explor[e] the interplay between video games and Asian Pacific American identity & experience.”...

The first major Asian American community, Chinese Americans, maintained the musical tradition of Chinese opera on a grand scale. From the mid-...

By the early 1890s, moving pictures had been invented in the form of short films from thirty to sixty seconds in length viewed by individuals in amusement arcades on machines such as Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. Cinema came into being in ...

Tracing the history of Asians and Asian Americans in entertainment prior to World War II is a daunting task. For actors of Asian descent in the United States at that time, orientalism limited opportunities for employment and recognition of their artistry. It also led to their typecasting as exotic foreigners or threats to white dominance. Furthermore, the musical, dance, and theatrical traditions of Asia were presumed to lack the artistic and representational sophistication of Western performance, reflecting the belief in Asian racial inferiority. This hierarchy appeared in travel literature, musicological analyses, and historical monographs and was used to justify the marginalization of Asian arts within American society. By the 1940s, the pervasiveness of these beliefs and casting practices—what became known as yellowface—impacted every aspect of the performing arts, requiring entertainers of Asian ancestry to find novel ways to maintain their creativity while simultaneously subverting stereotypes....

In the 1840s, westward expansion in the United States was driven by the combined impetuses of the idea of Manifest Destiny and the discovery of gold in California. Of the two, the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which sanctified imperialism as the embodiment of the will of God, was more devastating for Mexicans. The Mexican-American War (...

“Every barrio has its butch!”—Butchlalis de Panochtitlan

“To me the name sounds like Butch Stars in Aztec Pussyland, what does it really mean?” In a ...

Contrary to its earlier uses, mulataje is conceived as the antithesis of mestizaje, the archetype of the “racially mixed” or “degenerate” that has historically served to uphold over the rest of the human species the supremacy of a European “Ideal” subject as the representative embodiment of the analogical principle of the perfect correspondence of the parts to the whole that has informed the concept of beauty in the Western world since the Renaissance....

Comedy and humor are notoriously difficult to define, and no single theory can encompass all comedy and humor. In the broadest sense, “comedy” and “comedic” refer to a specific genre (or set of genres) with distinct conventions, though these conventions have varied and changed across time and place....

What is Asian American art? Does it need to be created by an artist of Asian heritage in the United States or have an identifiable Asian aesthetic? Does it need to embody Asian American politics or could it be a theoretical proposition? Does it need to be accountable to or reflect Asian American communities?...

A crown inferior to the royal crown. The coronet of the Prince of Wales has one arch fewer than the

The cross is not solely a Christian symbol originating with the crucifixion. In Carthage it was used for ornamental purposes.

“The ship sailed at midnight.”¹ Is this the beginning of a fictional story or a report of something that happened, and how would one know the difference? This article is a philosophical and wide-ranging introduction to the burgeoning field of deixis studies; literature, by this view, is central rather than peripheral to what humans do with their minds. There are many disagreements among scholars and researchers, but there is a gathering focus on deixis....

The category of Filipino American literature includes a diverse range of voices from the second largest Asian American ethnic group in the United States....

K-pop is a form of South Korean popular music that emerged in the 1990s in South Korea. It blends Korean and foreign musical elements and has subsequently spread throughout East Asia and the world. Its most visible performers are “idols,” solo singers as well as male and female pop groups whose members sing, dance to choreographed routines, and engage in other promotional activities in the entertainment industry. K-pop also includes nonidol artists who also produce hybridized music with global appeal, such as Korean R&B, indie, and mainstream hip-hop artists. The global spread of K-pop has been aided by technology in the form of digital music, social media, YouTube, and the Internet. Some use K-pop as a catchall term for all Korean popular music, including Korean folk songs, trot (an early ...

The Japanese American incarceration has fully embedded itself into the history of the United States. The imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in ten camps across the western United States has been repeatedly referenced as a moment of national shame, in which racial minorities were incarcerated, not because of any crimes that had been committed but because of their race and ethnic origin. Since the enactment of this wholesale injustice and betrayal of purported US ideals, the Japanese American and Asian American communities and the nation as a whole have grappled with the nation’s abandonment of its principles and the branding of Japanese Americans as enemies of the state. How the Japanese American incarceration has been represented and remembered reveals how US institutions and Japanese Americans have attempted to make whole again the profound rupture between the Japanese Americans and the United States during World War II. At the same time, such efforts to make coherent what is essentially an incoherent moment in history and memory have also prompted alternative ways of remembering the incarceration, ones that document loss and trauma rather than redress and healing....

In her poem “The Watchtower,” Mitsuye Yamada pairs a brief description of the “one uniformed guard,” who monitors the Japanese Americans detained in the World War II internment camps, along with that of the teenagers who dance to a live band in a camp rec hall: “This is what we did with our days. / We loved and we lived / just like people.”...

As a technical and metatextual concept, hypertext denotes a specific format of electronic text organization.¹ At its most basic, it refers to interactive networks of digital documents, files, and/or media connected through hyperlinks. These networks can be relatively small and stand-alone, as is the case with self-contained interlinked file repositories on media carriers. Some of these formats and systems appeared pre–World Wide Web, in bespoke software packages such as Apple’s Hypercard and, specifically for literary and scholarly projects, Eastgate Systems’ multilinear authoring software, Storyspace. More commonly, however, hypertext networks operate online and can assume gigantic and conceptually growing dimensions, epitomized by the World Wide Web and its underlying connective protocol, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Electronic hypertexts are navigated by activating and following hyperlinks, using mouse-click, mouse-over, touch, controller buttons, voice recognition, or even head position and vision direction (as in the case of VR)....

Writing in Ancient Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, parts of El Salvador, Honduras, and Belize) has a long history going back thousands of years. Olmec artworks in Mexico record texts as early as ...