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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....

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?...

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.”...

Instead of looking at the history of mixed-race representation as a series of misrecognitions that ultimately originate in the body itself, the changing status of mixed-race people in visual culture can help inform how race is understood as a technology....

What kinds of aesthetic and geocultural maps emerge if New Orleans becomes a starting point for considering Asian American culture and history? New Orleans continues to be an iconic and captivating city in the global imagination, known for its deep colonial and cultural history, while at the same time evolving into the post-Katrina “city that care forgot.” Situated at the edge of the American South, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean and influenced by Spanish, French, and British imperialisms, New Orleans is a geography distinguished by intense meteorological activity and a host of transnational crosscurrents; a below-sea-level port town that is continuously subject to environmental disaster, it has also long been vital to industry and trade, including the domestic slave trade that flourished in the period before the Civil War. These factors have shaped features distinctly associated with New Orleans, including its white–black–Creole model of race and its cultural traditions that make the region a popular tourist destination, such as Mardi Gras and jazz....

“No cultural identity is pulled out of thin air.”¹

—Stuart Hall

In the 1993 lecture “Negotiating Caribbean Identities” given at the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick, Stuart Hall contemplates processes of diasporic formation and national identity and claims that Caribbean peoples of African descent who have completed a “triangular journey,” or migrated from the (former) colonies to sites of colonial maters and paters, are “twice diasporized.”...

Scholarship surrounding literature from Hawai‘i is often cast as battles over who has the right to speak for “this place.” The publication of James A. Michener’s ...

Today’s scholarly accounts of the origins of Asian North American literature often center on two members of the same family: Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and her sister Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Reeve). It is without question that both authors wrote frequently about transpacific lives. The Eaton sisters were of Chinese British descent and born and raised in Canada. Although Edith Eaton is best known in Asian American literary studies as Sui Sin Far, the author of ...

In 1990, Actors Equity led protests against the decision to cast white actor Jonathan Pryce in the role of the Engineer, a biracial character, in the Broadway production of ...