|
||||||
 |
Join the virtual AMERASIA VOX / POP, on all that matters from UCLA's Asian American Studies Center Press. We welcome what you have to say. Selected commentaries (no page limits!) may be considered for future publication in Amerasia Journal. Virtual readers and contributors receive notice of special discount offers, book sales, and special announcements. Review the latest Amerasia VOX / POP issue BELOW and email your commentaries to us. Submissions and responses, please email:
Amerasia Journal begins this Spring's VOX POP with a peek at our forthcoming new issue 31:1 (2005) ORIENTALISM AND THE LEGACY OF EDWARD SAID. Dialogue with international scholars, cultural activists and writers including: Moustafa Bayoumi, Ali Behdad, Anna Bernard, Rey Chow, Kandice Chuh, Sohail Daulatzai, Richard Fung, Rahul Gairola, B.P. Giri, Sondra Hale, Alice Ming-Wai Jim, Ketu Katrak, Vinay Lal, Karen Leonard, Lorraine Sakata, Jinqi Ling, Lisa Lowe, Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, Vijay Prashad, E. San Juan, Tomas Santos, Shan Te-hsing, David Song, Henry Yu, and featured artist Phung Huynh.
TO OUR READERS Before and After Orientalism: From The Oriental School to Asian American Studies by Russell C. Leong
I. The Oriental School and Other Prisons For many Asian Americans the lived experience of being classified, represented and marked as an “Oriental” occurred at least a century before the appearance of Edward Said's book, Orientalism, in 1978. The process of becoming “orientalized” was far from an abstraction, but rather involved exclusionary immigration, land and educational laws, local lynchings, state violence, imprisonment and internment behind barbed wire, and cultural, linguistic, and political subordination. For the full "To Our Readers" article, please click here to download the PDF. Our Work Is of This World MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI, an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2000). No other outside practitioner has influenced Asian American Studies more than Edward Said. Orientalism, that founding text which powerfully explains how the production of knowledge and the application of colonial power are inextricably connected, changed many fields—literary studies, area studies, and anthropology, to name a few. It even inaugurated a new one, postcolonial studies, and it has also helped shape Asian American Studies of the last generation to an enormous degree. Asian Americanists have been using the theoretical perspective of Orientalism since its publication in order to launch critical attacks on the politics of representation and to expose the limits of American nationalism, the problems of white nativism, and the continuing ethnic and racial oppression of Asian Americans in the United States. And if Orientalism also explains how official power tends to deny, suppress, and distort other peoples' histories through the effects of a dominant and dominating culture, scholars in Asian American Studies have in turn responded by producing works of historical excavation that challenge invidious stereotypes of Asian Americans and provide alternative and critical histories. A quick glance at the library of Asian American Studies reveals Said's influence on the field. How many books and articles by Asian American scholars, after all, have “Orientalism” floating somewhere in their title? For the full article, please click here to download the PDF. Click Here for the full Table of Contents of AJ Vol. 31, No.1 Click Here for the AMERASIA JOURNAL EDITORIAL BOARD
|
|||||
