This site is under permanent construction.
As noted at the end of my initial blog post, this project was impelled by the terrible circumstances of the Atlanta area spa shootings that took place on March 16, 2021, in which a 21-year-old white man killed eight people, including six Asian American women, in three different locations. What started out as an attempt to document the extraordinary public discourse that Asian American studies scholars and public intellectuals were producing in order to historicize the killings–the likes of which I had never seen in the public sphere in my 15+ years as an Asian American studies faculty member–turned into a broader effort at mapping the contours of this unruly, undefined, and undefinable multidisciplinary field that those voices were drawing on and marshaling to articulate their interventions.
I’ve long wanted to do something like this, but the vastness of the task and the need to keep updating the lists had always seemed too daunting. I’m consoling myself now by imagining that the site will be useful for teaching and advising purposes as well–and perhaps for visitors to the site.
It is also an interesting exercise in categorizing knowledge production–how to name rubrics, how broad or narrow they should be, what fits where, what deserves its own title, etc. The rhetorical import of this project should be self-evident: the field of Asian American studies is a robust, vibrant, and ever-expanding field. Though it may be “minor” in terms of political clout within the academy, it is far-reaching in its intellectual, disciplinary, and political significance.
I had always envisioned this kind of project as a collective endeavor. If you feel so moved, please send omissions, corrections, suggestions to my work address: ponce [dot] 8 [at] osu [dot] edu. Self-citations welcome!
(For info about me, visit my other university site.)
Updates
- 4/21/2021: Created “General” page under Asian American Studies. Added a few more entries to “Activism” and “History” pages.
- 4/18/2021: New blog post and creation of “Specific incidents” page in histories of anti-Asian violence section in the wake of the killing of four Sikhs in FedEx, Indianapolis, shooting on April 15, 2021. Also added the “#WeToo: A Reader” special issue of Journal of Asian American Studies (2021) to the “Feminism/women’s cultures” page.