May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, which pays tribute to the generations of Asian and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America’s history and are instrumental in its future success. In today’s post, Penn Press is sharing a selection of our books from recent years related to this theme, including books exploring the history of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities and individuals as well as studies of contemporary Asia that may prove resonant with Asian/Pacific American diasporic experiences. Browse the titles below, and use discount code APAHM23-FM for 40% off plus free shipping until May 31!
The Kingdom and the Republic
Noelani Arista
In The Kingdom and the Republic, Noelani Arista uncovers a trove of previously unused Hawaiian language documents to chronicle Hawaiians’ experience of encounter and colonialism in the nineteenth century, reconfiguring familiar histories of trade, proselytization, and negotiations over law and governance in Hawaiʻi.
Making Meaningful Lives
Iza Kavedžija
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Japan, Making Meaningful Lives provides an intimate anthropological account of the existential concerns of elderly Japanese women and men.
China Urbanizing
Edited by Weiping Wu and Qin Gao
China turned majority urban only in the recent decade, a dramatic leap given that less than 20 percent of its population lived in cities before 1980. The chapters in China Urbanizing, written by American and Chinese scholars, provide new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change.
Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea
Ingu Hwang
Drawing on previously unused or underutilized archival sources, Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea offers the first account of the historical intersection between South Korea’s democratic transition and the global human rights boom in the 1970s.
Japanese American Incarceration
Stephanie D. Hinnershitz
In Japanese American Incarceration, Stephanie Hinnershitz connects the forced removal, incarceration, and exploitation of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II to the history of prison labor in the United States.
Legacies of Fukushima
Edited by Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles and Ryuma Shineha
In Legacies of Fukushima, contributors, drawn from the realms of journalism and academia, science policy and citizen science, activism and governance, contextualize 3.11 through the lens of critical disaster studies.
Disastrous Times
Edited by Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan
Disastrous Times explores how people across Asia live through and make sense of environmental transformation and asks how we might analyze this moment of disruption and risk.
Gu Hongming’s Eccentric Chinese Odyssey
Chunmei Du
Gu Hongming’s Eccentric Chinese Odyssey is the first comprehensive study in English of Gu Hongming, both the private individual and the public cultural figure. An “imitation Western man” who became “a Chinaman again,” Hongming was a reactionary to his contemporaries and an Eastern prophet to foreign intellectuals after the carnage of WWI.
P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Hans Ingvar Roth
P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of P. C. Chang (1892-1957), who lived an eventful and cosmopolitan life and was one of the key writers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, responsible for its defining features of universality and religious ecumenism.
Human Rights in Thailand
Don F. Selby
By placing greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological concern, Don F. Selby concludes that they are a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics.
Spaces in Translation
Christian Tagsold
In Spaces in Translation, Christian Tagsold explores Japanese gardens in the West and ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events. He concludes that a process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts created an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.
Deportation
Torrie Hester
A history of immigration policy in the United States and the world, Deportation chronicles the unsystematic emergence of what has become an internationally recognized legal doctrine, the far-reaching impact of which forever altered what it means to be an immigrant and a citizen.
Prairie Imperialists
Katharine Bjork
In Prairie Imperialists, Katharine Bjork examines how the experiences of American Army officers on the domestic frontier shaped them for the later roles they played in U.S. expansion abroad in the Philippines, Cuba, and Mexico.
