
Grace Lee Boggs (1998) Living for Change: An Autobiography
This fascinating autobiography traces the story of a woman who transcended class and racial boundaries to pursue her passionate belief in a better society. It serves as a sweeping account of the life of an untraditional radical from the end of the thirties, through the cold war, the civil rights era, and the rise of Black Power, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers to the present efforts to rebuild our crumbling urban communities.

Thi Bui (2017) The Best We Could Do
A graphic novel and memoir that documents Bui’s story of her family’s escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

Diane Fujino (2005)Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
Heartbeat of Struggle is the first biography of Yuri Kochiyama, the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with Kochiyama's family, friends, and the subject herself, Fujino traces Kochiyama's life from an “all-American” childhood to her accomplishments as a tireless defender of human rights.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2004) Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor
Through a comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II, Glenn details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.

Ian Haney-López (2006) White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race
Haney López revisits the legal construction of race, and argues that current race law has spawned a troubling racial ideology that perpetuates inequality under a new guise: colorblind white dominance.

Karen Ishizuka (2016) Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties
Serve the People tells the story of the social and cultural movement that knit these disparate communities into a political identity, the history of how—and why—the double consciousness of Asian America came to be. Drawing on more than 120 interviews and illustrated with striking images from guerrilla movement publications, the book evokes the feeling of growing up alien in a society rendered in black and white, and recalls the intricate memories and meanings of the Asian American movement.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui (2008) Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity
In the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHCA) of 1921, the U.S. Congress defined “native Hawaiians” as those people “with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” This “blood logic” has since become an entrenched part of the legal system in Hawai‘i. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is a comprehensive history and analysis of this federal law that equates Hawaiian cultural identity with a quantifiable amount of blood—a legal classification that undermines Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) sovereignty.

Yuri Kochiyama (2004) Passing it On: A Memoir
The account of an extraordinary Asian American woman who spoke out and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Whites for social justice, civil rights, and prisoners and women's rights in the United States and internationally for over half a century.

Susan Koshy (2005) Sexual Naturalization Asian Americans and Miscegenation
In the first major interdisciplinary study of Asian-white miscegenation from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century, Koshy traces the shifting gender and racial hierarchies produced by antimiscegenation laws, and their role in shaping cultural norms. Not only did these laws foster the reproduction of the United States as a white nation, they were paralleled by extraterritorial privileges that facilitated the sexual access of white American men to Asian women overseas.

Erika Lee (2015) The Making of Asian America: A History
This book tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. It serves as an important reminder that Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country.

Lisa Lowe (2015) The Intimacies of Four Continents
Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism.

Mae Ngai (2014) FacebookTwitterEmailMore58 Impossible Subjects Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
Ngai “traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century.” By offering a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s, she he shows that immigration restriction remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference.

Gary Y. Okihiro (1994) Margins and Mainstreams
A collection of six essays that challenge the Eurocentrism and other biases of Asian American social studies, and that explore gender and sexual politics within the Asian American community by arguing for a centering of Asian American women as well as greater consideration of the intersections of Asian America with Black and Latinx history and politics.

Gary Y. Okihiro (2015) American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders
American History Unbound reveals our past through the lens of Asian American and Pacific Islander history. In so doing, it is a work of both history and anti-history, a narrative that fundamentally transforms and deepens our understanding of the United States. Okihiro positions Asians and Pacific Islanders within a larger history of people of color in the United States and places the United States in the context of world history and oceanic worlds.

Ann Laura Stoler (2010) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
Tracking matters of intimacy to investigate matters of state in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indonesia, Stoler argues that social classification is not a benign cultural act but a potent political one. These essays examine the critical role played by sexual arrangements and affective attachments in creating colonial categories and distinguishing the ruler from the ruled.

Ronald Takaki (1998) Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
Blending narrative history, personal recollection, & oral testimony, this book presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. Takaki writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the canefields of Hawaii, of "picture brides" marrying strangers in the hope of becoming part of the American dream. He tells stories of Japanese Americans behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps during World War II, Hmong refugees tragically unable to adjust to Wisconsin's alien climate & culture, & Asian American students stigmatized by the stereotype of the "model minority."

Vicente L. Rafael (2000) White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
This book examines the period from the onset of U.S. colonialism in 1898 to the emergence of a Filipino diaspora in the 1990s. With a focus on the contradictions and ironies that suffuse Filipino history, Rafael delineates the multiple ways that colonialism has both inhabited and enabled the nationalist discourse of the present. His topics range from the colonial census of 1903-1905, in which a racialized imperial order imposed by the United States came into contact with an emergent revolutionary nationalism, to the pleasures and anxieties of nationalist identification as evinced in the rise of the Marcos regime.

Ellen Wu (2015) The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority
Wu demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement.

Judy Yung (1995) Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco
A comprehensive history of the powerful Chinese American women’s movement that arose in the Bay Area in the early 20th century.

Helen Zia (2000) Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People
This book describes the transformation of Asian Americans from small, disconnected, largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society. It explores the junctures that shocked Asian Americans into motion and shaped a new consciousness, including the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, by two white autoworkers who believed he was Japanese; the apartheid-like working conditions of Filipinos in the Alaska canneries; the boycott of Korean American greengrocers in Brooklyn; the Los Angeles riots; and the casting of non-Asians in the Broadway musical Miss Saigon.



















