Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Per Hyphen's mission with our Across the Desk column (to deliver fresh scholarship to your doorstep), we are very pleased to introduce a series of crossposts with Amerasia Journal. Amerasia is Asian American studies' most longstanding academic journal, with venerable beginnings in the student activism of the Third World Movement. Following the journal's introduction, keep scrolling for a list of what to look forward to in the series, this week and next.

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Amerasia Journal is excited to partner with Hyphen to crosspost a recently published forum on Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which appears in our latest issue. In conjunction with Hyphen, we hope to generate thoughtful and engaged discussion that is the hallmark of Asian American Studies.

Celebrating our 40th year in existence, Amerasia Journal is the longest running and most respected journal in the field of Asian American Studies. Housed at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Amerasia Journal has helped to shape Asian American Studies as an interdisciplinary area of inquiry, publishing cutting edge research in the humanities, social sciences, and public policy since 1971. Amerasia also stands out among scholarly journals for its emphasis on encouraging engagement between campus and community, as well as fostering Asian American arts and letters. According to founding publisher Don T. Nakanishi, the journal "has benefited from and reflected a wide array of profound social changes that have occurred among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders -- be it their unprecedented growth and diversification, or their ever-increasing levels of access, representation, and achievement in American society's institutions and sectors that had long excluded, marginalized, or demonized them."

Amerasia Journal is continuing to reach out to a new generation of Asian American readers, scholars, students, and activists not only by covering timely topics, but also by expanding accessibility to the journal through social media. Last year, we launched our Amerasia Journal blog and a Facebook group page to keep readers involved in what we are doing at Amerasia.  We hope you will join Amerasia in ongoing conversations as well as emerging debates as they happen, online and in print.

Arnold Pan
Associate Editor | Amerasia Journal

Coming this Thursday:

• "On Tiger Mothers and Music Moms": Grace Wang has the distinction of being the one and only Asian American studies scholar cited in Battle Hymn. Her research looks, in part, at the Asian barnstorming of Julliard Pre-College. What does Wang have to say in response to Chua's claims about race and classical music?

Next week:

• "Ching Chongs and Tiger Moms: The 'Asian Invasion' in US Higher Education": Oiyan Poon connects the dots between UCLA undegrad Alexandra Wallace’s anti-Asian YouTube rant and Chua's capitalization on that same fear of invading Asian hordes. How, she asks, should education research counter this cultural moment?

Also in the series (to be crossposted in excerpt only):

• "Advice on How Not to Misread the Tiger Mother": Hyphen blog editor and literary studies scholar erin K Ninh examines Battle Hymn as memoir -- while heeding the small print that any advice found therein is for entertainment purposes only.
• "Battle Hymn of the Model Minority Myth": Education professor Mitchell Chang discusses Chua's Wall Street Journal essay in the context of other recent promulgations of the model minority myth, including Wesley Yang's "Paper Tigers."