Asian Americans

Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu offer a thoughtful and deeply self-reflexive collection of autobiographical narratives, photo essays, interviews, and short historical essays on the emergence and political formation of the Asian American movement, thirty years after its genesis in the crucible of anti-imperialist, anti-war, and "Third World" liberation movements in and beyond the United States. Most importantly for the field of Asian American Studies, Asian Americans: the Movement and the Moment constitutes a critical and overdue scholarly response to William Wei's unfortunate revisionist text The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Rupturing Wei's rendition of the movement as a university campus-constrained phenomenon that passed through an awkward political adolescence characterized by misguided militancy and dogmatic radicalism, Louie and Omatsu (along with several other collaborators) have organized an impressive set of primary texts that resonate with seminal Asian [End Page 190] American political texts such as Roots: an Asian American Reader (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971), Counterpoint (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1976), Gidra (1970-), The AAPA Newspaper (1969-1971), and other grass roots publications of the 1970s liberation movement era. This anthology also provides historical context and breadth to the recent spate of books dealing with contemporary varieties of Asian American activism and critical political discourse, including radical feminist, anti-globalization, radical queer/LGBT, and other movements for social justice and transformation. In this sense, The Movement and the Moment is an important contextualizing complement to such recent texts as Dragon Ladies (Boston: South End Press, 1997), The State of Asian America (Boston: South End Press, 1994), Legacy to Liberation (Brooklyn: Big Red Media, 2000), and Asian American Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996)

American studies · Art · Context (archaeology · Literature · Media studies · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Vietnam War · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Law