Asian Diasporas
Award Winner
2008: AAAS Book Award
Winner of the 2008 AAAS Book Award, sponsored by the Association for Asian American Studies.
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Asian migrants are inextricably linked to contemporary debates concerning the nation-state, neoliberalism, globalization, and transnationalism. This volume brings together these streams of inquiry and proposes a synthetic approach to examine various processes of migration and community formation on a global scale.
The essays included in Asian Diasporas look at the worldwide dispersal of Asian populations through the lens of diaspora. They illustrate the underlying structures of inequality that create diasporic communities—the cultural barriers that impede belonging to the place they inhabit and the place they call "homeland," the unequal processes that embody globalization, and the social inequalities in host and origin country alike. Five major themes connect and cut across the collection: the recognition of inter-Asian strife; the persistence of the nation state; the salience of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; the forces of labor, colonialism, and globalization; and the centrality of culture.
"Asian Diasporas skillfully integrates diverse perspectives from Asian Studies and Asian American Studies into a coherent theme to illuminate sensible understandings of how people of diverse Asian origins experience, imagine, and interpret diasporas across geographical and social spaces in the globalized world."—Min Zhou, University of California, Los Angeles
"Rhacel Parrenas and Lok Siu have created an anthology that bridges diaspora, Asian and Asian American Studies. This is a difficult task, given the range of topics and tensions possible, yet this anthology has engaged with the key debates in the field and enhanced the conversation in extremely fruitful ways. Asian Diasporas is required reading for many disciplines and fields interested in theorizing subjectivities formed out of migration and dispersions."—Inderpal Grewal, University of California, Irvine
"Illustrating seemingly porous global borders, Asian Diasporas is a timely collection of rich, well-researched chapters on the lives and experiences of people originating from Asia..."—Journal of International Migration and Integration
