Asian American Studies
Asian American Studies examines, through multidisciplinary
lenses, the experiences of Asians in the United States. It
is a field of study, creative and critical, interpretive
and analytical, grounded in experience and theory. It is
located in the academy and therewith shares some of the
assumptions and values of intellectual production and
pedagogy, but it is also rooted in the extra-academic
community and therewith shares some of the assumptions and
values of the prevailing and contested social and cultural
relations. Its subject matter is the diverse (but united by
"racial" construction, historical experience, political
ends) peoples from Asia -- from West to East Asia, South to
Southeast Asia -- who live(d) and work(ed) in the U.S. But
its subject matter is also comparative and expansive,
inclusive of America's Africans, Europeans, Latinos, and
native peoples, and its geographic range is transnational,
extending beyond the borders of the U.S.
Asian American Studies was formally instituted in 1969 at
San Francisco State College and the University of
California, Berkeley, following the longest student strike
in U.S. history led by the Black Student Union and Third
World Liberation Front at State and the Third World
Liberation Front at Berkeley. Arising from the
anti-colonial liberation struggles of "Third World" peoples
after World War II and from the domestic civil rights
movement, African, American Indian, Asian, and Latino
students at State and Berkeley demanded an education that
served and was relevant to their communities. "The Third
World movement," Berkeley's Front declared, "was and
continues to be a demand of colonized peoples for freedom
and self-determination -- for the right to control and
develop their own economic, political, and social
institutions."
The movement and demand spread to campuses up and down the
state, throughout the West, and to institutions nationwide.
Through those student struggles, African-American Studies,
along with American Indian, Asian American, and Latino
Studies, sometimes under the rubric of Ethnic Studies and
American Studies, sometimes as independent programs, became
familiar features of higher education throughout the 1970s
and 1980s. Asian American Studies witnessed a resurgence of
growth during the 1990s, when many of California's programs
(including faculty, student enrollment, degrees, and
institutional structures) expanded dramatically and new
programs were established in regions east of California.
These are documented in the following pages of this
"Directory." Accompanying and stimulating that new growth
have been student movements in California (as in the Asian
Pacific Student Union), the Midwest (as in the Midwest
Asian American Student Union), Rocky Mountain (as in the
Rocky Mountain Asian American Student Coalition), South (as
in Atlantic Coast Asian American Student Union), and East
Coast (as in the East Coast Asian Student Union), and
fostering the growth and well-being of the field has been
the Association for Asian American Studies.
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