Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
Serving the Community College of Vermont & Vermont State University
“Do not be bound by this age; aim to create a new age that will delight people throughout the world.”
–Masayoshi Son
April is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The theme for 2024 is Advancing Leaders Through Innovation. See below for select VSCS Libraries books, ebooks & streaming films that celebrate AANHPI communities' rich heritages and numerous contributions to society.
A sampling of books by AANHPI authors or highlighting AANHPI experiences. All electronic titles are available to read online and our physical titles may be requested for pick-up at a VSCS library or sent to your home.
Adios to Tears is the very personal story of Seiichi Higashide (1909-97), whose life in three countries was shaped by a bizarre and little-known episode in the history of World War II. Born in Hokkaido, Higashide emigrated to Peru in 1931. By the late 1930s he was a shopkeeper and community leader in the provincial town of Ica, but following the outbreak of World War II, he--along with other Latin American Japanese--was seized by police and forcibly deported to the United States.
The social science discourse on the power of modernity and its everyday negotiation with tradition and locality in India has been a matter of continuous debate and discussion among academicians since the colonial era. By taking agriculture as a special field of investigation, this book describes the condition of modernity in the agrarian social system of contemporary India.
From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself--a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America.
A tour-de-force by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits.
From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island immigration station in San Francisco served as the processing and detention center for over one million people from around the world. The majority of newcomers came from China and Japan, but there were also immigrants from India, the Philippines, Korea, Russia, Mexico, and over seventy other countries. The full history of these immigrants and their experiences on Angel Island is told for the first time in this landmark book, published to commemorate the immigration station's 100th anniversary.
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship.
An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US.
Asian American plays provide an opportunity to think about how racial issues are engaged through theatrical performance physical contact, bodily labor, and fleshly desire as well as through the more standard elements of plot, setting, characterization, staging, music, and action.
This three-volume work represents a leading reference resource for Asian American studies that gives students, researchers, librarians, teachers, and other interested readers the ability to easily locate accurate, up-to-date information about Asian ethnic groups, historical and contemporary events, important policies, and notable individuals.
Tacoma's vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious, prefectural, and economic backgrounds.
Nineteenth-century Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island, bags heavy with silks from their villages in Bengal. Demand for "Oriental goods" took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey's boardwalks to the segregated South. Bald's history reveals cross-racial affinities below the surface of early twentieth-century America.
Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves
By now, everyone in the world knows the song "Gangnam Style" and Psy, an instantly recognizable star. But the song's international popularity is no passing fad. "Gangnam Style" is only one tool in South Korea's extraordinarily elaborate and effective strategy to become a major world superpower by first becoming the world's number one pop culture exporter.
This landmark volume explores the experiences of Chinese railroad workers and their place in cultural memory. The Chinese and the Iron Road illuminates more fully than ever before the interconnected economies of China and the US, how immigration across the Pacific changed both nations, the dynamics of the racism the workers encountered, the conditions under which they labored, and their role in shaping both the history of the railroad and the development of the American West.
Chang, the daughter of second-wave Chinese immigrants, has written an extraordinary narrative that encompasses the entire history of one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States, an epic story that spans 150 years and continues to the present day. Chang takes a fresh look at what it means to be an American and draws a complex portrait of the many accomplishments of the Chinese in their adopted country, from building the transcontinental railroad to major scientific and technological advances.
Bringing together grassroots organizers and scholar-activists, Contemporary Asian American Activism presents lived experiences of the fight for transformative justice and offers lessons to ensure the longevity and sustainability of organizing. In the face of imperialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and more, the contributors celebrate victories and assess failures, reflect on the trials of activist life, critically examine long-term movement building, and inspire continued mobilization for coming generations.
This essential text explores what it means to be a South Asian American living in the US while seeking, navigating and receiving psychological, behavioral or counseling services.
In this brilliant reinvention of the travel guide, artists, activists, and scholars redirect readers from the fantasy of Hawai'i as a tropical paradise and tourist destination toward a multilayered and holistic engagement with Hawai'i's culture and complex history.
Viet Nguyen, called "one of our great chroniclers of displacement" (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker), brings together writers originally from Mexico, Bosnia, Iran, Afghanistan, Soviet Ukraine, Hungary, Chile, Ethiopia, and elsewhere to make their stories heard. They are formidable in their own right--MacArthur Genius grant recipients, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, filmmakers, speakers, lawyers, professors, and The New Yorker contributors--and they are all refugees, many as children arriving in London and Toronto, Oklahoma and Minnesota, South Africa and Germany. Their 17 contributions are as diverse as their own lives have been, and yet hold just as many themes in common.
An interdisciplinary anthology of the rich Asian American influence on U.S. popular culture.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066-the primary action that propelled the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. From the last days of that month, when California's Terminal Island became the first site of forced removal, to March of 1946, when the last of the War Relocation Authority concentration camps was finally closed, the federal government incarcerated approximately 120,000 persons of''Japanese ancestry.''Social workers were integral cogs in this federal program of forced removal and incarceration: they vetted, registered, counseled, and tagged all affected individuals; staffed social work departments within the concentration camps; and worked in the offices administering the ''resettlement,'' the planned scattering of the population explicitly intended to prevent regional re-concentration.
Since its publication in 1993,
From a Native Daughter, a provocative, well-reasoned attack against the rampant abuse of Native Hawaiian rights, institutional racism, and gender discrimination, has generated heated debates in Hawai'i and throughout the world.
Asian diasporic writers imagine “home” in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong.
The story of two Indian women, one a victim of a brutal crime and the other an Americanized journalist returning to India to cover the story, and the courage they inspire in each other.
From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America.
Through a series of poems, a young girl chronicles the life-changing year of 1975, when she, her mother, and her brothers leave Vietnam and resettle in Alabama.
The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country.
T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.
The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject.
A varied collection of scholarly articles and interviews, Manzanar Mosaic engages diverse voices and considers multiple perspectives to illuminate aspects of the Japanese American community, the ethnic press, the Manzanar concentration camp, and the movement for redress and reparations.
Nicholas Hartlep’s annotated source book provides a critical intervention for educators to: (1) reassess their preconceptions about Asian American students as well as other students, (2) work towards unlearning the misconceptions rooted in the model minority stereotype, and (3) develop critical understandings of the diversity within Asian American student populations.
In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis--political, economical, and environmental--and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities.
In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into (and culls from) individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War.
Nikkei Baseball examines baseball's evolving importance to the Japanese American community and the construction of Japanese American identity.
Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond.
From Korean-American author Min Jin Lee, a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.
This book highlights inconsistencies within the field of sports scholarship and provides an opportunity to open up and extend conversations about the intersection of sports media and race -- particularly surrounding athletes of East Asian descent.
In 1943, University of Washington student Gordon Hirabayashi defied the curfew and mass removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and was subsequently convicted and imprisoned as a result. In A Principled Stand, Gordon's brother James and nephew Lane have brought together his prison diaries and voluminous wartime correspondence to tell the story of Hirabayashi v. United States, the Supreme Court case that in 1943 upheld and on appeal in 1987 vacated his conviction.
Drawing on in-depth interviews, this text examines how Asian American teachers in the US have adapted, persisted, and resisted racial stereotyping and systematic marginalization throughout their educational and professional pathways.
Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.
Based on in-depth ethnographic research in formal and informal educational spaces, this book argues that Hmong American youth are rendered invisible by dominant racial discourses and current educational policies and practices.
Rise is a love letter to and for Asian Americans--a vivid scrapbook of voices, emotions, and memories from an era in which our culture was forged and transformed, and a way to preserve both the headlines and the intimate conversations that have shaped our community into who we are today.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy.
A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu
From rupi kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one's roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself.
A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao Yasutani, a Japanese schoolgirl has decided there is only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century.
A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II.
In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist.
The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective.
From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate.
In Unsettled Visions, the activist, curator, and scholar Margo Machida presents a pioneering, in-depth exploration of contemporary Asian American visual art.
From a title-winning boxer in Louisiana to a Broadway baritone in New York, Japanese Americans have long belied their popular representation as “quiet Americans.” Showcasing the lives and achievements of relatively unknown but remarkable people in Nikkei history, scholar and journalist Greg Robinson reveals the diverse experiences of Japanese Americans and explores a wealth of themes, including mixed-race families, artistic pioneers, mass confinement, civil rights activism, and queer history.
An essential resource that addresses the unique experiences of trauma, healing, and mental health in Asian and Asian American communities.
The "yellow peril" is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture--dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia.
Yokohama, California, originally released in 1949, is the first published collection of short stories by a Japanese American. Set in a fictional community, these linked stories are alive with the people, gossip, humor, and legends of Japanese America in the 1930s and 1940s.
A selection of films from the library streaming video databases by AANHPI directors or that highlight AANHPI experiences.
Includes titles from Kanopy and Films on Demand. If you haven't accessed Kanopy before, learn how to set up your account in this FAQ.
2017 1 hr. 30 min.
Accused of mortgage fraud by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., Abacus becomes the only bank prosecuted after the 2008 financial crisis. The indictment and subsequent trial forces the Sung family to defend themselves – and their bank’s legacy in the Chinatown community – over the course of a five-year legal battle.
2020 Five 1 hr. episodes
This documentary series explores the question: As America becomes more diverse – and more divided – how do we move forward together? Told through intimate personal stories, the series will cast a new lens on U.S. history and the ongoing role that Asian Americans have played.
2022 57 min.
Betrayed: Surviving an American Concentration Camp tells the story of a group of Japanese American citizens and their mass incarceration by the U.S. government, purely on the basis of race. In the compelling voices of survivors of the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho, the film explores the unconstitutional suspension of the civil rights of these Japanese Americans during WWII, and the long-lasting impact of the incarceration on their community.
2019 2 hr. 40 min.
On May 6th, 1882—on the eve of the greatest wave of immigration in American history—President Chester A. Arthur signed into law a unique piece of federal legislation. Called the Chinese Exclusion Act, it singled out as never before a specific race and nationality for exclusion, making it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America, and for Chinese nationals already here ever to become citizens of the United States. It is a deeply American story about immigration and national identity, civil rights and human justice; about how we define who can be an American, and what being an American means.
This film presents the influx of Indian immigration into Michigan in the 21st century. Concepts such as identity, education, culture, religion, and traditions are discussed from the perspective of Indian people who became citizens of the United States.
20211 hr. 36 min.
The untold story of a Filipina American garage band that morphed into the ferocious rock group Fanny, who almost became the female Beatles.
2010 59 min.
Six thousand miles west of California, the Mariana Islands are American territory; but after generations of loyalty, the people of Guam and the Northern Marianas still remain second-class US citizens. Following the personal stories of four indigenous island leaders, this provocative film explores the history of American colonization in the Pacific - a moving story of loyalty and betrayal, about a patriotic island people struggling to find their place within the American political family.
2014 25 min.
Pacific Islanders serve in the U.S. military in disproportionally high numbers, and have suffered the highest casualty rates in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The men and women of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, are American citizens and serve in our country’s military at a rate three times higher than the rest of the country. Learn why the island’s returning veterans say they can’t get the healthcare they need.
Multiracial Americans is one of the fastest growing community demographics in North America. Mixed Match is a story told from the perspective of mixed race blood cancer patients who are forced to reflect on their multiracial identities and complex genetics as they struggle with a seemingly impossible search: To find bone marrow donors.
2020 56 min.
The Registry profiles veterans of World War II who served in the Military Intelligence Service –a secret unit of mostly Japanese Americans–U.S. citizens who went into combat with the U.S. Army against the Japanese enemy in the Pacific.These veterans want to make sure their legacy lives on through the M.I.S. registry where all of their names have been recorded.
2022 54 Min.
Following the aftermath of the March 2021 mass shootings at three spas in Atlanta, this film chronicles how the Asian American community came together to fight back against hate. Offering a conversation about race, class and gender, the film takes a deep dive into this critical moment of racial reckoning, exploring the struggles, triumphs and achievements of AAPI communities.
2019 1 hr. 8 min.
In 1979, a Vietnamese refugee shoots and kills a white crab fisherman at the public town docks in Seadrift, TX. What began as a dispute over fishing territory erupts into violence and ignites a maelstrom of boat burnings, KKK intimidation, and other hostilities against refugees along the Gulf Coast.
2017 1 hr. 29 min.
This acclaimed documentary follows the controversial 11-time Jeopardy! champion Arthur Chu as he attempts to leverage his viral celebrity to make positive social change online.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
