Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month

May is officially designated Asian Pacific American Month. This is an opportunity to celebrate the contributions of Asian/Pacific Americans to the culture and history of the United States. May was chosen for recognition because of two significant events. May 7, 1843 saw the first arrival of Japanese immigrants to the United States. And the transcontinental railroad, the building of which included many Chinese laborers, was completed May 10, 1869.

Take some time out from your studies this May Term, and immerse yourself in Asian/Pacific American culture with these books and movies…

Fiction

Carbó, Nick and Eileen Tabios. Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2000.

Jen, Gish. Typical American. New York: Plume, 1992.

Quang Bao and Hanya Yanagihara, eds. Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America. New York: Asian American Writer’s Workshop, 2000.

Srikanth, Rajini and Esther Y. Iwanaga, eds. Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

Non-Fiction

Kibria, Nazli. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, eds. Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007.

Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood. Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Yoo, David. Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture Among Japanese-Americans of California, 1924-1949. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

DVDs/Videos

Bruce Lee: The Master Collection, 1999.

The Joy Luck Club, 1994.

Los Angeles Now, 2004.

Monsoon Wedding, 2002.

Roots in the Sand, 1998.

Also check out…

24th Annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, May 1-8, 2008

Connecting Cultures: Music of the Mekong River from Smithsonian Global Sound Archives

On the Cutting Edge: Contemporary Japanese Prints, Library of Congress Exhibition

Librart/Audiopsy

Armacost Library (Verletta Kern) and MLuM members of the School of Music will present Librart/Audiopsy, a site-specific sound work and exploration of library science as an aesthetic procedure and category. The work will feature music and wall projections. Please join us for Librart/Audiopsy on Friday, April 11th, 2008 from 7-9 PM in Armacost Library. An informal lecture about the work will be given in the Music/Film Room of Armacost Library at 8 PM.

Visual Media and Presidential Campaigns

As presidential campaigning intensifies toward the November 4th election we’ll be seeing more and more presidential campaign advertisements and media coverage. Visual portrayals of candidates play a powerful part in swaying opinions and forming voter decisions.

For those interested in presidential campaign ads, take a look at these two excellent online sources (available free of charge).

The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials,
1952-2004 from the Museum of the Moving Image is an archive of some of the more “famous” presidential campaign commercials from Eisenhower to Nixon to Kerry

And

Campaign 2008: Presidential Primary Campaign Ads from Stanford’s Political Communication Lab provides access to current campaign commercials.