Association of Asian American Studies Book Awards 2021: Jian Neo Chen and Quynh Nhu Le

May 18, 2021

Association of Asian American Studies Book Awards 2021 (Part 1)

Jian Neo Chen and Quynh Nhu Le

Hosted by Christopher Patterson

Summary

This episode will be the first of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies.

Since 1987, the book awards at the annual Asian American Studies Association conference (or AAAS) has given valuable attention onto the works in Asian American Studies that have been leading the field, and have spotlighted works that seek to generatively disrupt, challenge, or undo the norms of Asian American Studies, keeping the field dynamic in its ideas, animated in its possible uses, and broadly affective in its possible impacts to educators, organizers, and the general public.

This first episode in the series will focus on the book awards in Social Sciences and Literary Studies. First, we will begin with our interview with Jian Neo Chen, whose book Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement (Duke UP, 2019) documents the threads of critical trans of color organizing and theory within the past twenty years. Our second interview will be with Quynh Nhu Le, whose book Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas (Temple UP, 2019) attempts to rethink the categories of indigenous and settler identities, to consider broader transnational forms of racial settler colonialism in the Americas.

Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia.