YCAR offers funding for its associate in support of their publication efforts and in this academic year, we are pleased to have supported four new publications by our Faculty Associates: Mona Oikawa (Equity Studies), Joan Judge (History), Muyang Li (Sociology) and Nalini Persram (Social Science).
Mona Oikawa (Equity Studies) is co-editor with Kirsten Emiko McAllister of After Redress: Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice, which the University of British Columbia Press will publish in April.
After Redress is a collection of eight essays by scholars who work in the areas of Indigenous Studies and Asian Canadian Studies. The book examines how struggles for justice continue long after truth and reconciliation commissions conclude and state redress is supposedly made. It focuses on what can be learned from the aftermath of struggles for redress by Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians. Contributors to this trenchant volume analyze the complex, often paradoxical process of redress from the perspectives of the communities involved. In a context where mechanisms for reconciliation and redress have been defined by the settler state, this book reveals how Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have responded to Western liberal notions of justice, whether by challenging or conforming to them, or by pursuing their own approaches. They discuss strategies used by Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians, adapted from their own epistemological or experiential roots and connections, and demonstrate that knowing our histories of struggle is essential for guiding our struggles today.
University of Chicago Press will publish Joan Judge’s The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China,1894–1954 in Fall 2025.
The book posits that cheap how-to manuals helped to liberate common readers from political structures that increasingly sought to mold them, granting them the autonomy to manage the daily-life challenges that arose in this era of governmental instability, institutional failure, and technological change. The book first introduces the common readers, the rustic “among the people” (minjian) publishers that created the common readers’ corpus, and the bookstalls and byways that constituted the national commoner book network. It then focuses on four specific challenges the daily-use manuals helped common readers confront: how to cure an opium addiction, how to avoid an electric shock, how to prevent a cholera infection, and how to graft a plant. Throughout, the narrative juxtaposes the politics of accommodation which governed the vernacular, minjian realm with the politics of tutelage dictated by “Enlightening” cultural and official authorities. While the politics of tutelage sought to eradicate temporal gaps between China and the world, national elites and local villagers, the politics of accommodation sought to reconcile global and domestic non-synchronicities. Whereas “Enlighteners” were determined to mold “the people” into model readers and compliant citizens, the minjian materials met commoners where they were and engaged them as knowers. The book introduces composites of such knowers: details of the problems they encountered, the solutions they attempted, and the texts they consulted to find their way. It argues that the acts of conciliation these readers engaged in shaped the broad epistemic terrain from which historical change was actualized in China’s century of revolution.
Muyang Li received support for The Return of Yellow Peril: Anti-Asian Racism during the COVID-19 Pandemic, co-edited with Guida C. Man (Faculty Associate, Sociology), X. Alvin Yang (former Visiting Graduate Associate) along with Chandrima Chakraborty and Sibo Chen. The University of British Columbia will publish the collection in November. The book presents a collection of selected papers presented at YCAR workshop “Anti-Asian racism during COVID-19: An interdisciplinary approach,” held in June 2021.
Since the global outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020, there has been a noticeable increase in assaults on individuals of Asian (especially Chinese) descent in Canada and other western countries. Anti-Asian racism, as a "shadow pandemic," has worsened the impact of COVID-19 on Asians in a multitude of ways. The impact of the present wave of anti-Asian racism is especially widespread and severe. It has led to the alarming resurgence of toxic, racialized “Yellow Peril” tropes in public discourse. Originating from the fear of non-white Other, the term “Yellow Peril” became prominent in the late 1800s as a pejorative metaphor attacking Chinese and other Asians. The term’s current resurgence builds on intensifying political polarization and right-wing populism across the Western world by further defaming Asians as “an existential threat to the West, to liberal human rights, to the market economy, to the ‘rules-based’ order, to American primacy”.
As Asian Canadians continue to face pandemic-related socio-economic consequences and racial discrimination, there is an urgent need for scholarly interventions that examines the resurgence of “Yellow Peril” from historical, geopolitical, and local perspectives. Contributions to the volume are guided by the following questions: What accounts for the increase in anti-Asian racism that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic? How does anti-Asian racism affect Asian communities and intercultural relationships? How can we mitigate the rise of anti-Asian racism?
By presenting critical perspectives on these pressing questions from scholars with diversified backgrounds, the volume aims to (1) provide a comprehensive diagnosis of the structural factors that contributed to the alarming return of “Yellow Peril” tropes in Canadian public discourse, (2) document how Asian communities in Canada responded to pandemic-related racial injustice, and (3) discuss potential policy and grassroots solutions to anti-Asian racism and other forms of racial injustice. The collection will call attention to the less visible societal implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby making significant contributions to ongoing public discussions about socioeconomic and racial equality.
Nalini Persram is author of Postrevolutionary Reckoning in Yemen Under Saudi-American Bombs, which is set to be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year.
This project engages in a critical inquiry into the military intervention in Yemen that began in 2015, and the current politics that surround the Red Sea crisis that developed in October 2023. Who are Ansar Allah, why were they the target of an illegal bombing campaign and how do both matters relate to the crisis in the Red Sea and the situation in Gaza? The endeavour is to foster research interest in the topic among undergraduates, graduates, post-doctoral researchers and visiting scholars, to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the themes and problematics identified, and to expand and refine them. It aspires to contribute to the network of national and international researchers, and particularly to engage those who are Yemeni or who live in Yemen, who are working on the complexities of the situation in Yemen and the region by bringing to bear on the existing literature different perspectives on a situation that requires urgent analytical, political and humanitarian attention.
The YCAR Publication Support Fund is intended to assist in covering expenses that will enable or enhance the publication of research on Asia or Asian diasporas by YCAR Faculty Associates or Graduate Associates, usually in the form of a book but YCAR has also funded expenses related to journal special issues, video/film projects and exhibitions. Learn more at this link.
The next deadline for applications is 01 May 2025.