Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

In this tour de force interpretation of early-20th-century US history, Jung (Univ. of Washington) weaves together three interlocking narratives. First, he recounts the activism of transpacific trade unionism, guided by international anarchism and communism, at a time when most Asians in North America were workers. Second, he traces the origins of the US security state to the American empire's "imperial insecurities"--intense fear of anti-colonial "sedition" by Asian trade unionists, which yielded an infrastructure of state violence comprising surveillance, criminalization, incarceration, and deportation. Third, he proposes a reframing of 20th-century Asian American history as revolutionary pan-Asian solidarity against white supremacy and imperialism, finding common ground with anti-racist Black American revolutionaries. This history of Asian working-class, anti-colonial activism is a powerful rebuttal to prevailing narratives of Asian Americans striving for acceptance as model minorities. Action-packed chapters revolve around the life and times of leading transpacific revolutionaries, among them Filipinos Artemio Ricarte, Pablo Manlapit, and Crisanto Evangelista; South Asian activists, notably those in the Ghadar Party, and the communist internationalist M. N. Roy; and Japanese trade unionists Sen Katayama and US-born Karl Yoneda. Though it will not replace existing approaches, this intervention in Asian American history is crucial reading that reinforces the centrality of Asian American history to modern US history.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Previous biographers of Magnus Hirschfeld focused intently on the famed sexologist's work but provided limited insight into his sexual relationship with his young Chinese student, Li Shiu Tong, or their world travels together. Marhoefer's accessible text reimagines the American, British, and Dutch empires throughout which the pair navigated racism, sexism, bigotry, and imperialism and expands readers' historical understanding of how and why progressive individuals pandered to white supremacists to achieve social justice during the 1930s. Hirschfeld's work formed the basis of the ideology that homosexuality was a biological variation rather than a psychological fault to be medically resolved. Marhoefer (Univ. of Washington) aptly navigates her subject with a keen critical lens, deriding Hirschfeld's ignorance of antiracist work by prominent Black scholars in favor of his position on scientific racism and use of protective whiteness as a German Jew. The book sets out to examine how and why queer individuals such as Hirschfeld who considered themselves white failed to see the dangerous intersection of sexuality and racism, especially when directly confronted with its insidious reality. Most important, Marhoefer's book examines both men, a daunting methodological task given the destruction of Li's manuscript in 1993.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.