Significant scholarship has recently emerged that moves the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies away from its earlier emphasis on the West Coast. Asian Americans in New England can be envisioned as such an effort, enlarging the historical, social, and cultural scope of Asian America to include New England. Importantly, the book also affirms that this inclusion entails a more radical realignment of the field, rather than the simple addition of new spaces and subjects for analysis.
For instance, histories of Asian Americans often begin with the large-scale migrations, labor practices, and exclusion laws of the later nineteenth century. But as K. Scott Wong's introduction reminds us, Asia played a major role in American society and culture at a much earlier point in time. Instances of Chinese and other Asian immigration to New England long preceded exclusion, as documented by Karen Sánchez-Eppler in her analysis of the aesthetic, linguistic, and political contexts of an 1824 “friendship book” by a Chinese student at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. Similarly, Amy Bangerter's essay on Yung Wing, author of My Life in China and America, concentrates on Yung's education in New England and formative college experience at Yale in the 1840s and 1850s.
The essays here also move away from defining Asian American studies as strictly devoted to accounts of immigrant individuals and communities, and posit a more flexible sense of how the field might imagine connections between the spaces of “Asia” and “America.” Thus Constance Chen's discussion of the creation of the Department of Chinese and Japanese Art at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts depicts late nineteenth-century white American fascination with Japanese arts and crafts. Krystyn Moon considers the reception of Japanese acrobatic troupes in various New England cities during the late 1860s. Moon's original research on these performing artists reinforces the close relationship between various discourses of Orientalism and the racialization of Asians visiting or inhabiting the United States. Bandana Purkayastha and Anjana Narayan also scrutinize this connection; their essay on 1890s lectures by the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda suggests how Vivekananda's teachings countered the prevalent typecasting of “hindoos” and how in the present South Asian Americans both employ and oversimplify versions of his doctrine to challenge Orientalism's continuing legacy.
Later essays provide distinctive sites of scholarly study and question the terms by which such research is framed and conducted. Shirley Suet-Ling Tang and James Điền Bùi look at Vietnamese American grassroots community-building efforts in Boston's Field's Corner neighborhood, and Monica Chiu examines the expressive possibilities of hip hop for Lao American youth in New Hampshire. Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns uses the example of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst's New World Theatre and Roberta Uno collections to unpack the ideological underpinnings of Asian American studies and performance studies archives, and Leakhena Nou considers the possibilities of an indigenous perspective in research on Cambodian Americans. While individually none of the essays makes a sweeping claim about Asian Americans in New England, collectively they invite a larger reconsideration of the history and the contemporary presence of Asian Americans, not just in this understudied location, but overall.
