AAPI Heritage Month Reading List
Some Suggested Titles from AAR's Reading Religion
Reading Religion is an openly accessible book review website published by the American Academy of Religion. The site provides up-to-date coverage of scholarly publishing in religious studies, reviewed by scholars with special interest and/or expertise in the relevant subfields. Reviews aim to be concise, comprehensive, and timely.
Below, the editors of Reading Religion have selected some books and reviews from the site and have shared some titles available to review. If you’re interested in reviewing books for Reading Religion, take a look at the guidelines. If there are any books missing from the Reading Religion site that you think should be there, email readingreligion@aarweb.org.
Reviews to Read
Heathen: Religion and Race in American History
By Kathryn Gin Lum
From the review:
“. . . Lum offers a sweeping challenge to what she calls the ‘replacement narrative,’ a scholarly position in which notions of biological racial difference are said to have subsumed religious categories as the dominant axis of distinction in the modern West. Gin Lum contends that race and religion have long been closely intertwined, and so cannot be isolated from one another.” – Andrew Chalfoun
The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood
By Shenila Khoja-Moolji
From the review:
“Touching upon themes of contemporary religion, masculinities, race, and capitalism, The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood adds much-needed nuance to the literature on the gender dimensions of representations of Muslims in 21st-century America.” - Faria Nasruddin
The Making of American Buddhism
By Scott A. Mitchell
From the review:
“. . . [T]his is a very important book—especially when making a mess [!]—in enhancing our understanding of the the American religions landscape, the journey of Buddhism in America, the field of Buddhist studies itself, as well as reflecting on the ways in which historical narratives about the past get crafted and the ways in which theoretical tools get used to interpret historical experience.” – Daryn Henry
The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West
By Mick Brown
From the review:
“With a great talent for uncovering extraordinary personalities and details, Brown traces the paths that ideas about Asian religions took to the West . . . The book is a great achievement. It takes readers along on the diverse encounters and exciting journeys of its protagonists and makes their fascination with Asia understandable.” – Inkhen Prohl
Available for Review
Doing Asian American Theology: A Contextual Framework for Faith and Practice
By Daniel D. Lee
From the publisher:
“In Doing Asian American Theology, Daniel D. Lee focuses on Asian American identity and its relationship to faith and theology, providing a vocabulary and grammar, and laying out a methodology for Asian American theologies in their ethnic, generational, and regional differences. Lee's framework for Asian American theological contextuality proposes an Asian American quadrilateral of the intersection of Asian heritage, migration experience, American culture, and racialization. This methodology incorporates the need for personal integration and communal journey, especially in the work of Asian American ministry. With interdisciplinary insights from interpersonal neurobiology and trauma theory, he offers a process of integration and reconciliation for Asian American theologies in service of Asian American communities of every kind.”
Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change
By Melissa May Borja
From the publisher:
“An incisive look at Hmong religion in the United States, where resettled refugees found creative ways to maintain their traditions, even as Christian organizations deputized by the government were granted an outsized influence on the refugees’ new lives.
Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel approaches to living, they also embraced Christianity—called kev cai tshiab, “the new way”—as a means of navigating their complex spiritual landscapes.”
Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab
By Falguni A. Sheth
From the publisher:
“Despite the disapproval that "visibly" Muslim women face in the West, the U.S. does not ban the hijab or niqab. Nevertheless, it does find a way to manage assertive Muslim women. How so? . . . Focusing on the discrimination claims of Muslim women, this study examines juridical and political approaches that dismiss Muslim women and other populations of color as culturally backward, misguided in their thinking, and gratuitously nonconformist. Likewise, it analyses the experience of racial dismissal through excruciation: the phenomenon by which vulnerable populations are pressed into hopeless performances of cultural assimilation. Racial dismissal is excavated through legal opinions, court transcripts, and other encounters between Muslim women and the state. Ultimately, this work finds that the racial address of dismissal and the phenomena of excruciation have been pivotal to a liberal juridical order that otherwise claims neutrality. By concentrating on the treatment of Muslim women, this book uncovers dynamics of social and racial division which have inhabited and bolstered liberal legal neutrality from its inception. This book's framework, while focusing on Muslim women in the U.S., is a template for understanding how exclusion is juridically implemented for other racialized and marginalized populations.”
Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival
By Maryam Kashani
From the publisher:
“From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and geopolitical agendas shape Muslim ways of knowing and being. Throughout, Kashani argues that contemporary Islam emerges from the specificities of the Bay Area, from its landscapes and infrastructures to its Muslim liberal arts college, mosques, and prison courtyards. Theorizing the Medina by the Bay as a microcosm of socioeconomic, demographic, and political transformations in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, Kashani resituates Islam as liberatory and abolitionist theory, theology, and praxis for all those engaged in struggle.”
Unassimilable: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century
By Bianca Mabute-Louie
From the publisher:
“In this hard-hitting and deeply personal book, a combination of manifesto and memoir, scholar, sociologist, and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie transforms the ways we understand race, class, citizenship, and the concept of assimilation and its impact on Asian American communities from the nineteenth century to present day.
UNASSIMILABLE opens with a focus on the San Gabriel Valley (SGV), the first Asian ethnoburb in Los Angeles County and in the nation, where she grew up. A suburban neighborhood with a conspicuous Asian immigrant population, SGV thrives not because of its assimilation into Whiteness, but because of its unapologetic catering to its immigrant community. . . .
UNASSIMILABLE offers a radical vision of Asian American political identity informed by a refusal of Whiteness and collective care for each other. It is a forthright declaration against assimilation and in service of cross-racial, anti-imperialist solidarity and revolutionary politics. Scholarly yet accessible, informative and informed, this book is a major addition to Ethnic Studies and American Studies.”
