Asian Diasporas

Asian migrants are inextricably linked to contemporary debates concerning the nation-state, neoliberalism, globalization, and transnationalism. This volume brings together these streams of inquiry and proposes a synthetic approach to examine various processes of migration and community formation on a global scale.The essays included in Asian Diasporas look at the worldwide dispersal of Asian populations through the lens of diaspora. They illustrate the underlying structures of inequality that create diasporic communities—the cultural barriers that impede belonging to the place they inhabit and the place they call "homeland," the unequal processes that embody globalization, and the social inequalities in host and origin country alike. Five major themes connect and cut across the collection: the recognition of inter-Asian strife; the persistence of the nation state; the salience of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; the forces of labor, colonialism, and globalization; and the centrality of culture.

"Rhacel Parrenas and Lok Siu have created an anthology that bridges diaspora, Asian and Asian American Studies. This is a difficult task, given the range of topics and tensions possible, yet this anthology has engaged with the key debates in the field and enhanced the conversation in extremely fruitful ways. Asian Diasporas is required reading for many disciplines and fields interested in theorizing subjectivities formed out of migration and dispersions.", "Asian Diasporas skillfully integrates diverse perspectives from Asian Studies and Asian American Studies into a coherent theme to illuminate sensible understandings of how people of diverse Asian origins experience, imagine, and interpret diasporas across geographical and social spaces in the globalized world.", "Illustrating seemingly porous global borders, Asian Diasporas is a timely collection of rich, well-researched chapters on the lives and experiences of people originating from Asia...", "The essays reflect a high level of professional skill... the writing is clear and unpretentious, and the scholarship is solid.... These are, simply, very bright and professional scholars doing excellent scholarly work."

Rhacel S. Parreñas is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Servants of Globalization (Stanford, 2001) and Children of Global Migration (Stanford, 2005). Lok C. D. Siu is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is the author of Memories of a Future Home (Stanford, 2005).