[While I did teach a couple online courses during my Spring semester sabbatical, I didn’t have my usual slate of classes by any means. So in lieu of my usual Semester Reflections series, this week I’ll share a handful of texts I read over the last few months, leading up to a weekend post on what’s next!]
On three things I love about Scott Kurashige’s new book American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism.
- Citation and Conversation: In my dissertation/first book, I had so many pages of endnotes that my publisher made me cut that section by almost half. I’d like to think that established a trend of citing as many folks and works as possible in everything I do, and certainly also foreshadowed the work I do every week, elsewhere on this site, on the #ScholarSunday threads. So I was really impressed by how consistently Kurashige cited his sources, not only in notes or a works cited list, but also and especially in the text itself (particularly in the first, most historical section, on which more in a moment). And he didn’t just mention other scholars and works, but brought in their words and ideas to contextualize and complement his own, making his work truly part of an ongoing conversation.
- Comparative Connections: As someone who is moving through the second season of a narrative history podcast focused on Asian American history—season 1 focused on the Chinese Exclusion era, while season 2 focuses on the period of Japanese incarceration—I’m obviously a bit believer in the need for us all to better remember foundational Asian American and American histories, and the first main section of Kurashige’s book does an excellent job tracing a number of such histories across about a century, beginning with Chinese Exclusion and moving up to the Vietnam War. But what he does even more successfully is consistently connect those histories to layers of our present moment, ones he has established in the book’s opening but to which he returns throughout that first section as well. As I’ve worked on the contemporarily focused bottom halves of Innings in my podcast’s new season, I’ve thought a lot about American Peril as a model for those kinds of comparative connections.
- Contemporary Calls: As everyone reading this blog (or familiar with any of my work for many, many years now) knows well, I don’t just believe that history should be connected to the present, though. I also and at the end of the day especially believe that every element of our work should be linked to calls for action, for what we all can do to help remember and resist our worst, commemorate and fight for our best, and push this nation a bit closer to our ideals (while grappling with all the ways we have and continue to come up short of them). We can’t do so at the expense of nuance or accuracy (and Kurashige never does), but neither can be elide the role that public scholarship can and must play in those ongoing efforts. American Peril is a pitch-perfect example of such public scholarship, and I ended it deeply inspired for my own continued part in the fight.
Next sabbatical read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What have you read recently?
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