Overview

How the ""Asian girl"" is central to the story of US imperialism and the formation of Asian America Representations of the ""Asian girl"" as lucky objects of humanitarian rescue and rehabilitation have been used to advance America's imperial ambitions from World War II to the wars in Korean and Viet Nam. In this compelling work, Sharon N. Tran traces the production and instrumentalization of this figure through an examination of state documents, military newspapers, documentary photographs, and other archival materials. Theorizing ""Asian girlhood"" as a technology of imperial power, Tran exposes how the Asian girl is invoked as a shield that protects the innocence of US empire while she is excluded from innocence herself-relegated instead to a precarious position between child and adult, human and nonhuman, plaything and laborer. Offering fresh insight into how imperial power operates, Tran analyzes figures such as the Japanese American school-girl in the context of World War II incarceration, the elusive ""camptown girl,"" and the objectified image of the ""Napalm Girl."" Her innovative feminist approach interrogates the tendency to reclaim innocence for the Asian girl or to reframe her as an empowered woman. She engages the work of writers and artists such as Kiku Hughes, Nora Okja Keller, Aimee Phan, and le thi diem thy to demonstrate how Asian American literature offers rich theoretical interventions for critiquing the childadult dichotomy that underpins key structures of imperial domination, illuminating more capacious conceptions of girlhood. Restoring the dignity and agency of a figure too often denied both, Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire is a groundbreaking intersectional contribution to studies of gender, race, childhood, and state power. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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9781517919856

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Reviews

""Ambitious, thoroughly researched, and illuminating, Sharon N. Tran's brilliant intervention adopts a novel feminist approach to the problematics of race and empire that lie at the heart of Asian American studies. Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire sits in the discomfiting location of the subject who's silenced, tapping both its potential for critique as well as its capacity for imagining Asian Americanness otherwise.""—Daniel Y. Kim, author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War ""In Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire, Sharon N. Tran perceptively demonstrates the significant appearance of the Asian girl throughout the archives of US military and imperial enterprise. By examining this figure in twentieth-century and contemporary Asian American literature and culture, Tran offers a persuasive and moving response to this history, theorizing how Asian girlhood obliges us to reckon with the past anew.""—Crystal Parikh, author of Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

""Ambitious, thoroughly researched, and illuminating, Sharon N. Tran's brilliant intervention adopts a novel feminist approach to the problematics of race and empire that lie at the heart of Asian American studies. Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire sits in the discomfiting location of the subject who's silenced, tapping both its potential for critique as well as its capacity for imagining Asian Americanness otherwise.""--Daniel Y. Kim, author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War

Author Information

Sharon N. Tran is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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