Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction / Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu  1

I. Sounds Authentic?  

1. Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC / Oliver Wang  35

2. Silenced but Not Silent: Asian Americans and Jazz / Kevin Fellezs  69

II. Popular Places  

3. Homicidal Tendencies: Violence and the Global Economy in Asian American Pulp Fiction / Christopher A. Shinn  111

4. Visual Reconnaissance / Joan Kee  130

5. Chinese Restaurant Drive-Thru / Indigo Som  150

6. The Guru and the Cultural Politics of Placelessness / Sukhdev Sandhu   161

III. Consuming Cultures  

7. Cooking up the Senses: A Critical Embodied Approach to the Study of Food and Asian American Television Audiences / Martin F. Manalansan IV  179

8. Performing Culture in Diaspora: Assimilation and Hybridity in Paris by Night Videos and Vietnamese American Niche Media / Nhi T. Lieu  194

9. Indo-Chic: Late Capitalist Orientalism and Imperial Culture / Sunaina Maira  221

IV. Troubled Technologies  

10. Asian American Auto / Biographies: The Gendered Limits of Consumer Citizenship in Import Subcultures / Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Vernadette Vicu�a Gonzalez  247

11. Bruce Lee I Love You: Discourses of Race and Masculinity in the Queer Superstardom of JJ Chinois / Mimi Thi Nguyen  271

12. Race and Software / Wendy Hui Kyong Chun  305

Bibliography  335

Contributors  355

Index  359

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

Oliver Wang

Kevin Fellezs

Christopher A. Shinn

Joan Kee

Indigo Som

Sukhdev Sandhu

Martin F. Manalansan IV

Nhi T. Lieu

Sunaina Marr Maira

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

"If at the end of the collection readers goes away engaging with the diverse world of Asian America beyond skin/screen deep, and are better able to cut through and contextualize the accumulated stereotypes and racial expectations, then the large amount of serious scholarship devoted to popular culture in Alien Encounters will have been worth every word."—Sanaphay Rattanavong, Asian American Press

“Alien Encounters, though mostly academic, contains a wide spectrum of writing. . . . This book’s version of the Vietnamese-American experience is essentially positive because it concentrates, not on a sense of displacement and loss, but on adaptation to a new environment.”—Bradley Winterton, The Taipei Times

“This volume of essays on Asian Americans and popular culture is a welcome addition to interdisciplinary and cultural studies, as well as scholarship on ethnic studies. The collection brings together a variety of subjects and viewpoints, highlighting elements attendant upon popular culture such as race, nation, and gender.”—Crystal S. Anderson, MELUS

"The contributors to Alien Encounters eschew cultural studies’ normative investment in locating mass culture’s hegemonic and/or resistant potential, instead analyzing 'how Asian Americans have chosen to engage the idiom of the popular' (3). . . . This new orientation of Asian American studies has begun to take hold in the field, and its possibilities are nowhere more apparent than in the range of domestic and transnational sites made available to Alien Encounters. Nguyen and Tu have assembled a radically contemporary array of case studies as a springboard to enlarge cultural studies’ understanding of popular culture, both as consumptive and productive practice."—Emily Roxworthy, e-misferica

“Alien Encounters . . . offers the best introduction to Asian American popular cultural studies to date. The contributors illuminate an impressive range of unstudied or understudied youth cultures, musics, art, media, performance, and everyday practices and discourses.”—Glen Mimura, Journal of Asian American Studies

“This impressive interdisciplinary collection (Asian American studies, English, anthropology, sociology and art history) takes the encounters between Asian America and popular culture, as well as their threats and promises, seriously. . . . One of Alien Encounters’ strengths is its refusal to reduce the diversity and complexity of Asian American experience to any easy political assurances; rather, as alien encounters go, it offers an exploration, one that takes the readers through an amazing array of Asian American cultural sites.”—Yiu Fai Chow, European Journal of Cultural Studies

“The editors kept their promise to make Alien Encounter a book full of suspense for the reader. This is due to its interdisciplinary approach that highlights a great variety of activities from different angles, where Asian Americans act either as consumers or creators. . . . The book is worthwhile reading for undergraduate and graduate students of art (history), political science, sociology, and anyone who is interested in multiculturalism.”—Eva Schmidt, Itinerario

"If at the end of the collection readers goes away engaging with the diverse world of Asian America beyond skin/screen deep, and are better able to cut through and contextualize the accumulated stereotypes and racial expectations, then the large amount of serious scholarship devoted to popular culture in Alien Encounters will have been worth every word."—Sanaphay Rattanavong, Asian American Press

“Alien Encounters, though mostly academic, contains a wide spectrum of writing. . . . This book’s version of the Vietnamese-American experience is essentially positive because it concentrates, not on a sense of displacement and loss, but on adaptation to a new environment.”—Bradley Winterton, The Taipei Times

“This volume of essays on Asian Americans and popular culture is a welcome addition to interdisciplinary and cultural studies, as well as scholarship on ethnic studies. The collection brings together a variety of subjects and viewpoints, highlighting elements attendant upon popular culture such as race, nation, and gender.”—Crystal S. Anderson, MELUS

"The contributors to Alien Encounters eschew cultural studies’ normative investment in locating mass culture’s hegemonic and/or resistant potential, instead analyzing 'how Asian Americans have chosen to engage the idiom of the popular' (3). . . . This new orientation of Asian American studies has begun to take hold in the field, and its possibilities are nowhere more apparent than in the range of domestic and transnational sites made available to Alien Encounters. Nguyen and Tu have assembled a radically contemporary array of case studies as a springboard to enlarge cultural studies’ understanding of popular culture, both as consumptive and productive practice."—Emily Roxworthy, e-misferica

“Alien Encounters . . . offers the best introduction to Asian American popular cultural studies to date. The contributors illuminate an impressive range of unstudied or understudied youth cultures, musics, art, media, performance, and everyday practices and discourses.”—Glen Mimura, Journal of Asian American Studies

“This impressive interdisciplinary collection (Asian American studies, English, anthropology, sociology and art history) takes the encounters between Asian America and popular culture, as well as their threats and promises, seriously. . . . One of Alien Encounters’ strengths is its refusal to reduce the diversity and complexity of Asian American experience to any easy political assurances; rather, as alien encounters go, it offers an exploration, one that takes the readers through an amazing array of Asian American cultural sites.”—Yiu Fai Chow, European Journal of Cultural Studies

“The editors kept their promise to make Alien Encounter a book full of suspense for the reader. This is due to its interdisciplinary approach that highlights a great variety of activities from different angles, where Asian Americans act either as consumers or creators. . . . The book is worthwhile reading for undergraduate and graduate students of art (history), political science, sociology, and anyone who is interested in multiculturalism.”—Eva Schmidt, Itinerario

“This wonderfully rich collection of essays shows the particular import of the realm of popular culture and its study. Such a critical assessment of the practices, production, consumption, and variegated sites of Asian American popular culture and politics demonstrates the broad horizons which can and should ground Asian American criticism.”—Kandice Chuh, author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique

“Learned, savvy, and on the pulse, this volume does more than fill a huge gap in popular culture studies. Like the strongest of new entries, it might end up rearranging the entire field.”—Andrew Ross, author of Fast Boat to China: Lessons from Shanghai

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