Alien Encounters

“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

“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, Taipei Times

“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 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

“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

"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

"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-misférica

“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

“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