National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage

Rating:
Summary: informative in a way?
Review: I had this professor at UC. Was curious to see if the book added a further dimension to what she offered in class. The depth and extent of the anti-white bias was ingrained in all the cultural studies classes but I wonder if this lack of balance can be understood as a necessary phase or whether it just lacks objectif value. I was only visiting from Belgium when in her class, and felt that all the classes were more or less the same, probably moniteured by some invisible agent like Hashimoto, the top prof in the department. His classes were just plain race hatred toward the white people. I ended up switching to a pre-med schedule to learn something that would be helpful to my communauty when I got back to Bruxelles. Why the americans are publishing books like this? It feels very much like a kind of Sarajevo is going on, or trying to surface, but with the multiculturals fighting against what they consider to be the intolerables: white people. If you read this book you will wonder what the author even wants. Answer? I think it's ethnic purification with the whites removed or exterminated. Maybe I read it wrong. Outside of academia however everybody is making love, not war, across the races.

Rating:
Summary: Petty Sniveling
Review: In a larger historical context the crimes that this author puts on America would never stand up in any court, and are so strangely subjective that the book seems merely personal, rather than political.

To get a larger perspective, I'd recommend that students of Asian-American relations read the book American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin. It was just published by S. Illinois U. Press about 4 years ago and is still in print. It is about an important time when the Japanese army murdered a million Chinese people in a six-week rampage that left my whole family dead.

The usual statistics say only 350,000 died, and of these only 50,000 women were raped first.

Scholars should find important things to write about and forget about making a legal case out of innuendos and seeing stuff where nothing is there. The Japanese army killed millions of people for the fun of it. This book documents that.

When you're done with this book, read Iris Chang's book, and then re-read this bizarre little book on abjection and see if it doesn't strike you as pathetic and beside the point or without any kind of reality to it. What is this abjection crap? Is this a crime, or just something some scholar made up? Is it as important as the rape and murder of a city?

Rating:
Summary: Fine Cultural Studies Analysis
Review: Professor Shimakawa's book is a prime, masterful examination of the historical and cultural situations of Asian Americans in the United States. Employing sophisticated critical analysis, the book's power will clearly be missed by those who lack an historical awareness of Asians and other ethnic groups in the U.S. and the marginalization of these populations. If one approaches the book with an open mind and a desire to learn the history they may not be aware of, much can be taken for this top-notch scholar. Making love across the races does not make for radical politics, but books like this propel us toward a moment when love and radical transformation are not mutually exclusive.