Here are 100 books that Between Empires fans have personally recommended if you like
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Extensive research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry has given me a comprehensive understanding of the development of Transpacific studies. For the last decade, my research has focused, for the most part, on South-South intercultural exchanges and cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent. I have written five books dealing with these topics: 2008 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (2009), The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (2013), Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru (2014), Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production (2019), and The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (forthcoming).
This book studies the anti-imperialist dialog between twentieth-century Latin American and Filipino intellectuals, writers, and diplomats who, in her view, appropriated brotherly discourses of Latinidad and Hispanidad as part of their resistance versus US imperialism. This book opened my eyes to the fact that, as late as the twentieth century, Filipino intellectuals still saw themselves as an intrinsic part of the Hispanic world and took for granted that it was beneficial for their country to keep a cultural and sociopolitical alliance with Latin America if they wanted to rid themselves of the new imperial yoke: the United States.
As a nation, the Philippines has a colonial history with both Spain and the United States. Its links to Latin/o America are longstanding and complex. Intercolonial Intimacies interrogates the legacy of the Spanish Empire and the cultural hegemony of the United States by analyzing the work of twentieth-century Filipino and Latin/o American writers and diplomats who often read each other and imagined themselves as kin. The relationships between the Philippines and the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas were strengthened throughout the twentieth century by the consolidation of a discourse of shared, even familiar, identity. This distinct…
Extensive research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry has given me a comprehensive understanding of the development of Transpacific studies. For the last decade, my research has focused, for the most part, on South-South intercultural exchanges and cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent. I have written five books dealing with these topics: 2008 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (2009), The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (2013), Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru (2014), Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production (2019), and The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (forthcoming).
Afro-Asian Connections looks at the cross-cultural relations between people of African and Asian ancestries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The chapters address how their common history in agrarian labor led to numerous interactions that have been reflected in the region’s history, literature, art, and religion. I found this continuation of the exploration of Afro-Asian sociocultural exchanges in Latin America initiated by Kathy López and Evelyn Hu-DeHart years earlier extremely timely and revealing, as it underscores a long history of intermittent alliances and animosities.
Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean explores the connections between people of Asian and African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although their journeys started from different points of origin, spanning two separate oceans, their point of contact in this hemisphere brought them together under a hegemonic system that would treat these seemingly disparate continental ancestries as one. Historically, an overwhelming majority of people of African and Asian descent were brought to the Americas as sources of labor to uphold the plantation, agrarian economies leading to complex relationships and interactions. The contributions to this collection examine various…
Extensive research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry has given me a comprehensive understanding of the development of Transpacific studies. For the last decade, my research has focused, for the most part, on South-South intercultural exchanges and cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent. I have written five books dealing with these topics: 2008 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (2009), The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (2013), Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru (2014), Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production (2019), and The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (forthcoming).
This was the first book on the literary representation of the Japanese and Nikkeijin in Peruvian fiction. It analyzes literature published by both Nikkei (the Nisei authors José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato) and non-Nikkei Peruvian authors (Mario Vargas Llosa, Mario Bellatin, etc) from 1996 to 2005. The book closes with interviews with six authors whose works are examined in the book: Miguel Francisco Gutiérrez Correa, Carmen Ollé Nava, Pilar Dughi Martínez, Mario Bellatin, José Watanabe, and Doris Moromisato. This important study opened the way for many other recent explorations of the traces of Japaneseness in Peruvian literature as well as the relevance of Japanese-Peruvian writing.
In her book, The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature, Rebecca Riger Tsurumi captures the remarkable story behind the changing human landscape in Peru at the end of the nineteenth century when Japanese immigrants established what would become the second largest Japanese community in South America. She analyzes how non-Japanese Peruvian narrators unlock the unspoken attitudes and beliefs about the Japanese held by mainstream Peruvian society, as reflected in works written between l966 and 2006. Tsurumi explores how these Peruvian literary giants, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Gutierrez, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Carmen Olle, Pilar Dughi, and…
Extensive research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry has given me a comprehensive understanding of the development of Transpacific studies. For the last decade, my research has focused, for the most part, on South-South intercultural exchanges and cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent. I have written five books dealing with these topics: 2008 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (2009), The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (2013), Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru (2014), Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production (2019), and The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (forthcoming).
This book uses a transpacific, decolonial, and interdisciplinary approach to study the connections between Latin America and East Asia, concentrating on contemporary commodity extraction and exchanges. The book explores South-South exchanges without Global North metropolitan mediations, thus recentering East Asia-Latin America as an epistemological lens through which to consider these sophisticated networks and produce new knowledge. In my view, the originality of this book resides first in the interdisciplinary connection it makes between the decolonial project and transpacific studies, and secondly, in the two-pronged approach from two unfortunately often disconnected academic perspectives: Latin American and East Asian Studies.
In this collective work, researchers from different disciplines reflect upon the challenges and opportunities of decolonizing transpacific studies through the lens of a few paradigmatic case-studies that deal with connections between East Asia and Latin America. The present book offers a productive problematization of the idea of the transpacific as a concept and a space that is not restricted to a single definition. We defend that the transpacific can instead promote an understanding of agents and experiences that share many common traits that have been generally overlooked by a hegemonic interpretation of knowledge and the relationship between regions.By fostering an…
As a professor of Communication, Environmental, and Native American Studies, Bruce E. Johansen taught, researched, and wrote at the University of Nebraska at Omaha from 1982 to 2019, retiring to emeritus status as Frederick W. Kayser research professor. He has published 55 books in several fields: history, anthropology, law, the Earth sciences, and others. Johansen’s writing has been published, debated, and reviewed in many academic venues, among them the William and Mary Quarterly, American Historical Review, Current History, and Nature, as well as in many popular newspapers and magazines. He's married to Patricia E. Keiffer, whose father, mother, and older sister were interned in the camp. Patricia was born there shortly before liberation.
This is evidence of the enduring appeal of the Santo Tomas story. More than half a century after the events that it describes, Cogan makes good use of interviews and printed sources. The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines is especially valuable for its scholarly tone and comprehensive nature. It described the lives of internees in several camps.
More than five thousand American civilian men, women, and children living in the Philippines during World War II were confined to internment camps following Japan's late December 1941 victories in Manila. Captured tells the story of daily life in five different camps-the crowded housing, mounting familial and international tensions, heavy labor, and increasingly severe malnourishment that made the internees' rescue a race with starvation. Frances B. Cogan explores the events behind this nearly four-year captivity, explaining how and why this little-known internment occurred. A thorough historical account, the book addresses several controversial issues about the internment, including Japanese intentions toward…
Soon after 9/11, I had dinner with several American scientists worried about how new security measures would affect international collaborations and foreign-born colleagues. Since science rarely if ever comes up in discourse about the War on Terror, that set me off. I’m always drawn to whatever gets overlooked. I was born in one international city – New York – and have lived in another – Los Angeles – for over 20 years. I’ve spent time on four continents and assisted survivors of violent persecution as they seek asylum – which may explain why I feel compelled to include viewpoints from outside the US and fill in the gaps when different cultural perspectives go missing.
Sometimes I read a book and wish I’d written it. With Insurrecto, I cheered and gave thanks that Gina Apostol did write it. Decades ago, I became obsessed with the US conquest of the Philippines after the Spanish American War and how the people of the islands fought back to liberate their country. I knew Mark Twain protested the occupation. I found military histories of the war against Spain. At that time, I couldn’t find anything from the Filipino perspective. Where were books to challenge the American belief we’ve never had colonies? Apostol brings this lost history brilliantly to life with a contemporary filmmaker and a translator who create dueling narratives while trying to make a movie about a 1901 massacre.Insurrecto is a remarkable work, complex enough to repay rereading.
Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines’ present and America’s past by the PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Gun Dealers’ Daughter.
Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside.…
As a kid, I didn’t identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. Even without the language to describe who I really was, I was always on the lookout for stories about other people who felt like I did—for stories, in other words, like the ones on this list. But I never found them. As the books below beautifully illustrate, the spectrum of transgender experience, and our childhoods in particular, are so rich and diverse. My hope is for these and other books like Cactus Country to encourage more trans and queer people to tell their stories so that kids like us can find characters that represent them.
Fairest by Meredith Talusan is an incisively observant memoir of class, ability, and whiteness, among many other subjects.
I was so enthralled by Talusan’s compelling story about living with albinism and passing as white, first in the Philippines as a child, which led to a television acting career, and later in the United States as an adult. Talusan’s deft descriptions of her journey from childhood stardom to her education at Harvard to her eventual coming out and transition hooked me from the first page and made this book so difficult to put down.
Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction
"Talusan sails past the conventions of trans and immigrant memoirs." --The New York Times Book Review
"A ball of light hurled into the dark undertow of migration and survival." --Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A love story with the heart of Austen classics and a reflective journey of becoming that shift our own perceptions of romance, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.
Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to…
My journey into Asian story began with Black Cranes, edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn. I have two stories in that book, but it is more than another anthology. The stories were specifically about women of horror and Asian descent- black cranes. I’ve gone on to write and publish my own stand-alone works from the Asian perspective, and our sisterhood gets stronger with every new book. We aren’t alone in appreciating representation. The books we’ve written since Black Cranes have an impressive collection of Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and all sorts of other awards.
Don’t let the title put you off! It’s a play on the pronunciation of an island in the Philipines called Siquijor (sounds like “seek ye whore”), but the titular story is still pretty titillating.
Yvette Tan is another of the essayists in my book. Her writing vividly portrays Filipino culture, replete with its myths and legends and drenched in the complexities of human emotion. I appreciate that Tan didn’t just make another horror collection; it's a lens through which the rich tapestry of Filipino life, with its blend of the mundane and the magical, is explored.
The collection is a good pick for those who enjoy horror with a cultural twist. This book gives a panoramic and multifaceted experience of Filipino life with which I was unfamiliar.
As a native Oregonian of Polish descent, I was born in the small town of Sweet Home, Oregon. After finishing high school, I moved to Portland where I graduated from Lewis and Clark College with a Master’s degree in psychology. I spent twelve years as a psychotherapist, publishing over a dozen articles. After joining a writing group and trying my hand at fiction, my stories, articles, and poems have been published in magazines and newspapers—including Sarasota Herald-Tribune, The Oregonian, Catholic Sentinel, Dziennik Związkowy, and The Polish American Journal. My debut novel, Victoria’s War, won CIBA’s Hemingway Award for 20th Century Wartime Fiction and was #1 Best Seller on Amazon Kindle Unlimited in German Historical Fiction.
I loved this enchanting WWII story about two heroic women: Tess, an orphan turned US Army nurse, and Flor, a Filipina university student living in glamorous Manila where Tess is stationed. These resilient women face unimaginable challenges with hope and humility. Hooper’s storytelling amazed me from the moment I started reading.
Hooper’s Angels of the Pacific spoke to my heart like the music of great composers, revealing an unforgettable and little-known chapter of WWII history, inspired by the true story of 78 American nurses who were captured and imprisoned by the Japanese in Bataan. Hooper masterfully brings to life this awe-inspiring tale of sisterhood, bravery, sacrifice, and love.
"Absolutely riveting. A stay-up-all night read about two very different women who discover just how strong they can be-and just how much they'll dare-during the brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II. This story of endurance and sisterhood will have you turning pages late into the night." -Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author
If you loved Beantown Girls by Jane Healey and Hazel Gaynor's When We Were Young & Brave, then you won't want to miss critically acclaimed author Elise Hooper's powerful new novel of the Angels of Bataan, nurses held as prisoners during the occupation…
I like to go on trips, particularly overseas. This gives me the ability to write travel books—but moreover, I love adventure. I love to see the fantastic in the world in which we live. I’ve written other kinds of books that helped shape my writing style, including a kaiju novel series, which gives me a bit of a different approach than more encyclopedic travel writers. That’s what I try to bring to the table—the magic and esotericism in the world, presented like a pulpy Saturday matinee that you can enter yourself if you follow my travel tips.
The Aswang mythology of the Philippines is fascinating and storied, a menagerie of creatures as horrific as any from Transylvania. This novel by a Filipina-Canadian author about a young man returning to his roots to find more werewolfery than he bargained for delves into its fascinating lore with cultural authenticity.
A teenage boy discovers family in the last way anyone wants to: as bloodthirsty monsters from the countryside.
Pablo Santos probably shouldn't try to crack the secret question to his dad's email account. Probably. But after getting into trouble in school yet again--for something that he swears wasn't his fault--he decides to run off to the countryside with his best friend, Rachel Ann, to discover the answer to such a mind-numbingly simple question: "Where was my father born?" Because Pablo knows nothing about his father and even less about his past.
Come and explore the Bicol countryside with Pablo and…
