Amerasia Journal is pleased to join forces with Hyphen Magazine‘s “Across the Desk” blog to crosspost a series of commentaries on Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which first appeared in the print version of the current issue of Amerasia Journal. “The Year of the Tiger Mother,” a forum on the newsmaking book, was undertaken in collaboration with “Across the Desk” Editor erin Khuê Ninh, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; please see the description of “Across the Desk” by Professor Ninh below.
Starting Thursday and running through next week, the essays on the Tiger Mom controversy will be posted in their entirety at “Across the Desk” and here on the Amerasia blog. We at Amerasia are excited to partner with Hyphen — a truly vital and vibrant voice in Asian American arts and culture — and hope it will be the first of many such efforts.
— Arnold Pan, Associate Editor, Amerasia Journal
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has certainly catalyzed a lot of things, this first-time partnership between Hyphen Magazine and Amerasia Journal being among the better of them. Like Amerasia, Hyphen — a nonprofit, volunteer-run national publication started by Asian American journalists, activists, and academics in 2002 — traces its roots to the Movement (though we’re a somewhat newer cutting). And we love what you love: arts, politics, culture, and Asian American studies.
It’s in recognition of common cause that, this year, Hyphen launched a series called Across the Desk: A Collaboration of Asian American Scholars and Journalists. The series is designed to bring Asian American studies academics into more regular conversation with a general reading public — with hopes thereby of moving the online conversation around Asian American topics beyond endless rehashings of AsAm 101, and also of making an implicit and immediate case for the relevance and keen significance of the academic work. We have too few public intellectuals in the field, as a random law professor’s thorough hijacking of the national conversation around Asian American families and education makes clear.
Hyphen is happy to say that Across the Desk has thus far boasted features from Lisa Nakamura on the Syrian lesbian blogger hoax and her work on identity tourism; Theo Gonzalves on that staple of the college experience which is Pilipino Cultural Night; Jane Iwamura with some quick tips on how to start your own Asian religion without Asians; and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu with insights on the rise of the Asian designer.
The series is published on Hyphen‘s website, which reaches over forty thousand readers each month. Scholars interested in sharing their work with a left-leaning, college-educated readership of Asian Americans in their 20s and 30s are warmly invited to email me at either of the addresses below.
With both my Hyphen and academic hats on, may I say, I look forward to hearing from you.
erin Khuê Ninh
Hyphen | blog editor | erin@hyphenmagazine.com
UCSB, Dept of Asian American Studies | assistant professor | ninh@asamst.ucsb.edu
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