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Serve the People:Making Asian America in the Long Sixties
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A narrative history of the movement that turned “Orientals” into Asian Americans
The political ferment of the 1960s produced not only the Civil Rights Movement but others in its wake: women's liberation, gay rights, Chicano power, and the Asian American Movement. Here is a definitive history of the social and cultural movement that knit a hugely disparate and isolated set of communities into a political identity--and along the way created a racial group out of marginalized people who had been uncomfortably lumped together as Orientals.
The Asian American Movement was an unabashedly radical social movement, sprung from campuses and city ghettoes and allied with Third World freedom struggles and the anti-Vietnam War movement, seen as a racist intervention in Asia. It also introduced to mainstream America a generation of now internationally famous artists, writers, and musicians, like novelist Maxine Hong Kingston.
Karen Ishizuka's definitive history is based on years of research and more than 120 extensive interviews with movement leaders and participants. It's written in a vivid narrative style and illustrated with many striking images from guerrilla movement publications. Serve the People is a book that fills out the full story of the Long Sixties.
Reviews
“This text is foundational for understanding the development of Asian American consciousness as relevant identity for political work and organizing in the context of a decade of Civil Rights work we typically think of as dominated by African American and gender organizing.”
“With meticulous research and more than a hundred interviews, Karen Ishizuka traces the links between Yellow Power and other radical movements. This engaging book breaks through to new levels of insight into this still-neglected movement of far-reaching influence.”
“We weren’t born ‘Asian American.’ It’s a political identity, forged in the fires of struggle, community and consciousness. Serve the People chronicles the hard-fought history of a new awareness—the story of how we became Asian America."
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“Serve the People describes beautifully not merely the making of a people but an entire era. People of color, women, queer people, students, and the working class altered US history by making the nation more democratic and aware of its imperialism. This is a work of immense significance."
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“As Karen Ishizuka indicates so well, African Americans and Asian Americans have shared a long history of interaction and influence. Her work reminds us of the need to view race through a broader paradigm.”
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“With scholarship and verve, Ishizuka traces the creation of what would be called the “yellow power movement”…From San Francisco to New York to Los Angeles, from students to activists, Ishizuka depicts how the story of Asian America is multi-voiced and variegated.”
, Brooklyn Paper -
“This compelling multi-voice story explains how Asian America came into being as both a political identity and a place to call home…Serve the People powerfully argues that recovering and remembering the Asian American Movement is not to live in the past, but rather to claim the future that the Asian American Movement envisioned.”
, International Examiner