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Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Heritage Month

The University Library's guide for celbrating AAPI Heritage Month.

Books & Videos

Browse featured books and videos on this page, then use the tabs on the left to find more specific resources for the different cultures (more to come!). 

Are you unsure how to get books from the library? Use the links to the right for help. 

Featured Books

title surrounded by illustrated popular figures

Rise: A Pop History of Asian America

RISE is a love letter to and for Asian Americans--a vivid scrapbook of voices, emotions, and memories from an era in which our culture was forged and transformed, and a way to preserve both the headlines and the intimate conversations that have shaped our community into who we are today.

girl with hair blowing and holding flower

A young girl notices that her eyes look different from her peers'. They have big, round eyes and long lashes. She realizes that her eyes are like her mother’s, her grandmother's, and her little sister's. They have eyes that kiss in the corners and glow like warm tea, crinkle into crescent moons, and are filled with stories of the past and hope for the future. Drawing from the strength of these powerful women in her life, she recognizes her own beauty and discovers a path to self-love and empowerment.

cover featuring woman putting up posted of California

California Dreaming: Movement and Place in the Asian American Imaginary

A multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of "Asian America" through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California's imaginary. Here, "California" is interpreted as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking the state's cultural imaginary, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the world. 

Cover featuring title in flames on neutral background

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. 

Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion

Racial Feelings addresses how Asian Americans both resist and rely on stereotypes in their writing and art work. In addition, Santa Ana investigates how capitalism shapes and structures an emotional discourse that represents Asians as both economic exemplars and threats.  

neutral cover featuring a leaf vine

The Namesake

An incisive portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life, in a debut novel that spans three decades, two continents, and two generations. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies. 

illustrated south asian woman in traditional clothing

Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion

The voices in this volume reveal how a Good Girl is trained to seamlessly blend professional success with the maintenance and reproduction of her family's cultural heritage. Her gratitude for her immigrant parents' sacrifices creates intense pressure to perform and embody the role of the "perfect daughter." Yet, the demand for such perfection can stifle desire, curb curiosity, and make it fraught for a Good Girl to construct her own identity in the face of stern parental opinion. 

cover featuring painted beach

Our Voices, Our Histories : Asian American and Pacific Islander Women

This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women's lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. 

Title on orange background

Contemporary Asian American Activism : Building Movements for Liberation

In the struggles for prison abolition, global anti-imperialism, immigrant rights, affordable housing, environmental justice, fair labor, and more, twenty-first-century Asian American activists are speaking out and standing up to systems of oppression. Creating emancipatory futures requires collective action and reciprocal relationships that are nurtured over time and forged through cross-racial solidarity and intergenerational connections, leading to a range of on-the-ground experiences.

cover featuring graduates under a partly masked face

The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success

 This sourcebook is composed of an annotated bibliography on the stereotype that Asian Americans are successful. Each chapter in The Model Minority Stereotype is thematic and challenges the model minority stereotype. Consisting of a twelfth and updated chapter, this book continues to be the most comprehensive book written on the model minority myth to date.

historical images surrounding title

Asian American History

A comprehensive survey, Asian American History places Asian immigration to America in international and domestic contexts, and explores the significant elements that define Asian America: imperialism and global capitalist expansion, labor and capital, race and ethnicity, immigration and exclusion, family and work, community and gender roles, assimilation and multiculturalism, panethnicity and identity, transnationalism and globalization, and new challenges and opportunities. 

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