Department of History AAPI Solidarity Statement and Educational Resources

The Department of History condemns the anti-Asian hate crimes and femicides (gender-related killings of women) perpetrated in Atlanta, GA on March 16, 2021. More than 3800 acts of anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) violence have occurred in the US over the past year in the context of a pandemic and a trade war with China. Elected officials' repeated use of racist terms to refer to the SARS-CoV-2 virus has encouraged and normalized anti-AAPI views goading, if not tacitly sanctioning, a dramatic increase in anti-Asian violence.

The US has long treated AAPI as perpetual outsiders and subjected them to racist and xenophobic practices. These include, and are not limited to, the interconnected policies and dynamics of immigration exclusion, internment during World War II, the US' prosecution of devastating colonial wars in Asian countries, and, for most of the twentieth century, denial of citizenship via naturalization. Rising violence against AAPI today draws from and further fuels damaging historical legacies of exclusion and bigotry.

Misogyny further shapes anti-AAPI violence. Over 68% of the 3800 attacks during the past year targeted AAPI women. The Atlanta mass shooting killed seven women, six of whom were AAPI. Femicide and other forms of violence against women have reached pandemic proportions according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The US' systemic racial and gender-based inequities, and legacies of impunity for racist, xenophobic, and gender-based violence, place BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) women and LGBTQIA+ communities at especially acute risk.

The Department of History stands in solidarity with Asian American and Pacific Islanders. We invite all members of the UNF community to learn about how white supremacy and misogyny benefit from pitting different ethnic communities and gender identities against one another. As historians, we reject past methodologies of racial and gender injustice and discrimination in the interest of seeking ways to work together in pursuit of a more free, just, and equitable society. As a public university, we are dedicated to free speech and open inquiry, even if it leads to difficult conversations. We pledge to work with our students, colleagues, and university to advance acceptance, freedom, and justice through our teaching, research, and advocacy.

Resources for Further Information

AAPI Women Lead

Stop AAPI Hate

House Committee on the Judiciary

Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties

Hearing: Discrimination and Violence Against Asian Americans, March 18, 2021

Historian Erika Lee, members of Congress, and advocates testify

Association for Asian American Studies

Stop the Hate: AAPI Youth Campaign

National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA)

PBS Documentary about Asian American History

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Urgent action needed to end pandemic of femicide and violence against women, says UN expert," 25 November 2020.

Historical Resources

• Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II
• Erika Lee, America for Americans: The History of Xenophobia in the United States
• Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism
• Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es)
• Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
• Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
• Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White
• Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California
• Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War
• Stephanie Hinnershitz, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South
• Simeon Man, Soldiering Through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
• Aihwa Ong, Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New America
• Susie Woo, Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire
• Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America
• Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans
• Isabell Thuy Pelaud, This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature
• John Kuo Wei Tchen & Dylan Yates, Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear
• Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America
• Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
• Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
• Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii
• Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism
• Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States
• Elliot Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through
• World War II
• Leah Zani, Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos
• Jana Lipman, In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates
• Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian
• Relations, 1960-1968
• Truong Buu Lam, Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931
• Mai Na M. Lee, Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French
• Indochina, 1850-1960
• Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940
• Christina Elizabeth Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina,
• 1890-1980
• Karen Ishizuka, Making Asian America in the Long Sixties
• Angel Shaw and Luis Francia, The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial
• Dream, 1899-1999
• Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority
• Literary and Memoirist Works
• Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
• Bich Nguyen, Stealing Buddha's Dinner
• Thi Diem Thuy Le, The Gangster We Are All Looking For
• Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
• John Okada, No-No Boy
• Chang Rae Lee, My Year Abroad
• Chang Rae Lee, Native Speaker
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees
• Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds
• Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
• Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do
• Nguyen Phan Que Mai, The Mountains Sing
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
• Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
• Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
• Pramada Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet
• Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land
• Gish Jen, Typical American
• Vu Trong Phung, Dumb Luck

Courses that Address Asia, Asian American History, and Colonial Violence

• AMH2020 United States History Since 1877
• ASH2003 Introduction to Asia
• ASH3106 Women and Gender in East Asia
• ASH3337 Gandhi and Modern India
• ASH3401 Contemporary China
• ASH3402 Traditional China
• ASH3404 Modern China
• ASH3440 Japanese Civilization
• ASH3620 Asian Art and Culture
• EUH3932 France and Its Empire, 1871-Present
• PHH3820 Chinese Philosophy
• PHH3860 Japanese Philosophy
• PHI3930 Philosophies of India
• HIS4936/5934 Comparative Empires
• ASH4934/5935 Seminar in Asian History
• AMH5515 US in World Affairs
• AMH6935 The Black Pacific
• HIS6935 Sex and Gender in History