Funded Projects Query Form
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Research, writing, and digital development of a book examining the publication history of the first anthology of Asian-American literature, Aiiieeeee!

“Behind Aiiieeeee!: A New History of Asian American Literature” is a scholarly monograph and accompanying interactive, open-access online resource that transforms our current understanding of the genesis of contemporary Asian American literature. Its focus is the 1974 publication of Aiiieeeee!, a canonical and deeply controversial Asian American literary anthology. Read widely and reviewed everywhere from The New Yorker to Rolling Stone, Aiiieeeee! was the first – and remains the only – Asian American literary anthology to achieve the status of trade publication rather than an academic one primarily for classroom use. The monograph, based on archival research of an enormous collection of previously inaccessible documents, demonstrates how Asian American literature of the post-WW2 period intersected with countercultural energies and US-Asian military conflicts of the 1970s to create new modes of writing and reading about what it meant to be a racial minority in America.

Project fields:
American Literature; Asian American Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies, Other

Program:
Fellowships

Division:
Research Programs

Totals:
$60,000 (approved)
$60,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
9/1/2021 – 8/31/2022

Creation of a digital edition of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), a formative text in the development of Asian American Studies.

“Behind Aiiieeeee!” is a digital humanities project that examines the genesis of Asian American literature and its political and aesthetic role in contemporary America. It undertakes the first comprehensive archival analysis of Aiiieeeee!, a foundational Asian American literary anthology from the 1970s formed in the crucible of national post-civil rights struggles and global “Third World Movements” in Asia. These unpublished materials will be showcased through a series of online interactive learning modules, including an annotated hypertext version of the original edition and a visual map of the inter-ethnic and transnational networks involved. It will provide educators and students with the resources to appreciate a number of unfamiliar but seminal Asian American texts, while contributing to a scholarly understanding of how literary fiction became a powerful vehicle for synthesizing the political and aesthetic aspirations of the first generation of self-proclaimed Asian Americans.

[Grant products]

Project fields:
American Literature; Asian American Studies; Media Studies

Program:
Summer Stipends

Division:
Research Programs

Totals:
$6,000 (approved)
$6,000 (awarded)

Grant period:
7/1/2017 – 9/30/2017