Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties

(Paperback)

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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 compelling multi-voice story explains how Asian America came into being as both a political identity and a place to call homeServe 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. -- Tracy Lai * International Examiner *
With scholarship and verve, Ishizuka traces the creation of what would be called the yellow power movementFrom 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. -- Stephanie Bartolome, Greenlight Bookstore * Brooklyn Paper *
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. -- Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture
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." -- Gary Okihiro, author of American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders
We werent born Asian American. Its a political identity, forged in the fires of struggle, community and consciousness. Serve the People chronicles the hard-fought history of a new awarenessthe story of how we became Asian America." -- Phil Yu, Angry Asian Man
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. -- Helen Zia, author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People
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. -- Melissa Harris-Perry * Elle *

Author Bio

Karen Ishizuka is the author of the books Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration and Mining the Home Movie. She has produced numerous award-winning films including Something Strong Within and Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray, an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival. She served the Japanese American National Museum for its first fifteen years as senior curator, senior producer, and director of its Media Arts Center. She lives in Los Angeles.