Long Le-Khac, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, just published a 1,900-entry dataset that he hopes will be used to investigate which works are discussed as “Asian American” in scholarly circles — and who that leaves out.
In the dataset, one can find Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang, Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye and novelist and Berkeley professor emerita Maxine Hong Kingston. Beyond novels, plays and poetry, the collection includes the comic book World War Hulk — penned by a biracial Korean American writer — and films like Crazy Rich Asians and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The latter, based on a book by Truman Capote and directed by Blake Edwards, features a white actor playing a painfully stereotyped Japanese American character.The publication of the dataset, which the researchers plan to update every five years, is only the first step. Now, Le-Khac as well as other scholars can search for quantitative answers to key questions about Asian American literature — a computational approach to the humanities known as cultural analytics
Read more down at: https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/16/what-counts-as-asian-american-literature-anyway/
