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IT HAS BEEN TEN YEARS SINCE I first started teaching in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. My first few years here were full of personal as well as professional transformations, and more than a little bit of culture shock. I had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, attended school on the East and West coasts, but had never been to the Midwest before. This was my first job out of graduate school, so much of the anxiety I felt stemmed from the common self-doubts that plague new assistant professors. Other stresses came from adapting to life in Minnesota and trying to answer two pressing questions: What does it mean to do Asian American studies in the Midwest? What does it mean to be Asian American in the Midwest?
What little had been written about Asian Americans in the Midwest painted a dismal picture. The female protagonist in Eleanor Wong Telemaque's novel It's Crazy to Stay Chinese in Minnesota struggled to form a Chinese American identity in a small town in Minnesota.1 And scholars writing about Asian Americans in the Midwest characterized the region as a "vast banana wasteland" that Asian Americans had left to "search for their roots" in Asian ethnic communities on the coasts.2
The vibrant growth of Asian American studies in the Midwest in the past two decades, however, reflects a very different reality. It is certainly true that Asian American studies and Asian Americanness are not the same in the Midwest as they are along the coasts, but many of us in the field believe that this is an exciting thing. This article begins by examining the recent growth in Asian American studies in the Midwest and by posing central questions that have framed that growth: What does Asian American studies scholarship, pedagogy, and outreach look like in the Midwest? How does a Midwest focus complicate existing narratives, approaches, and canons of the field? What particular questions, histories, and ethnic groups emerge from a Midwest perspective, and how might they transform the field more generally? My findings tilt toward the two areas with which I am most familiar, history and Minnesota-based scholarship. Programmatic data on the big public research institutions in the region was also more readily...