At the time of its founding in 1987, the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell University was the first such program in the Ivy League. Today the program has faculty members in the humanities and social sciences in a variety of departments in the College of Arts & Sciences, teaching students from across the University. This cross-college, university-wide position accommodates the extensive teaching and research interests of the Program's faculty and reflects the breadth of the vibrant field of Asian American studies in general. In the classroom, in scholarship, and through campus and community advocacy, the Program is committed to examining the histories and experiences; identities, social and community formations; politics; and contemporary concerns of people of Asian ancestry in the United States and other parts of the Americas.

Department website

Viranjini P Munasinghe

Associate Professor

Publications

Academic Articles

2007 Dougla logics and nation building in Trinidad. South Asian Review. Special issue on “Empire and Racial Hybridity”. Edited by Deepika Bhari. 27(1):182-204.

2006 Claims to purity in theory and culture: Pitfalls and promises. American Ethnologist 33(4): 588-592.

2006 Theorizing World Culture through the New World: East Indians and Creolization. American Ethnologist 33(4): 549-562.

2005 Narrating a Nation through Mixed Bloods. Social Analysis 49(2): 155-163.

2002 Nationalism in Hybrid Spaces: The Production of Impurity out of Purity. American Ethnologist 29(3): 663-692.

2001 Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle in Trinidad. Journal of Asian American Studies 4(1):1-34.

1997 Culture Creators and Culture Bearers: The Interface Between Race and Ethnicity in Trinidad. Transforming Anthropology 6(1):72-86.

Books

2001 Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (CUP).

Chapters

2009 Foretelling Ethnicity in Trinidad: The Post Emancipation Labor Problem. In Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology. Eric Tagliacozzo and Andrew Willford, eds. Pp 139-186. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

2008 Rescuing Theory from the Nation. In Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely, eds. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

 

Klarman Hall
205 McGraw Hall
vpm1@cornell.edu
607/2553505

Departments and programs

Links

Derek Chang

Associate Professor

Klarman Hall
454 McGraw Hall
dsc37@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

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