In his fine book, Mark Chiang presents a genealogy of Asian American studies that begins with the Third World Strike of 1968 and ends with the 1998 controversy over the Association for Asian American Studies fiction award given to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). Drawing heavily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Chiang argues that Asian American studies has been dominated by a set of internal contradictions and useful misunderstandings, which were painfully and even traumatically revealed during the protests over Yamanaka's award. The five chapters of the book engage in a systematic analysis of key moments and texts that have shaped the field in its current form: the Third World Strike, which would lead to the creation of the first Asian American studies program at San Francisco State College; two books that are emblematic of the two primary methodological strands of Asian American studies, Viet Nguyen's Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); the two foundational works of Asian American literature, the collection Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers edited by Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974) and The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (New York: Vintage, 1975); Theresa Cha's Dictée (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001) in light of the 1995 special issue of the journal Amerasia on the intersections of theory and Asian American studies; and the conflicts leading up to the award granted to Blu's Hanging.

Bourdieu's theoretical framework enables Chiang to read the strife surrounding Blu's Hanging as the logical outcome of the compromises through which the field was inaugurated. According to Chiang's analysis, Asian American studies acquired legitimacy by converting the political capital produced by student-led protests in 1968 into the cultural capital of institutional recognition. In its inaugural form, Asian American studies programs at San Francisco State College and the University of California-Berkeley demonstrated what Chiang calls a “revolutionary institutional structure” (p. 60). Both programs established governing boards including faculty, students, and community activists; these boards operated according to principles of self-determination that in many cases radically challenged the hierarchical structures of university governance. These successes depended, however, on building coalitions among the stakeholders who possessed very different conceptions of autonomy. For the student protesters, according to Chiang, autonomy signified the capacity to determine their own political structures for governing Asian American studies programs; for academics, in contrast, autonomy signified academic freedom. The latter understanding would prevail as the need to conserve academic legitimacy within the university limited the dimensions of political struggle, such that increasingly “mobilization turned to representation with the exclusion of community members (or any non-academics) from the program's governance” (p. 62).

Chiang's book is at its strongest when it analyzes the consequences of this shift. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies presents an elegant case for why Asian American studies programs have putatively “sold out,” preserving cultural capital at the expense of political capital. More originally, Chiang helps readers to understand how the interdisciplinarity of the field is the consequence not of abstract theoretical debates but rather of efforts to reconcile conflicting attitudes regarding the purpose of the field itself. This is an absolutely crucial recognition, particularly at a moment in which interdisciplinarity is cast in such unambiguously positive terms. Likewise, Chiang is very astute in recognizing how certain conflicts cannot be indefinitely deferred. Following Bourdieu in conceiving of knowledge as capital, Chiang credibly explains how Asian American community members were increasingly excluded from governing boards, and how student efforts to redistribute knowledge and skills to larger communities were in conflict with efforts to institutionalize ethnic studies in the university. Whereas the former impulse involved distributing cultural capital, the latter involved accumulating it. Hence, the great irony that radical politics is often espoused at the most elite institutions.

While I would strongly recommend Chiang's book to anyone interested in the field of Asian American studies, I nonetheless have a reservation regarding the prominence of Bourdieu in Chiang's analysis. This book would benefit from a clearer rationale for why Bourdieu's theoretical framework is the most appropriate for analyzing Asian American studies. Chiang implicitly recognizes that such a rationale is necessary when he notes that his work may evoke long-standing narratives of “selling out” (p. 15), but he never provides a more compelling case for the necessity of his particular theoretical focus. As a result, the book is not entirely successful in rationalizing its key assumptions. Why, for example, should the genealogy end in 1998? Is this a result of Bourdieu's theory and its tendency to foreground self-confirming evidence? Put another way, would a genealogy employing a different theoretical framework (e.g., Bruno Latour's) have provided knowledge that is foreclosed here? Chiang might credibly respond that every theoretical focus forecloses certain knowledges, but such a response only emphasizes the importance of rationalizing his choice. The adoption of Bourdieu's opposition between political and cultural capital (or politics and academics) tends to occlude and otherwise devalue forms of politics within the university, and this is potentially worrisome. These concerns notwithstanding, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies represents a fine work of scholarship and a significant contribution to the field of Asian American studies.