Los Angeles-The UCLA Asian American Studies Center announces the thirty-seventh-year Spring 2008 edition of Amerasia Journal, which focuses on post 9-ll identity and culture through the concept of "majority world." 

This issue is entitled "Majority World Movements," a term coined by Bangladeshi photojournalist and scholar Shahidul Alam.  In the early 1990s, Alam began to advocate for a new expression, to, in his words, challenge the "West's rhetoric of democracy."  (During the past forty years,  " the culture of poverty," and "third world communities" were used domestically, while internationally, countries were categorized as Third World, Developing World, or as Least Developed Countries.)
However, as Alam points out, "the expressions have strong negative connotations that reinforce the stereotypes about poor communities and represent them as icons of poverty."  Thus, the term "majority world" seeks to define "the community in terms of what it has, rather than what it lacks."  The term necessarily includes the cultural, intellectual, and social "wealth" of these communities.
Alam believes that the contemporary photographic image has the "power to validate history" from the majority world perspective, in opposition to manufactured corporate representations.  To challenge such media power brokers, in 1994 Alam began to teach photojournalism to working-class children in Dhaka, enabling them to become the producers and disseminators of their own images.
Majority World explores both the concept and its implications with contributions by an international array of scholars, writers, and activists in the following three sections.

Part One-Articles in this section include:  "Form and Emptiness:  Globalization, Liberalism and Buddhism in the West," by Dana Takagi, who looks behind the culture of Buddhism in the U.S.-in relation to the popular traffic of both ideas and things-books, statues, malas, incense, prayer flags.  In the West, as Takagi argues, Buddhism can also, contribute to the formation of new political movements including "ecopolitics, cultural politics, ethical advocacies, and radical autonomy."
Constance J. S. Chen, in her study, "'The Esoteric Buddhist':  William Sturgis Bigelow and the Culture of Dissent," examines the late nineteenth-century trend of American Orientalism "amidst the dramatic socioeconomic transformations taking place on both sides of the Pacific."
Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston works with American War veterans through her writing workshops that combine her writing expertise, Buddhist theory and practice, and notions of sangha or community from various wars, according to Shan Te-hsing who interviewed Kingston.  Kingston states:  "A veteran can be a peace activist, a woman, a deserter, a combat soldier, a non-combatant, et cetera."
Nancy Abelmann and Shanshan Lan, in this section, examine an Asian American campus church predominately made up of Korean and Taiwanese Americans; Brandy Lien-Worrall, our book review editor based in Vancouver, Canada, contributes a Zen poem.

Part Two of this special issue focuses on South Asia, with featured commentary on the culture and countries involved in the political assassination of Benazir Bhutto, who had returned to Pakistan in the Fall of 2007.  These include writings by Roshni Rustomji, Vinay Lal, and Amitava Kumar.

Part Three features new research.  Jane Mee Wong examines Pingshe-the Equality Society and the writings of Ray Jones, or Liu Zhongshi, a Chinese American worker and main organizer of the U.S. branch of the China-based anarchist group.  Wong utilizes the Chinese American archives developed by Him Mark Lai at U.C. Berkeley.  See also William Gow's excerpt of the memoir of his grandfather's sister, Auntie Kay, from her life growing up in China Alley in Oxnard, California in the years before the 1965 Immigration Act.  Will, a social historian and a graduate of the M.A. program in Asian American Studies at UCLA, also provides an additional research note on how to do Asian American genealogical research utilizing family records, family trees, timelines, and new technologies.

This limited edition volume, with can be ordered directly through the website of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center:  (http://www.aasc.ucla.edu).  The cost is $15.00 plus $5.00 for shipping and handling and 8.25% sales tax for California residents.  Make checks payable to "Regents of U.C."  Visa, Mastercard, and Discover are also accepted; include expiration date and phone number on correspondence.  The mailing address is:  UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 3230 Campbell Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1546.  Phone: (310) 825-2968.  Email:  aascpress@aasc.ucla.edu
Annual subscriptions for Amerasia Journal are $35.00 for individuals, and $295.00 for libraries and other institutions.  Amerasia Journal is published three times a year:  Winter, Spring, and Fall.  A free subscription to the Center's Crosscurrents Newsmagazine is included in a subscription to Amerasia Journal.