Asian American History—Reflections on the De-centering of the Field

MAE M. NGAI

WHEN I WAS in graduate school in the early 1990s I went to a meeting of a caucus that had recently been formed within the Association of Asian American Studies, called the "East of California" caucus. The name summed up the state of Asian American studies as a field that was emphatically centered in the West Coast. As I recall, there were at the time only a handful of tenured or tenure-track professors at institutions outside of California. East of California conferences, however, drew hundreds of students, mostly undergraduates but also a substantial cohort of graduate students, reflecting the growth of the Asian American population in the Northeast and Midwest since the 1965 immigration reforms.