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George I. Sánchez is the most important intellectual and one of the most important activists of the “Mexican American Generation” between the New Deal and the Great Society. From humble New Mexico beginnings, Sánchez used education as a means of advancement first as a teacher, then as an educational bureaucrat, and finally as a professor. Intimately connected to some of the leading national philanthropies with regard to civil rights and with different levels of government in the U.S. and abroad, George Sánchez made bettering humankind his life's work. While he was involved in many issues, Sánchez was most invested in the idea of integration. He sought to unleash the revolutionary potential of schools by abolishing the school segregation of Mexican Americans in the United States. He was an academic activist interested in the integration of Mexican Americans in all facets of national life. Through this biography, the author will not only tell the life and work of a fascinating individual, but also relate much of the twentieth-century Chicana/o experience. Despite enduring serious professional difficulties, particularly over his civil rights activism, as well as major challenges his personal life, George Sánchez still fought racial prejudice as if he had nothing to lose. He did. And yet he continued for decades to fight those good fights.

Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways, and this book offers readers a critically engaged examination of her literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, the study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North–South vector into the East–West conceptual paradigm, the author highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, the author designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, the book also sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, it argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programmes and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishing international artist-in-residence programs and founding social activist networks. This book also investigates the impact of managerialism, marketization and globalization on university cultures, asking what critical cultural scholarship can do in such increasingly adversarial conditions. Experiments in Asian universities are emphasized as exemplary of what can or could be achieved in other contexts of globalized university policy.