We are excited to announce that the eBook version of War Baby| Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, originally published by the University of Washington Press in 2013, is now available.
The eBook is available for purchase across multiple platforms including Kindle $35 on Amazon, NOOK book $26.49 on Barnes & Noble, and Kobo eBook $35 from your local bookstore. Some of our favorites independent bookstores are listed below. Readers can also purchase a print copy at a 40% discount with free shipping through December 31 ($21) by entering promo code WHOL20 on the University of Washington Press website or by calling (800) 537-5487.
In the past seven years since the book was first published, a lot of things have changed for mixed race people and for Asian Americans. On one hand, we saw a normalization of more expansive views on fluid and non-binary gender, sexual, and racial identity and the Black Lives Matter movement has sparked national conversations on structural racism. At the same time, with the Trump presidency, we witnessed an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-Asian rhetoric that was further exacerbated with the COVID-19 rise of anti-Asian hate speech and crimes.
Since working together to write War Baby/Love Child, the co-authors continued their work with the founding of the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association and Conference and leading ethnic studies units in their respective universities. Laura Kina co-edited Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017) with Jan Christian Bernabe to center a conversation on Asian diaspora art, including a chapter on mixed race, within an LGBTQ context. Wei Ming Daroitis built on her experience in structural leadership as an Asian American woman in academia to co-edit Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars’ Resistance and Renewal in the Academy (Rutgers University Press, 2019) with Kieu Lin Caroline Valverde.
Many of the BIPOC artists we featured in War Baby/Love Child have seen explosions in their careers. For example, Mequitta Ahuja, whose work is featured on our book cover, was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018 and artist Louie Gong went on to found Eighth Generation — a Native American art and lifestyle brand with a flagship store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market.
The scholarly essays framing each section in War Baby/Love Child continue to be relevant in the way they reveal many of the socio-historical underpinnings of contemporary issues around race and mixed race, particularly for Asian Americans. They also offer a unique perspective for populations that are often overlooked, such as Black-Asians, Native-Asians, and Latinx-Asians.
Book Description:
War Baby / Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai’i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.
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Buy local from an independent bookseller:
Elliott Bay in Seattle (Kobo eBook $35)
Third Place Books in Seattle (Kobo eBook $35)
Women & Children First in Chicago (Kobo eBook $35)
Books, Inc in San Francisco Bay Area (Kobo eBook $35)
EastWind Books of Berkeley (Paperback $35)
