Political scientists Andrew L Aoki and Okiyoshi Takeda have written the first undergraduate textbook on Asian American politics. Asian American Politics is an important book for Politics and Asian American Studies students, although its clear yet lively style makes it accessible to students taking courses in race and ethnicity outside these fields. As well as summarizing Asian American politics, this book delineates 'larger themes that run through the politics of Asian Americans and other racialised groups', specifically the politics of identity. For Aoki and Takeda, this politics 'refers to the basic question of how Asian Americans are defined – including who gets to define them … and the attempt of Asian Americans to define themselves, and to be accepted on their own terms' (p. vi).  

Aoki and Takeda's clarity is particularly apparent in each chapter's introductory section where important terms such as racialisation (Chapter 1), ethnic, pan-ethnic and racial identity (Chapter 2), and the model minority and forever foreigner stereotypes (Chapter 7) are listed alongside key topics. Their definitions of these terms are not so rigid as to overlook the diversity of Asian American identities and experiences. This diversity is successfully conveyed throughout the book in both narrative and statistical forms as ethnic, national, linguistic, class, educational, gender and sexual differences complicate Asian American racial identity. Also complicated is the mainstream view that Asian Americans are politically inactive. While political participation by individuals is low, partly because post-1965 Asian America comprises a large number of immigrants who are not naturalized citizens and so cannot vote (Chapter 3), political participation by interest groups and movements has shaped educational, immigration and language policies (Chapters 4 and 8) despite Asian American under-representation in Congress and state legislatures (Chapter 6). A prime example of effective group political participation is the Redress Movement for Japanese American internment during the Second World War (Chapter 8).  

Like a number of other critics in Asian American Studies, for example, Angelo Ancheta in Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience (1998), Yen Le Espiritu in 'Asian American Panethnicity' (2004), Lisa Lowe in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), Aoki and Takeda use and develop Michael Omi and Howard Winant's influential concept of racial formation to understand the history of US racial categories and race relations. Their part in this history ensures Asian Americans relationships with other racialised groups, although the nature of these interracial relationships typically depends on where Asian Americans are positioned along the black/white colour line. Despite interracial conflicts, most notably between Blacks and Koreans in Los Angeles and New York in the early 1990s (Chapter 6), Aoki and Takeda conclude their book by asserting the importance of coalition building if Asian American politics is to avoid reinforcing racial inequality: 'Will Asian Americans be able to pry open American society to accept those who have been deemed non-white? And, if they do, will they do so in a way to create an opening big enough for others to join them, or will they make a space only for themselves, thereby leaving intact racialisation and its legacy?' (p. 190).

I would recommend Asian American Politics to students and academics in Asian American Studies and other courses about race and multiculturalism in the US, although those with a specific interest in post-9/11 Asian American politics and culture would find Monisha Das Gupta’s Unruly Immigrants (2007) and Rajini Srikanth’s The World Next Door (2004) more useful in this regard.