| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women's Public Culture, 1930–1960. By Shirley Jennifer Lim. (New York: New York University Press, 2006. x, 241 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8147-5193-8. Paper, $21.00, ISBN 0-8147-5194-6.)

Despite their legal status as citizens, Asian Americans, often portrayed as perpetual for eigners, continue to struggle to claim cultural American citizenship in the United States. In her thoughtful book, Shirley Jennifer Lim traces the history of second-generation Asian American women's efforts to claim American- ness through cultural practices during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In exploring Asian American women's gendered performance of cultural citizenship, Lim argues that the conscious efforts on the part of Asian American women to partake and participate in American popular culture "cannot be interpreted merely as assimilation but must be seen as a set of transformative social acts that constituted Asian American culture" (p. 1). Because they were considered "the nonmodern, nonassimilable aliens," Asian American women, Lim argues, "had particular stakes in performing the modern" and their citizenship and gendered narratives of national belonging depended largely on their mastery and performance of modernity (p. 9). By further insisting that Asian American women, more than their male counterparts, served as the central figures who embodied and asserted American cultural citizenship, Lim renders Asian American women the main subject of this insightful investigation into the history of Asian American public culture.

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