Rebecca Jo Kinney
Associate Professor, School of Cultural and Critical Studies, Bowling Green State University
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Rebecca Jo Kinney is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar of Critical Ethnic Studies, American Studies, and qualitative research methods, and an associate professor at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. Dr. Kinney’s first book, Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) argues that contemporary stories told about Detroit’s potential for rise enables the erasure of white supremacist systems. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Race&Class, and Verge, among other journals. She is currently completing her second book, Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt (under contract Temple University Press), that examines the complexities of racism and community led placemaking by analyzing the work of Asian American stakeholders spearheading the redevelopment of Cleveland’s AsiaTown. In 2021-2022 she was an Ewha University affiliated Fulbright Korea Scholar undertaking ethnographic research for the project “Adult Korean Adoptees Making Home and Building Community in South Korea.”
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Book Roundtable, Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt
Author Meets Respondents Roundtable
Rebecca Jo Kinney, Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt, Temple University Press, 2025.
Chair: Donna Doan Anderson
Panel Abstract:
Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt reexamines what we think we “know” about both Asian American Studies and the Rust Belt by tracing Asian American community history and contemporary development in a mid-sized postindustrial city in northeast Ohio. Through an interdisciplinary analysis foregrounding the importance of region in racial formation and redevelopment, Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland unsettles the presumed invisibility of Asian Americans in the urban Midwest by linking the contemporary development of Cleveland’s “AsiaTown” to the multiple and fragmented histories of Cleveland’s Asian American communities from the 1940s to present day. Building on her award-winning Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (2016) Kinney’s analysis of Rust Belt redevelopment situates contemporary logics of the postindustrial city within a heretofore unexamined history of Asian American migration and immigration to the region. Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland is an anchor to the growing body of scholarship on the Asian American Midwest.
In a timely connection to the 2025 AAAS conference theme of “Re-Orienting Asian American Studies,” this roundtable is fertile ground to not only look “East of California” to Atlantic connections, but centers the Midwest as a nodal site of Asian American history and contemporary community development. Mapping Asiatown Cleveland reorients the field of Asian American Studies to the U.S. nation’s geographic middle and invites readers to recognize the vibrant Asian American community formations that have developed in such seemingly unexpected spaces and places. During this “Author Meets Respondents Roundtable,” Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, Donna Doan Anderson, Monica Mong Trieu, and Lily Chen, leading voices in the conversation around Asian American race and regionality in the Midwest, will respond to Dr. Kinney’s contribution to the conversation. Each respondent will offer comments highlighting the new pathways that Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland creates in the field of Asian American Studies while pointing to the conversations and questions that remain unaddressed. Each commentator will situate the book and their own research into routes of future inquiry that the roundtable members or the audience may consider in building a regional conversation on the Midwest in Asian American Studies and Asian American Studies in the Midwest. The last 20-30 minutes of the session will be used to invite the room into robust conversation about the role of race and subnational region in the field of Asian American Studies.
Rebecca Jo Kinney
Associate Professor, School of Cultural and Critical Studies, Bowling Green State University
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