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.