Tara Fickle in Conversation with Andrew Way Leong

Join us for a book talk with Tara Fickle about her new book The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities and Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (3rd Edition) in which she wrote the forward for. Hosted by Andrew Way Leong and followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

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About the book:
As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US.

Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.

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About the Authors:
Tara Fickle is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon. Her first book, “The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities,” examines how games and game theory have shaped American racial typologies and US-Asian relations from the 19th century onwards. She also worked on Aiiieeeee!, a seminal Asian American literary anthology.

Andrew Way Leong is a comparativist who works primarily in Japanese and English with additional interests in Spanish and Portuguese. His research focuses on the literature of Japanese diasporas in the Americas as well as queer and critical theoretical approaches to the study of literary genre, gendered embodiment, and generational time. He is the translator of Lament in the Night. He is currently an Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s English Department.

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Purchase the authors’ books here:

Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers: https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2129/Aiiieeeee%21%3A_An_Anthology_of_Asian_American_Writers_%283rd_ed%29%29.html
The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities : https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2525/Race_Card%3A_From_Gaming_Technologies_to_Model_Minorities_.html

Lament in the Night:
https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p1106/Lament_in_the_Night_.html

Choose to ship your orders to your home or select in-store pick up at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704.

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Eastwind Books Multicultural Services (EBMS) is a 501(3)c non-profit dedicated to the promotion and accessibility of Asian American and Ethnic Multicultural Literature. EBMS is the community education arm of Eastwind Books of Berkeley which is comprised of a dedicated staff of booksellers, artists, poets, and community workers. Our events are for educational purposes and we appreciate your tax-deductible donations and continued support.