Former fellow awarded NEH grant

Tara Fickle, associate professor of English, has been awarded a 2021 NEH fellowship for her project “Behind Aiiieeeee!: A New History of Asian American Literature.” The fellowship will fund the research, writing, and digital development of a book examining the publication history of ​one of the first anthologies of Asian American literature, Aiiieeeee! 

In the eyes of mid-twentieth-century white America, “Aiiieeeee!”—so often seen ​on the silver screen and in comic books—was the one-dimensional cry of Asian America, their singular expression of all emotions—it signified and perpetuated the idea of Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, self-hating, undesirable, and obedient. Aiiieeeee! is an anthology published in 1974. The editors reclaimed that shout, outlining the history of Asian American literature and boldly drawing the boundaries for what was truly Asian American and what was white puppetry. The third edition was published in 2019 with a new foreword written by Fickle.

“‘Behind Aiiieeeee!’ gives readers, especially students, the resources and contextual information they need to fully appreciate Aiiieeeee! and the field of Asian American cultural production more broadly. This will be done through a combination of traditional and non-traditional media platforms, including a scholarly monograph and a series of critical essays. At the heart of the project is a digital humanities component, in the form of a digital edition and companion.

Fickle was a 2017–18 OHC Ernest G. Moll Faculty Research Fellow. That project led to the publication of her first monograph The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (NYU Press, 2019), which explores how games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes. The book won the 2020 American Book Award given by the Before Columbus Foundation.