05/30/2026
Please take a moment to watch this short announcement of our 2026 award winners for The Randy Martin Prize, The Outstanding Service & Leadership Award and The First Book Prize:
https://youtu.be/wYDHqTWHkEs?si=toorzv_unuG3XmWT
Congratulations to all those nominated, honorable mentions and winners!
First Book Prize:
Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film by Beenash Jafri. University of Minnesota Press, 2025
The awards committee found the conceptual and affective conversation that was marshalled to produce the concept of settler attachment and its demonstration in the interpretation and analysis of film both surprisingly conceptually and stylistically original and, also, grounded in the thread of Stuart Hall’s inquiries into Black and diasporic cinema in Britain and the Black Arts.
Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. by Corinne Mitsuye Sugino. Rutgers University Press, 2025
Sugino’s book demonstrated extraordinary conjunctural-analytical work linking together and demonstrating the complex dynamics of the racialized and gendered boundaries that constitute the “genre” of the human (wrought from a deep engagement with Sylvia Wynter’s work) through multiple figurations of Asian Americanness. Sugino’s larger project demonstrates a broad orientation to racialization that places Asian American studies in direct dialogue with Black studies scholarship through sites of allegory: media, law, popular culture, disease, and carcerality, offering means for unravelling categories and locating political possibilities going forward.
We also have a finalist for consideration for the First Book Prize:
Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art by Lesley A. Wolff. University of Texas Press, 2025.
Culinary Palettes looks at post-revolutionary Mexican national identity through food: foodways, preparation, aesthetics, and modes of consumption to reveal the ways in which food and art are not sites of posterity or tradition but active materials that directly contribute to an emergent national identity. Wolff’s book shows a sophisticated theoretical posture analyzing the intersection of modernism and colonization, gender and nationalism through the concept of desmadre, the “unmothering of the nation, supplanting a sense of nurture and care with a patronizing hunger and lack” linking together cookery, consumption, visual culture, the production of national identity, and social struggles in the Mexican post-revolutionary period.
Randy Martin Prize:
“Anti-War Military Performance?: The Union Barrack-Ades Volunteerism in the Ohio Valley Region and Beyond,” by Sammy Roth.
Outstanding Service & Leadership Award:
Delores Phillips
