American Sutra

"This is one of my favorite books ever, and it is pretty new. I don’t think we pay enough attention to the significance of religion in the construction of racial difference. That’s what Duncan Williams does in American Sutra . He highlights how Buddhist Japanese Americans had a pretty distinctive experience of being racialized and treated in a discriminatory way during the Second World War . He also highlights how there was a spiritual resilience that Japanese Americans displayed. Religion was a critical part of how they endured and survived. I study Hmong refugees who came to the US in the seventies, eighties and nineties, after the war in Laos. American refugee policy made it very difficult for them to practice Hmong rituals in the US. Because families were separated and ethnic communities were dispersed, Hmong were deprived of the material resources and critical mass of community necessary to carry out their rituals. How America and Americans try to put ideals of religious pluralism in practice is a question at the center of my work. “The idea that Asian Americans are all successful is a myth” That’s why I’m really drawn to American Sutra, because it’s a question at the center of Duncan’s work, too. We’re a country of religious freedom and religious pluralism, but we don’t have a great record of upholding our commitment to those principles in practice. There is a long history of white Christian privilege in the United States. There’s a lot of attention to that issue in religious studies now. So I like that Duncan and a number of people have studied how religion plays a critical role in unequal relations of power."