Congratulations Dana Nakano for receiving the Honorable Mention in the Social Sciences Book Award 2025 from the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS)!
Dr. Dana Nakano is a Class of 2004 graduate from the College and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Professor Dana is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Gerontology, and Gender Studies at California State University, Stanislaus.
Honorable Mention: Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Limits of Assimilation by Dana Nakano (New York University Press)
Deeply personal, compelling, and yet theoretically sound, sociologist Dana Nakano’s research unveils why and how race still matters to these ostensibly fully assimilated Americans through an in-depth study of an ethnic theme park in Southern California. Highly accessible and well-researched, this book is an engaging ethnographic account of current Japanese American ethnic experiences as well as the history of those who were employed in the 1960s and 70s at an orientalist “Japanese” village and amusement park. As a first book, Nakano engages relatively effectively with a range of literature in sociology, anthropology, and Asian American studies to critique the conventional colorblind logic of citizenship and assimilation and innovate the concept of affective citizenship. The connections Nakano makes with historical anti-Japanese racism and its contemporary manifestations – the concept of the racial body as a perpetual racial uniform–is powerful. This book is a trailblazer in the scholarship on race, culture, and citizenship in contemporary Asian America.