Book excerpt: "In the past four decades, the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies has grown enormously, expanding its areas of inquiry beyond reflection on the straight-line patterns of immigration, assimilation, and citizenship to encompass issues such as transnational and diasporic identities and communities, the workings of imperialism, the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality, and social justice/human rights in a global context. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture will offer a comprehensive and in-depth survey of this important literary tradition, covering the span of Asian American literature from the late nineteenth-century large-scale immigration of Chinese to the United States and Canada to the present. All of the articles appear online as part of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature"--