Asian American Subjectivities
Event type: Panel/Discussion
The great Filipino novelist and revolutionary José Rizal, while he was studying medicine and philosophy in Madrid, wrote a letter to a friend in 1883, in which he described native Spanish reactions to his presence at their universities:
“they called me Chinese, Japanese, American [that is, Latin American], etc., but not one Filipino! Unfortunate country—nobody knows a thing about you!”
Unfortunate: and yet, there are certain benefits to nobody knowing a thing about you. Benedict Anderson, writing about this letter in The Age of Globalization, notes that this misidentification is not experienced by Rizal as a great pain or a lack. The ignorance around him, compared to the rigid racial hierarchy of the colony, is liberating instead. Back home Indios like himself found themselves, alongside Chinos, as racially inferior to the Filipinos, which at the time referred specifically to people of Spanish descent living in the Phillipines.
“In Spain, however, Rizal and his fellow students quickly discovered that these distinctions were either unknown or seen as irrelevant. No matter what their status was back home, here they were all filipinos, just as the Latin Americans in Madrid in the late eighteenth century were americanos, no matter if they were from Lima or Cartagena, or if they were creoles or of mixed ancestry. (The same process has produced the contemporary American categories “Asians,” and “Asian Americans”.)”
Asians in America used to be subject to this process, anyway: having come to America as mostly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino, widespread ignorance, fear and hatred resulted in a process of racialization whereby the previously distinct communities could come together to discuss what it was they had in common. Through this process “Asian America” was invented.
Asian America’s long afterlife outside of the immediate moment of its necessity speaks to its emotional resonance. It’s a dream of a shared culture in the face of oppression. In a way, the concept is utopian. Today we are many decades into its dissolution into a demographic category, a term of description. What is its use for those populations who did not experience the specific collective alienation of those who invented the term but found ourselves clothed in it anyways? Is it still a political term, and in what way is it political?
Furthermore, the application of the created demographic of “Asian American” has its continued impact and consequences -- upon the demographic as both artificial and organic whole -- on the political, educational, cultural, institutional development of Asian America. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, in “The Success Frame and Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian Americans,” write that “Applying the concept of frames to our research, we find that 1.5- and second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese respondents framed ‘a good education’ similarly, despite the dissimilar educational backgrounds of their immigrant parents.”
Though Asian American identity has stabilized - or at least, demographically, appears to have stabilized - the cultural and institutional processes which created it churn along, albeit in different ways. Literature was then and remains today the machine through which new subjectivities are developed and put to the test. We propose to discuss with the attendees the how history of Asian American literature built up the subjectivities which made something like Asian America possible and new subjectivities being developed by Asian American writers today.
Innovation and Embodiment in Contemporary African American Poetics
Panel Abstract
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”
-Audre Lorde
This panel represents a range of poetry and poetics projects by graduate students and faculty at the University of Texas, Austin. Home to one of the nation’s premiere MFA programs, UT-Austin is the site of a thriving community of poet-scholars that refuses the divide between critics and artists that often divides English departments. The work represented on this panel engages the intersections of race and language with a focus on innovation in contemporary poetry. In light of this year’s theme “The Ephemeral Archive,” the proposed papers explore aspects of tradition/experimentation, form/deformation, and embodiment/performance with the intent to trace, recover, challenge and/or reimagine. Although the panelists approach the capacious subject of ephemerality differently, each engages the conference’s call to rigorously reckon with received, lived, and creatively-crafted epistemologies by artists of color. Jeffrey Boruszak engages the work of one of this year’s keynote speakers, Douglas Kearney. He pays particular attention to Kearney’s typographical innovation and argues that the poet’s form of “ekoustic” writing, a style that captures the dynamism of post-soul performance, likewise holds within it the powers of cultural critique and knowledge making. Where Kearney’s typographically distinct poems resound loudly on the page, Harryette Mullen’s tanka verses are deceptively quiet; however, the tanka’s brief and ordinary nature belie their scope and impact. Rebecca Macmillan finds that Mullen’s daily and quotidian archival writing practice brings into relief urgent social crises such as environmental destruction and systemic inequalities based on race and class. Likewise, Sequoia Maner examines the artist’s role as documenter, archivist, and storyteller. She examines how writer-rapper Kendrick Lamar revives and embodies the late Tupac Shakur as a symbol of social dissent and, moreover, provides an aesthetic counterpart to #BlackLivesMatter public policy-minded aims. Although she engages modes of analysis outside of academia, she too foregrounds the poetics of Tupac’s sonic resurrection. Lisa L. Moore’s paper aims to redirect and expand conversations about Lorde’s work to include her innovative, “sonnet-like” strategies and thereby, remove the author from the “prism of autobiography” she has thus far been relegated to. Our panel chair is CantoMundo founder and former UT faculty member Deborah Paredez--a scholar-poet whose work on black and latina/x performance examines the intersections of race, queerness, performance, and writing.
Together, the panelists aim to tackle a range of questions that, at their roots, signal the desire for futurity. How must we remember Lorde and will we have done her work deserved justice? How do hip-hop aesthetes both honor and critique a nostalgic past in moving toward new visions of being in the world? How does one cultivate a creative practice of mindfulness and what might one do with that in the world? In thinking through these questions, the panelists confront the lingering and urgent crises that continue to shape and constrain lives of the most vulnerable of our society: institutional and interpersonal violence, social protest and social justice, misrepresentation and erasure. The panelists present a group of artists--Audre Lorde, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, and Kendrick Lamar--who together, provide the languages and tools needed for dismantling and rebuilding. How marvelous.
Event Description
Readings from three works produced by Aquarius Press, an independent press specializing in underrepresented authors and artists. Founded in 1999, the press has two major divisions: Willow Books (now in its 10th year) and the newly-formed AUXmedia. Willow Books develops, publishes and promotes many of the nation’s top poets and writers of color, and AUXmedia presents nontraditional work in multimedia formats.
Sokunthary Svay is the author of a forthcoming poetry collection, No Others (Willow Books, 2017), which memorializes the largely untold stories and legacy of Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia. Svay is a Pushcart-nominated Khmer writer and musician from the Bronx, New York. Her writing credits include an essays anthologized in Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place and Time, FLESH, The Postpartum Year, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Blue Lyra Review, Newtown Literary, Mekong Review, and Emotive Fruition. She was the 2016 Willow Arts Alliance Residency Fellow and a recipient of the First Friday Residency at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. Her poem “Morning Song” was recently set to music and had a world premiere at the Queens New Music Festival. Svay’s family were refugees from Cambodia after surviving the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
Reginald Flood’s forthcoming Refugeed (Willow Books, 2017) is a narrative poetry collection based on the oral histories of African Americans who were enslaved during the most tragic era of American history. Refugeed contains authentic Works Progress Administration (WPA) transcriptions collected during the Roosevelt era. Flood was inspired by the interviewees who answered questions from “strangers representing a government agency about their enslavement with bravery and dignity.” Flood is a recent NEA Fellow in Creative Writing who received a Walker Fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Center. His poems have appeared in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Cave Canem X Anniversary Collection, Massachusetts Review, African American Review and Mythium. Flood is a Cave Canem fellow and teaches composition, African American literature and creative writing at Eastern Connecticut State University. Flood was also the editor and scholarly consultant for Remembrance (AUXmedia, 2016-2019), a multimedia and cross-disciplinary collaborative preservation project on the WWI-era African American performers and scholars who were involved in the creation of the Harlem Hellfighters Band.
Heather Buchanan is the founder of Aquarius Press and Executive Producer for Remembrance. She is a Digital Humanities scholar and the 2017 Paul Charosh Fellow for the Society for American Music. She is the Director of the Paradise Valley Idlewild Digital Resource, which utilizes technology to preserve the cultural legacies of two rapidly-vanishing African American historic districts in Michigan. She is the Co-Director of the Willow Arts Alliance, which presents readings and workshops for writers of color in culturally significant locales in the U.S.
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All three readings embody this conference’s thematic issues of race, creativity, interdisciplinarity and cultural legacies. Having lived in a refugee camp and then later in the projects of New York City, Sokunthary Svay’s reading will demonstrate the depth of deeply instilled cultural legacies and the power of literature to give voice to a people’s history of violence and displacement. Flood’s reading will illuminate the shameful past of slavery-era America, but in an inventive way that turns the tables on how this story is told. Flood’s work gives voice to a people who have been missing from the discussion of “what really happened.” Blending authentic WWI narratives with poetry and prose, Buchanan’s Remembrance gives voice to African American men and women who—despite their world-changing contributions to the Allied victory in WWI— have literally been left out of the history books. All three readings, while steeped in history, also chronicle the far-reaching personal and collective legacies in the present day. Reginald Flood states it best: “After studying hundreds of these transcriptions from a historical place of privilege I recognize the powerful gift these narratives provide a tangible, material connection to my own past. These words reinforce my gratitude for the fortitude of relatives from that generation whose stories fired my imagination and carved out my aesthetic.”
Visual Occupation/s: The Image & Palestine
Dalia Ebed (Moderator), Khaled Jarrar (Panelist), Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman (Panelist)
Khaled Jarrar’s work is internationally recognized for its concern with radical intersections of daily life in the occupied territories and visual culture. His body as such an artist has been censored from appearing publicly at openings, and some of his projects, such as “Through the Spectrum,” have been co-opted by the international media to perpetuate harmful narratives of the social spaces he is trying to document and fight from. Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, as an emerging artist and thinker, identifies with the movement of young Jews in the United States actively trying to disrupt U.S. American organizational and community denial of the occupation. Both artists are working through this panel on the question of the image, or what scholar Gil Z. Hochberg calls “visual occupations;” Khaled from within the very geopolitical and embodied circumstances of the occupation, and Robert as one both committed to working as a Jewish artist while forming solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and dignity, enabling an intercultural critique of subjugation, wherein the presenters’ very bodies are implicated by each other’s arguments.
Deconstructing Race, Deconstructing Identity
How do writers populate a world of their creation with racially marked bodies in a way that thoughtfully and meaningfully engages with the very question of how racial identities are constructed? The writers on this panel have all considered this question, and in addressing “the relationship among aesthetics, politics, and representation” in literature, we offer rigorous creative experimentations that challenge, critique, and embody racial discourse.
These panelists have modeled their work on the fictions of acclaimed writers like George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, Bernardine Evaristo, Jess Row, and A. Igoni Barrett. Rather than limiting ourselves to the question of who gets to write what, the writers on this panel ask the following questions: What is race? How does it operate? What can imaginative literary texts reveal about our shifting notions of race, over time and space, and through narrative?
To support this inquiry—and in conversation with scholar-critics like Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Omi and Winant, and Patricia Hill Collins—the panelists use deconstructive modes for identifying and practicing narrative strategies and craft techniques that grapple with constructions of race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities.
We hope that by sharing and discussing our creative and critical experimentations, we can foment a discussion that engages with the ways that history, genre, textual and creative practices, and representation may inform how we engage with racial identity in creative writing.
Title: Disrupting and Dismantling Dis-content: performances and a panel discussion
Event description:
Disrupting and Dismantling Dis-content is a performance/presentation with a panel discussion that presents the work of Peggy Robles-Alvarado, Nicholson Billey, Alexandria Johnson, and Feng Jiang and is moderated by Julia Steinmetz. Through performance and presentation, Disrupting and Dismantling Dis-content intends to challenge the conventionalized aesthetics and content of identity based performance by cultivating minoritarian modes of self-presentation. Acknowledging the exhaustion that results from perpetually shouldering the burden of representation, we take up disidentification as a point of departure for survival and flourishing.
Statement of Merit:
Disrupting and Dismantling Dis-content as a performance/presentation is centered in the intersectional practices and performance perspectives of four MFA candidates from the inaugural class of the Performance + Performance Studies program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. These artists perform their dis-content by elaborating performative art-based spaces within academic and artistic discourses related to their creative, theoretical, and methodological work. As a pedagogical unit, this panel demonstrates a particular legacy of José Esteban Muñoz’s practice of teaching: one in which the evidentiary status of ephemera is taken as a given, where we birth new worlds by means of disidentificatory performance, and where the medium of our mutual transformation is nothing less than love.
Editors of the forthcoming anthology Letters to the Future: BLACK Writing/Radical WRITING (Kore Press) propose a panel short reading followed by in-depth discussion focusing on the proliferation of black women writing in expansive, experimental, innovate, inquiring, prophetic, and profane forms/un-forms.
TO RELEASE: / A RESPONSE / --IN THE BODY
With Lara Mimosa Montes, Lucas de Lima & Anna Martine Whitehead
Moderated by Samiya Bashir
"How can writing be the place where an interoceptive nervous system is tracked? The sensorimotor sequence is a sequence of glitches, subtle movements, trembling, voltage — that, in somatic trauma therapies, is: tracked. So that a sequence can be completed. To release: a response to trauma that has been lodged — as a loop or distortion/contraction — in the body."
-Bhanu Kapil
In the wake of white nationalism’s global resurgence and a renewed interest in coalition-building, this panel interrogates the recuperative work of artists and writers of color resisting structural entanglements within white supremacy and exposing possibilities within multiracial coalition politics.
Through lyric essay, performance, and multimedia, the panel will focus on healing and the urgency of becoming undisciplined. In mapping these far-reaching yet imbricated formations, the panel seeks to both uncover and scramble the intimacy of racial categories, producing a poetics of horizontal relationality whose “opacities” (Glissant) and remakings of subjectivity work to collectivize rather than wish away racial power.
This panel is in response to the 2015 AWP panel entitled, “I Am We As You Are Me: Exploring Pronouns In Experimental Poetry,” where the question of whether pronouns are raced was discussed. This hybrid performance seeks to explore questions of intersections of race, diaspora, embodiment and language through Asian American responses to pronoun shifts and usage which evoke the bodily materiality of language and identity in multiple selves and contexts. What does it mean, as Sara Ahmed writes, to “live it” in everyday situations?
The Buffalo is a re-imagined outcome of a true story of a baby bison's encounter with humans. In the summer of 2016, a baby bison was euthanized by the park service in Yellowstone National Park after well-meaning tourists put the calf in the back of their SUV to protect it from the cold. It was 39 degrees outside. The bison, after experiencing human contact, was rejected by its mother and herd, imprinted on cars and humans, and tried to nurse on exhaust pipes, causing a danger to itself and other people.
The story of "The Buffalo" is a devised theatre piece told from the bison calf and his mother's perspective. It takes place in part in a prison cell, where the bison and his mother appear to the tourist-turned-prisoner repeatedly. We plan to utilize youtube home videos of people's trips to Yellowstone, shadow puppets, music and movement, as well as dialogue to investigate the story. The piece is an exploration of society's strained relationship with nature and the consequences of losing that connection. Through magical realism, we intend to ask our audience to examine our connection-or lack thereof-to nature, and the consequence of well meaning but misguided attempts to control or fix it.
Through this story, we are also exploring other forms of alienation: specifically relationships between Indigenous Americans and the colonialism of America, consumption and consumerism, fast fashion, mother child relationships, and technology's role in our human connections. Tonally, we intend for the piece to dwell in a slightly alienated humor.
We at MT+NYC Collaborative are deeply interested in both rural and urban audiences: how they are similar, how they are different, and where the universal human experience lies. We seek to utilize the audience as a lense to explore these facets of a story. The participants at TIP are a fantastic demographic of academically minded fellow artists to provide feedback, and would be a unique opportunity for us to meet artists from both urban and rural communities in a single setting.