Program

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1

Pre-Symposium Film Screening

TIME: 6-8 p.m.

PLACE: Livingston Student Center, Livingston Hall (Livingston Campus)

CURTIS CHIN (Director, Writer, Producer)

VINCENT WHO? (2008)

Synopsis: In 1982, at the height of anti-Japanese sentiments, Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit by two white autoworkers who said, “it’s because of you mother** that we’re out of work.” When the judge fined the killers a mere $3,000 and three years probation, Asian Americans around the country galvanized for the first time to form a real community and movement. This documentary features interviews with the key players at the time, as well as a whole new generation of activists. Vincent Who? asks how far Asian Americans have come since then and how far we have yet to go. The film has screened at over 350 colleges, high schools, libraries, non-profits, and law firms in four countries and won awards from the National Association for Multicultural Education and the Asian American Justice Center. Directed by Tony Lam and produced by Curtis Chin. 

Curtis Chin is also working on a memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant and a documentary film Tested, which follows the struggles and challenges of a diverse group of students—many of them immigrants and working class—as they prepare for the standardized test for admission to New York City’s nationally ranked public high schools.

Event Co-Sponsors: Asian American Cultural Center and Asian Student Council

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2 / FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3

Third Symposium on Asians in the Americas

TIME: 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

PLACE: Alexander Library 4th Floor Teleconference/Lecture Hall (College Avenue Campus)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2

8 a.m.-8:45 a.m.         

REGISTRATION / CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

8:45-9 a.m. 

OPENING REMARKS: Peter March (Executive Dean, School of Arts and Sciences)

9-10:15 a.m. 

PANEL 1: ASIAN DIASPORIC ENCOUNTERS BEYOND SETTLER COLONIALISM

Moderator: Zelideth María Rivas (Marshall University)

Benjamín Narváez (University of Minnesota, Morris)

Chinese Coolies in Nineteenth-Century Peru: Race, Geopolitics, and Labor

Julia Katz (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)

Ahuna and the Mo‘o: Problematizing Chinese Success in Hawaiian Commercial Food Production

Tao Leigh Goffe (Yale University)

Framing the Chiney Royal: Jamaican Chinese Vernacular Photography and Cultural Memory

10:15-10:30 a.m. BREAK

10:30-11:45 a.m.    

PANEL 2: HISTORICAL MEMORY AND IDENTITY

Moderator: Debbie Lee-DiStefano (Southeast Missouri State University)

Yeon-Soo Kim (Rutgers University-New Brunswick) 

Representation of the Chinese Revolution and Spain’s Ideological Nostalgia: Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León’s Sonríe China (1956) and José María Gironella’s China, lágrima innumerable (1965)

Roanne Kantor (University of Texas at Austin)

The Travelogue and the Fellow Traveler: Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Safarnama-e Cuba 

Anita Baksh (LaGuardia Community College)

Beyond the Kala Pani: Indentureship, the Environment, and Affect in Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter

11:45 a.m.-1 p.m. LUNCH BREAK 

The College Avenue Student Center (126 College Avenue) offers numerous food options, including au bon pain and Gerlanda's Pizza and Cafe.

During the lunch break, enjoy a symposium-related photography art exhibit featuring the work of Maria Lau, a Chinese Cuban artist from New Jersey, at the Center for Latino Arts and Culture (122 College Avenue).

1-3 p.m. FEATURED SESSION I: Film Screening and Discussion

Encounters: Co-locating Historical Narratives of People of Asian Descent in the Americas—West Asia/East Asia 

Moderator: Kathleen López (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)

Roshni Rustomji-Kerns (Sonoma State University) with Konrad Aderer

Konrad Aderer’s Enemy Alien (2011) is a prize-winning Asian United Statesian documentary presented in the format of multi-interviews about the fight to free Farouk Abdel-Muhti, a Palestinian-born human rights activist detained in a post-9/11 sweep of Muslim immigrants. Transferred from jail to jail, beaten and interrogated but never charged with a crime, Farouk organizes other immigration detainees in a hunger strike. Resistance brings consequences as Farouk is transferred into solitary confinement and Aderer’s documentary itself is obstructed and investigated by counterterrorism officials. Told mainly through the eyes and words of Konrad Aderer, the grandson of Japanese Americans interned during World War II, the two stories take the form of what Roshni Rustomji-Kerns calls an important “geo-historical co-location.” 

Professor Rustomji-Kerns will introduce and discuss the documentary film in the context of questions and ideas generated during the last two Symposiums on Asians in the Americas. 

3-3:15 p.m. BREAK

3:15-5 p.m. 

PANEL 3: COMPARATIVE ETHNIC STUDIES 

Moderator: Annie Fukushima (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)

Kavitha Ramsamy (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)

Anti-Asianism in the United States: The "Dotbuster" Attacks of the 1980s in Jersey City

K. Kale Yu (Nyack College)

Outside of Evangelical Mainstream: Jeremy Lin and Asian American Evangelicalism

Apoorva Jadhav (University of Michigan)

Indians and Other Asians in America: Convergence to Non-Hispanic Whites, or a New Trajectory? (co-authors Devesh Kapur and Sanjoy Chakravorty)

Sayu Bhojwani (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)

South Asian Panethnicity: Resonant Identity and Organizing Tool

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3

8-8:30 a.m.

REGISTRATION / CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

8:30-9:45 a.m. 

PANEL 4: TEXT AND REPRESENTATION 

Moderator: Camilla Stevens (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)

Ana Paulina Lee (Tulane University)

Volatile Mandarins in the Writings of Eça de Queiroz and José Martí

Koichi Hagimoto (Wellesley College)

Borges and Japan

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Ryerson University)

"I am the Man": Chinese Masculinity and Calypso

9:45-10 a.m. BREAK

10-11:15 a.m. 

PANEL 5: THEORETICAL PARADIGMS

Moderator: Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui (Rutgers University-New Brunswick) 

Debbie Lee-DiStefano (Southeast Missouri State University)

Questions of Place, Space and Geography in the Study of Asians in the Americas

Augusto Espiritu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Transpacific Crossings and Ghostly Rememberings: Asian American Studies and Latin American Studies: An Imperial Pacific Perspective

Junyoung Verónica Kim (University of Iowa)

Re-orienting Transpacific Studies: The Politics of Globality in Asia-Latin America

11:15-11:30 a.m. BREAK

11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. FEATURED SESSION II: Dialogue 

Journeys of Indenture

Moderator: Anjali Nerlekar (Rutgers University-New Brunswick)

Lisa Yun (Binghamton University)

“Coolie Narratives” of Yesterday and Today: An Ancestral Genre of the Americas

Yun proposes the “coolie narrative” as a hybrid literary/historical genre with profound and lasting themes that relate to today’s human rights struggles, freedom, borders, and belonging.

Gaiutra Bahadur (Author and Journalist)

Her Middle Passage: Indian Women and Indenture Voyages

Bahadur explores neither the point of departure nor the point of arrival for female indentured laborers on British sugar estates in the West Indies. Instead, she focuses on their journeys across the transfiguring seas from Calcutta to the Caribbean. The approach is fitting because indenture itself proved to be a journey for the quarter million Indian women engaged as “coolies,” replacement plantation workers after the enslaved were freed in the British Empire. They journeyed from a position of complete marginalization in the subcontinent, as widows and other outcasts, to a position of tenuous power as the scarcer sex, greatly outnumbered by Indian men on the plantations. That figurative journey was mirrored in their literal journey across the dark waters (“the kala pani”).

1-2 p.m. LUNCH BREAK 

2-3:30 p.m. 

PANEL 6: CULTURE, NATION, AND COMMUNITY 

Moderator: Curtis Chin

Maria Tham (Master of International Affairs, Columbia University)

Chinese-Pakistani-American Migration and Identity: Cultural Identity, Language, and Food

Eric Hung (Westminster Choir College of Rider University)

Healing the Trauma over the Cambodian Killing Fields through Music in America

Zelideth María Rivas (Marshall University)

Bodies of Desire: Japanese Brazilians on International Stages

Chisu Teresa Ko (Ursinus College)

Beyond Colectividades: Can We Talk about “Asian-Argentines”?

3:30-3:45 p.m. Break 

3:45-5 p.m.  

PANEL 7: ROUNDTABLE 

New Directions in the Study of Asians in the Americas: Rethinking Migration, Borders, Identity, Belonging, and Memory

Moderator

Julia María Schiavone Camacho (Sarah Lawrence College)

Participants

Fredy González (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Asian Migrants and Transpacific Identities

Recent scholarship has frequently touched upon questions of identity among Asian migrants to the Americas, much of it seeking to move beyond an antiquated sojourner/settler binary and explore more complicated senses of belonging. González raises questions about the relationship between the identity of transpacific migrants and international relations. How have migrants been caught “between empires” and negotiated overlapping attachments to their birth countries and countries of settlement? What is the relationship between these senses of belonging and international politics? In a rapidly changing global landscape, is identity always strategic? Does national identity obscure other attachments that may be more relevant or important to transpacific migrants?

Elliott Young (Lewis & Clark College)

Epiphytes as a Model of Migration: Beyond Rooted Plant Metaphors

Young proposes a new metaphor for understanding migrants to the Americas: the epiphyte. Epiphytes do not find roots in the soil, but rather they live non-parasitically off of the moisture, nutrients, and windblown debris found in another plant or tree. The experience of all migrants, but especially Asians, Africans, Latin Americans and others who were racialized as non-white in the US, fits this metaphor better than the root-based metaphors which always privilege the ability to assimilate to the local culture and to establish new roots. The epiphyte metaphor accounts for the diasporic zigzagging of many Chinese migrants in the Americas. It also allows us to view migrants through a transnational lens rather than assuming that the teleological endpoint of migration is incorporation into a national polity.

Erika Lee (University of Minnesota)

Entangled Histories

The histories of Asians in the Americas have drawn from and have helped to develop local, borderlands, regional, national, transnational, and hemispheric histories. Recent scholarship has allowed us to understand their rich and diverse experiences better than ever before. Lee asks what can be gained by trying to connect the long histories of diverse Asians, including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, South Asians, and Southeast Asians to the Americas together over the longue durée from the colonial era to the present. How have these histories been entangled with each other and to world history in general? What theoretical and methodological approaches might we consider? What synergies and constraints exist? 

5-6 p.m.  

CLOSING REMARKS

RECEPTION