Bernard James Remollino
Associate Professor of U.S. and Asian American & Pacific American History || Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) Mid-California Trustee
San Francisco, California, United States
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Dr. Bernard James Remollino (He/They/Siya) is an Associate Professor of U.S. and Asian American & Pacific American History at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California. Their doctoral work focused on the history of Filipinx American popular culture, labor, and migration in California during the early twentieth century. Bernard writes on Filipinx American histories, Asian American popular cultures, and transpacific cultural imaginaries in the Philippine diaspora. Bernard is a 1.5-generation undocumented immigrant from Makati, Philippines. Their family first settled in Stockton and still resides in the San Joaquin Valley.
Bernard collaborates with several Filipinx American organizations across California in amplifying the histories of struggle and community building that make Filipinx experiences part of the larger fabric of U.S. history. They are a National Trustee for the Filipino American National Historical Society representing the Mid-California FANHS chapters of Stockton, Central Valley, California Central Coast, Fresno, and Delano. They currently live on occupied, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land (San Francisco), where they are conducting research for an upcoming book project.
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(Re)Cultivating Bayanihan: Mobilizing Filipinx Martial Arts to Liberate, Heal, and Transform
This combined workshop and roundtable brings together the expertise of Filipinx American scholars, community organizers, culture bearers, and martial artists around the urgent work of decolonization, intersectional anti-imperialist struggle, radical motherhood, and transformative approaches to mental health through an engagement with Filipinx American relationships to sport and martial arts.
Workshop attendees will interact with facilitators – who hold over five decades of combined experience as martial artists – in a dynamic session that incorporates movement, story sharing, and critical reflection activities emphasizing the interconnectedness between a person’s physical wellbeing, mental health, and the labor of cultivating one’s capacity to participate in movements committed to dismantling oppressive structures of domination internally, at home, in the community, and globally.
This workshop will also encourage attendees to grapple with the stakes of situating Filipinx American sport and martial arts as tools by which practitioners historically reinforced and challenged the scripts of U.S. transpacific empire, gendered expectations and representations of family, the performance of masculinity and femininity, and a radical search for joy in play – discussions present in Constancio R. Arnaldo Jr.’s and Bernard James Remollino’s scholarly work.
These meditations on the expansive potentials of Filipinx American sporting and martial arts cultures are rooted in the mobilization and nurturing of the concept of bayanihan, or “community spirit.” Jean Teodoro frames this culture of solidarity as a portmanteau of “bayan” (people/nation), “bayani” (a person for the people), “ani” (harvest), and “anihan” (harvest season) that expresses itself as “a harvest of heroic acts” to achieve a greater purpose. This harvest of heroic acts coincides with Jyn Rose M. Aguas and Martin Romualdez’s reclamation of voice and the recultivation of inner power modeled after an emergent mindfulness of the potentials of radical motherhood. Participants will be encouraged to share their own experiences and challenged to determine how global solidarity can be cultivated through the work of raising future ancestors in the struggle.
How do we mobilize and engage in our histories as Filipinx Americans without retraumatizing ourselves and our communities? How can we strategize to keep each other safe as we encounter consistent assaults by capital and settler colonial violence? How do we remain mindful of our relationality with our LGBTQIA+, SWANA, and indigenous kin? How do we - as scholars, activists, organizers, and culture bearers – become more in tune with our bodies as we struggle to remain present in the work of collective liberation?
The ultimate goal is to offer multiple possibilities to address the urgent concerns of the present moment’s rise in ethnonationalism, fascism, and deadly silence. Workshop facilitators hope that the activities, discussions, and strategies generated during this session will be taken and applied to attendees’ respective contexts.
Tattoo Counter Narratives and/as Asian American Critique
The goal of this roundtable is to interrogate the history and study of US tattooing as a way to enact this year’s conference theme of sustainable publics, “to advance and cultivate learning, development, and collective engagements in public scholarship for speculative possibilities of expansive and humanizing change/justice.” Asian American frameworks and methods provide powerful tools to critique and expand the Eurocentric, white hegemonic narratives prevalent in tattoo studies, which erase the role of BIPOC communities, including Asian Americans, in the emergence, development, circulation, and application of tattoo aesthetics and practice. The common framework found within the cultural study of tattooing relies on the “great white male” narrative of artistic development and the presumption of the white normative universal body. The result of this myopic framing is the erasure of American empire, settler colonialism, militarization, and racial capitalism–that is, historical structures of domination that were enacted and maintained through the marking of specific (non-white) bodies rendered visibly abject by the US colonial racial state. How does Asian Americanist critique pose a challenge to these racial and colonial histories to highlight the role of tattooing in US racial formation and US empire? How does the unearthing of ‘buried histories’ and the centering of Asian American tattoo countercultures help us imagine liberatory intimacies, relationalities, and communities in the face of state repression and systemic social dismantling? The four presenters in this panel construct counternarratives of Asian American tattooing through interdisciplinary approaches California/West Coast tattoo cultures: a historiographical critique of the so-called “Tattoo Renaissance” and its white heteropatriarchal narratives to recenter tattoo aesthetic development within the framework of war, empire, and racial capitalism; an Asian American tattoo artist’s personal recollections of trying to define an “Asian American tattoo aesthetics” and working within a local Long Beach tattoo shop; reconstructing the forgotten history of Pinay tattooer in Hawai’i during the early 20th century and how her presence within the masculine spaces of the U.S. tattoo scene simultaneously troubled and reinforced U.S. transpacific imperial cultures over this period.; making visible the roll of prison life, gangs, and tattoos had in Asian American, Pacific Islander communities of the San Gabriel Valley. Ultimately, the participants on this roundtable collectively grapple with the question: What role does aesthetics play in recalibrating our ontological and epistemological sensory capacities to view the world anew, towards the goal of “speculative possibilities of expansive and humanizing change/justice”?
Carrying the Torch Without Burnout: Imagining a Sustainable Future for Asian American Studies
Our roundtable discussion centers on the reality of work life immediately after the PhD. As 1st generation scholar-activists, who feel lucky enough to find a home in the community college system, we nonetheless have felt that our training, and time with the university, did not prepare us to navigate our new terrain. This liminal period of transitioning from the environment of a graduate student to full time professor, on many occasions is jarring. Without practice, mentorship, or simple conversations within the ivory tower on how to manage our time and responsibilities to our communities, while trying to survive our new workloads (of anywhere from 3-6 classes on diverse subjects that do not always align with our fields, but with the needs of the college), such discussions in our training would have better eased us into the workflow of life outside of the academy.
Other tasks within the community college system as new professors include building new curriculum for new divisions and departments in Ethnic Studies, participating and collaborating with local community organizations and student clubs and outreach are a number of the additional tasks we scholars of color have taken on. This cultural taxation, to serve as diversity representatives on multiple committees, who bring with them new literature, pedagogy, and social justice praxis into our decolonial curriculum, are also still expected to remain moored to research and contemporary literature in their respective fields. We barely were able to survive the university as first generation scholars. We feel that we have been thrown into yet another environment of scarcity where we continue to advocate and maintain our departments that intersect or house branches of Ethnic Studies. How do we as new Asian American Studies scholar-activists maintain our momentum and drive to preserve and teach the many lessons of social justice, community building, and abolition that is inherent to the formation and initial purpose of Asian American Studies?
Our papers and reflections ask this question to fellow Asian American scholar activists, both long tenured in their fields and those who are also just entering and settling into the academic workforce: How is this workload sustainable?
Radical Love, Critical Kapwa: Embodying Filipinx Histories in the Praxis of Care and Solidarity
This roundtable discussion brings together Filipinx American scholars, activists, and educators committed to the work of liberatory Ethnic Studies and History in their communities across California. Guided by the spirit of reorienting subjects that have been “Othered” in Asian American Studies (including intersectional histories of solidarity between Filipinos in the Philippines, Filipinx Americans, and Palestine), discussions will be grounded in the concept of kapwa, a Filipinx framework of interconnectedness. Participants will discuss their roles in contemporary struggles to transform curriculums and develop pedagogies that make accessible the narratives of minoritized populations in the United States and beyond.
Participants will share how they engage in this struggle from their positionalities as activist-educators, union organizers, and professional historians. Moreover, Raj Desai’s formulation of Critical Kapwa as a “revolutionizing ideology, epistemology, and spirituality” that both combats “the daily manifestations of the residual hegemonic trauma” of colonization and cultivates thick solidarity to “empower the individual to operate outside of those hegemonic ideological structures” is a common theme across each participants’ work. Participants will discuss how their work demonstrates the embodiment of Critical Kapwa as a way to see themselves in the communities they serve and to protect community members from racist ideologues, gendered violence, and Zionist attacks on education.
Our roundtable participants are daily engaged in a praxis of sharing out intersectional narratives of Asian American solidarity, resistance, and radical change to communities with direct stakes in their telling. By highlighting histories that have otherwise been suppressed, diluted, or erased, our participants are actively confronting attacks on Ethnic Studies that occlude the critically significant connections linking Filipinx Americans to Third World liberation, National Democracy in the Philippines, and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation in the afterlives of the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Participants will discuss the tensions, contradictions, and conditions of possibility that emerge in the deliberate acts of kwentuhan (talk-story), collaboration, strategizing, advocacy, and co-conspiratorship. We will invite attendees to engage with each other through art, storytelling, and critical reflection so that they might learn to feel the themes of solidarity, radical love, and community building from their own positionalities.
How has education traditionally been weaponized against marginalized communities? How does an embodied Critical Kapwa allow us to identify, resist, and transform these structures of domination in education so that we might experience, as bell hooks writes, “a revolution of values” rooted in radical love? What bridges communities together and how can we mobilize historical memories to strengthen transracial, transpacific, and cross-cultural solidarities?
Our discussion will grapple with the intimate connections between the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine, the movement for indigenous sovereignty in the Philippines, and Filipinx American diasporic organizing. It will offer responses to these questions in an attempt to reorient current organizing frameworks toward a Critical Kapwa lens that challenges existing structures of domination in education.
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