Grace Shinhae Jun
UC San Diego/San Diego City College
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grace shinhae jun is a mother, wife, artist, educator, and scholar. The daughter of a South Korean immigrant and a North Korean refugee, she comes from a lineage of deep love and commitment to serve the people. She is the director/choreographer for bkSOUL performance company and has performed locally, nationally, and internationally. grace also is a co-founder of Asian Solidarity Collective, co-conspires with Street Dance Activism, and loves to get down in the club. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her PhD in Drama and Theatre through the joint doctoral program at UCSD/UCI. Her scholarship includes publications in the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Journal, and is the co-editor for Dance Studies Association’s 2022 Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies. grace teaches at San Diego City College, with transcenDANCE Youth Arts, and at the University of California, San Diego, where she is the recipient of the 2023 Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award.
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Inquiries of Arrival: "Contemporary" Asian/American Dance/Studies in the 2020s
This panel examines the contributions of Asian American labor to “contemporary” dance and dance studies, problematizing the dominantly narrow theorization of the “contemporary” within these fields. The “contemporary” in dance is temporally and aesthetically significant: it indicates historical current-ness and aesthetic experimentation, concepts fraught with the racialized, colonial logics underpinning artistic innovation and modernity. Asian American dance scholars have argued that mainstream understandings of “contemporary dance” often reference white, Euro-American choreographers exclusively, positioned in opposition to racialized, global artists whose dances represent “tradition” (Chatterjea 2013; Kwan 2017). Our panel elaborates on this scholarship by exploring how discussions of “contemporary dance” also require attention to their contemporary contexts — that is, we insist that our studies must be responsive to social-political urgencies of our contemporary moment in the 2020s. In this panel, we locate these urgencies in the connection between Asian American dance, critical refugee studies, casteism, anti-Blackness, and Indigeneity, aiming to not only complicate dominant (white) theorizations of Asian American dancers as un-contemporary but to argue that analyses of interrelated oppressions are crucial to this scholarship. We also emphasize dance practices and perspectives that are marginalized in normative imaginings of contemporary dance, exploring Asian American hip hop dancers; Hmong dance; and analyses of South Asian dance from anti-racist, anti-caste, and regionalist approaches. In doing so, we assert the significance of dance disciplinary methods to Asian American studies broadly: the movement of the body expresses crucial knowledge, perhaps producing alternative paradigms for Asian American scholarship and prompting the “arrival” of contemporary solidarities.
Community Building: Asian American Studies through Hip Hop Studies & Aesthetics
Asian Americans have long participated in Hip Hop as a culture of resistance and creativity. While popular accounts have often dismissed this participation as culturally appropriative or inauthentic, Asian American youth have continued to adopt Hip Hop to express racialized identity, knowledge of self, community, and relational race politics. This roundtable analyzes how, as Asian American practitioners of Hip Hop culture, our pedagogies have led to a deeper understanding of our Asian American identities and how they are tied into the larger discourse of American culture. Critically mindful of how Hip Hop as a conflicted site of Asian-Black relations, we lead with an understanding that an analysis of Asian Americans in Hip Hop should necessarily be considered in the broader contexts of white supremacy, relative positions of privilege and penalty, people of color solidarity, and interracial conflict. Based on this premise, we leverage our experiences as educators and community organizers to develop teaching practices that center embodied and experiential learning, and encourage solidarity building.
AAAS Annual Conference 2024 Sessionize Event
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