This panel examines multiple publics negotiating, critiquing, and constructing a variety of Asian American religious subjectivities and religious cultures. Each paper takes a different approach to unpacking transnational entanglements informing various religious communities and ideas that have either been understated or erased from collective memory due to various geopolitical interests. Such forms of epistemic violence reveal contesting communal identities and transnational exchange of ideas that transgress national, religious, and cultural boundaries.

The first paper engages the Kachin Baptist diasporic community through a historical overview of the debates surrounding the formation, critique, and reimagination of collective identity. In particular, the paper examines how various historical events and actors have fomented divisions within the Kachin diaspora and how various publics engage in reconstructing Kachin ethnic identity in the US.

The second paper turns to Korean Evangelical publications that evidence the transnational circulation of anti-LGBTQ organizing and Cold War developmentalist ideologies amongst the South Korean Christian Right and Korean American churches. Such critical reevaluations engage Korean and Korean American gender and sexual minorities by speculating possibilties of future solidarities against the Korean Evangelical Right.

The third paper traces the intellectual history of the concept “Beginner’s Mind” popularized in the US by founder of the San Francisco Zen Center Shunryu Suzuki. The author challenges readings that erase its connection to East Asia and Asian Buddhism by calling for deeper analysis that unpacks the entanglements of Asian, Asian American, and non-Asian Buddhist communities in the circulation of both the “Beginner’s Mind” and Zen spiritual practices in the United States.

The fourth paper examines the Long Beach Cambodian American community and diasporic adaptations of political and religious power on the communal level. Relying on ethnographic and participant observation, the author analyzes the centrality of religion in diasporic negotiations of individual and communal identity while simultaneously entangling the political-religious spatiality of Cambodia with Long Beach, California.