The OFF-WHITE PAPER SERIES, developed in partnership between the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), is a set of mini-essays on the futures of Asian American studies in relation to the development of new Smithsonian Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) gallery spaces. Published in fall 2024, the series gathers recommendations by leading scholars for how academic field and museum spaces, as they grow and evolve, might do so in coordination, best supporting and informing one another, with a focus on decolonial and liberatory commitments.

This proposed roundtable features selected readings from the series and a conversation among several series contributors, including Theodore Gonzalves, Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and former President of AAAS (2018-2020); Simi Kang, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and former AAAS Board Member (2020-2022); Ma Vang, Assistant Professor and Founding Chair, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced; Jason Oliver Chang, Head and Associate Professor, Department for Social and Critical Inquiry, University of Connecticut and former AAAS Board Member (2018-2019); and series editor Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, APAC Curator and diasporic troublemaker, who will chair the session. Together the group will discuss the series’ scope and consequence, addressing, among other critical questions, what museums are to the field, what the field is to museums, what each might be to the other, and what the two should offer, together, to broader publics and AANHPI communities in particular. These questions are of course the domain and responsibility of everyone in Asian American studies, and we will invite the audience to join the conversation.