Professional/Cultural Representation: Academic Outsider-ness and Asian Otherness
This panel brings together three interdisciplinary scholars with books recently published within this past year on social exclusion of Asians and Asian Americans in society.
Each of the three authors will briefly talk about their new monographs, but they will share how those academic works inform their own positionality within the Ivory Tower. The authors will also do a cross-examination of each other’s work to consider how dominant images of Asian/Americans as Other shape personal and collective feelings of academic outsider-ness. The discussant will offer reflections on the three recently published books and Asian American insider-outsiderness.
This panel is significant in not only unpacking Asian marginalization, but it deconstructs what it means to be a scholar-teacher of Asian descent today with the panelists speaking to issues of being Filipina, Vietnamese, Sino-Burmese, and Korean as well as woman of color, queer, first-gen, immigrant, working class. The panel centrally aligns with this year’s theme on sustainable publics in terms of working through issues of work-life balance and identity-labor.
On the 25th Anniversary of Asian Settler Colonial Critique: An Amerasia Special Issue Roundtable
It has been twenty years since the 2000 publication of Haunani Kay Trask’s essay, “Settlers of Color and Immigrant Hegemony” in Amerasia Journal. Recognizing this, in an upcoming Amerasia special issue, scholars, activists, and community organizers will reflect on shifting conversations and debates in the field of Asian settler colonialism. Their collective articles, forums, creative pieces, and reflection essays re-orient and ground scholarship about Asian settler colonialism in Indigenous land and water based-struggles. In this way, they open more capacious engagements of decolonization- ones that are rooted in alternative futurities for Asian and Indigenous communities beyond different settler colonial states.
This roundtable brings together the forum contributors to the special issue. Grounded in their ties to Guåhan, Okinawa, Guåhan, and Turtle Island, Ryan Buyco, Eleanor Craig, Himanee Gupta-Carlson, Tamara Ho, Josephine Faith Ong, and Areerat Worangwongwasu unsettle the binary that is often attributed to Asian American and Indigenous experiences in Turtle Island and the Pacific, re-orient Asian settler colonial scholarship towards decolonial praxis, and raise robust questions about the functioning of Asian nation-state as settler states that participate in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Asia
Place, Practice, and Ethics: Interracial Engagements of Spirituality, Land, and Relationality
Given how responsibility and relationships to land have been central to Indigenous spiritualities, what might Asian Americanists learn from Native American, Pasifika, Palestinian, and indigenous epistemologies about ecology, faith, and environmental ethics? How might scholars of Asian American and Pacific Islander religions take seriously the environment, land, and food as spiritual? One of the starting points for this panel’s interdisciplinary conversation is Candace Fujikane’s 2021 book Mapping Abundance: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i, which engages with Indigeneity, Euro-American-Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, and fraught intersections of Asian and Pacific identities. The panelists share an interest in the critical nexus of spirituality, coloniality, and relationality, and offer their views of different embodied practices and narratives that resist settler-colonial epistemologies and cultural amnesia. Our exchange aims to animate discussions of Asian American and Pacific Islander interventions in relation to food security, land and water sovereignty, climate change, and the environment.
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