AAAS

By Tamika Whitenack

What was I doing this past weekend? Frolicking in the snow in Madison, WI? Why? I was at the Association for Asian American Studies conference and it was an incredible learning experience!! Very grateful that we got to go, as it was v intellectually stimulating and exciting. In an effort to process my thoughts I have gone through my notes and written some stuff...still a bit rough but I thought I'd share!

AAAS Reflections

The three days of the Association for Asian American Studies conference were an incredible learning experience. The extensive conference program enlightened me to the wide range of topics in the field of Asian American Studies, including issues that I had never considered in an AAS context before, such as disability studies, environmental studies, and refugee studies. Asian American Studies is truly interdisciplinary, while at the same time being anti-disciplinary: Asian American Studies challenges us to consider learning outside of the traditional institutional context, exploring ideas that break preconceived definitions and using research methods that benefit communities, not just academia. Through the conference, I have come to see AAS not just necessary as an important curriculum of knowledge, but as a practice that strives for community empowerment. This was particularly evident to me in a panel of AAS educators who spoke about AAS as a high-impact practice. AAS, along with other fields of Ethnic Studies, answers these three questions: Who am I? What is the story of my family and community? What can I do to make positive change and bring about social justice for my community and the world? These three questions are central to representational belonging and building a sense of agency to create transformative leaders. As a community that strives to be inclusive and situate our studies in the broader context of the world, I believe that these goals align with the goals of Vassar.

It was intellectually stimulating to hear the work presented by scholars in the various panels I attended. Much of their research was in areas I had no previous academic experience in, and I welcomed these new perspectives. However, some of the most exciting panels were about how AAS connects to Environmental Studies, which is my field of concentration at Vassar. In a panel on the Pacific, scholars discussed how the creation of the ocean as an alien space and the domination of the ocean through settler colonialism (ie island plantations) and capitalism (ie trade routes) has created conditions that depleted the environment and continue to affect the resilience of these spaces and communities to climate change. The idea of environmental degradation as gentrification of the sea, as green solutions/industries are proposed to address environmental issues, was particularly striking to me. I was also moved by the idea of slow resistance as a counterpoint to the environmental harm often characterized by Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence. The panelists suggested that slow resistance is a process of reclaiming community systems, such as indigenous food and government pathways, as a way to counteract the environmental harm that has been caused from colonialism. As someone who approaches environmental studies and climate change with hope, I found this idea especially exciting. Another thought-provoking concept to me was the relation of disability studies to climate change: the panelists posited the idea that we need to accept that since we likely cannot restore a “pristine Earth,” we need to learn how to value and live with a debilitated land.

Another panel that felt directly related to my ENST major and particular interest in food systems was a presentation on community gardens (specifically the Danny Woo Community Garden in Seattle’s Chinatown International District). The research presented discussed how the garden is a form of socio-ecological resistance and biocultural diversity that protects transnational knowledge systems and agroecological methods. Community gardens can offer an essential space for the nutritional, emotional, and social well-being of immigrant communities, as well as serving as resistance to gentrification and development. It was inspiring for me to hear this research work, as it is similar to the type of work I hope to do for my ENST thesis and potentially my career after Vassar.

Other interesting thoughts from these panels:

· Is the opposite of pessimism nihilism?

· Ocean food chains/residence time: how do things in ocean (ie bodies from middle passage) get recycled and consumed?

· Typhoons are echoes of dispossession, storms as actors and archives in history

· Role of military in island environmental depletion

· What does climate change mean for AAS? How to imagine a world without humans

Other important ideas from panels:

On sanctuary, refuge, and resilience

· Liberalism is limited as an anti-racial; liberal practices such as sanctuary are given because justice has not been given

· Abolition movements should not just be about breaking down systems, but about building new worlds that reject the state

· Settler colonialism takes away the multiplicity of sovereign states (ie indigenous nations, territories) and privileges citizenship, how can we consider a right to space based on humanity?

· Research of AAS must build partnerships with communities that are useful for the community, not just researchers

Adoption

· Adoption as containing absence (no connection to homeland) vs. loss (prior connection that is left)

· How to understand that pasts may be incomprehensible

Speculation/Embodiment

· Toxicity is present in racialized bodies already

· Asian bodies are seen as healthy which ties into model minority myth and neoliberalism, health is seen as a personal attribute not related to structural

o Access to healthcare in neoliberal system prioritizes some bodies over others, ties to access to healthcare profession: Asians are viewed as being healthcare providers not receivers, how does this privilege Asian bodies as healthy?

· Biotechnology is promoting the idealized healthy body, how does this relate to disability studies?

Critique of Racial Capitalism

· Disability as the antithesis of productivity: could anti-work disability politics go against capitalist productivity and promote the right to not work and be proud? Or expand definition of work beyond wage work, is survival a form of work?

· Antiwork politics in academia: how lack of admin work to change structural issues leads to more work for faculty

· How faculty of color do work that is not legible as work: ie work related to diversity

o Need to refuse this work to acknowledge exhaustion? How to create space to refuse work?

· Phenomenon of Asian (esp South Asian males) as the authoritative of voice of medicine: how this perpetuates model minority myth and ideas about healthy Asian body

Critical Refugee Studies and Storytelling

· The catastrophe of settler colonialism is a process, so the act of returning is a process

· Use of foodways to tell stories: olive tree for Palestinian refugees

· Care in families for Hmong refugee stories: how trauma becomes intertwined with care

o How western medicine invalidates Hmong care practices

· Lost/found for refugee stories: what is lost is not just what is left behind but what possibilities are not allowed due to displacement, what is found can be new lifestyles and kinship-radical kinship can be found in shared histories of colonial oppression—instead of absolute loss, loss that is creative and makes social relations

· There is also what remains: how things lost persist as intergenerational memory

o Storyteling is a way to keep remains

· Moving beyond loss and towards healing requires decolonization

· Need to be wary of refugee success story bc it can excuse the conditions that produce refugees

· Need to complicate Asians as settlers, need to challenge US “nation of immigrants” narrative

Challenges to Whiteness

· How is Asian American relation to whiteness based on proximity rather than distance? -proximity is defined by nearness but inability to be white, there is still distance

· How is whiteness being defined as current cultural habits vs historical violence and hierarchy

· In regards to media studies: how do conditions created by whiteness affect representations

· How some Asian Americans have surpassed whites in educational/economic privilege complicates white privilege…model minority myth

· Hyperselectivity explains model minority myth for Asians and relates to structural immigration policies?

· How current white anxiety crisis creates new conditions for PoC and weakens aspirations to whiteness?

Tearing Down Narratives

· Context of Japanese in WW2: 2 stories are camp or 442^nd

o How do these narratives uphold patriotism and appeal to emotion?

o Can we replace narratives so that they don’t support nationalist ideals?

o Interesting to look at Issei experience vs Nisei

§ Shift the focus on belonging due to citizenships, suggest ways of belonging outside of legal citizenship

· How have narratives/archives been lost due to empire? When is war invisible?

· How does time frame effect narrative? Can expansive time frame make larger movements more visible, implicate things such as colonialism, capitalism etc

· What is the origin of a narrative? What is the ending? Can there be multiple and what does this mean?

Education outside of the classroom

· Supplementary education for high-achieving east Asians reflects desire for educational advantage, often supports white supremacy by trying to make students more American?

o Trying to use resources to maximize educational advantage is a neoliberal practice

o Neoliberalism for racialized people manifests as self-governance?

· Community spaces as healing/ability to learn what is not given in schools

o SE Asian community spaces provide critical consciousness and care that is not given in school

o Model minority myth is hiding state violence in schools for refugees—need for data disaggregation

o Hmong students: erasure from curriculum means that classmates do not know how to read students so they have burden of teaching about their identity

§ Invisibility is damaging and maybe schools cannot be a place for healing?

Carceral State

· How racism is at play in mail order brides: who is considered to be taking advantage of the system (Asian women) vs taking refuge in the system (eastern european)

· Sexism of immigration fraud: women are exploited bc expectations of husbands are harmful but only way to remain is US

· How does advocacy for refugees end up falling into neoliberal practices by advocating for refuges patriostims/economic contributions as validation to stay?

· The states increasing interest in private lives: modern surveillance state and how family fits in arguments of deportation

· How legitimization of love to the state affects status

· Questions of abolishing ICE—what message is this sending? That we are criminalizing the wrong people vs. criminalization as a practice is wrong

Settler Colonialism

· Distinction between racialization and colonization: indigeneity vs racialized subject

· Developing and Asian American Critical Race Theory needs to look at complicity with anti-blackness, make allyship with indigenous goals, need to go beyond legal discourse bc law as knowledge creation does not serve communities of color

· Thinking about consciousness raising in the context of Mao’s China and immigration to the US…

Okihiro: “Asians did not come to America, America came to Asia”

· How to take AAS outside of body, look at interactions of Asia/America before migration of bodies—its about systems, not people

· Need to reconceptualize the geographic framework as a way to challenge citizenship as final goal; need to look at AAS in terms of empire not US geographical location

· Ideology is the basis to destabilize oppression and learning is a threat to positions of privilege

o Need for comparative ethnic studies as “the study of power” as opposed to multiculturalism and inclusion