Faculty Seminar Series in Asian American Studies
Foreigners In Us – Why Love to Hate?
Date: Monday, March 1, 2010
Time: 6PM to 8PM
Place: 25 West 43rd Street, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
Free Admission
This public dialogue on xenophobia/philia in the (Asian) American context, energized by some of the critical and creative voices from inside and outside the Ivory Tower, celebrates the beginning of a stimulating series of faculty seminars in Asian American Studies at the Asian American / Asian Research Institute. At this launch event, panelists will explore various embodiments of the “foreigner” question, the theme of the year 2010, focusing on its aesthetic, moral, and political harms, implications and future: how deep is its everydayness and randomness?
Panelists will offer their own unique perspectives on how they understand the term or conceptual pair, xenophobia/philia, and why this issue deserves more critical attention; followed by Q& A with the audience.
Panelists
- Linda Martín Alcoff (Hunter College, and CUNY Graduate Center)
- Terry Hong (Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program)
- David Henry Hwang (Playwright)
- Gary Mar (Stony Brook University – SUNY)
- Gary Okihiro (Columbia University)
- Bruce Robbins (Columbia University)
- Jack Tchen (New York University)
Series Organizer: Kyoo Lee, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College, CUNY, and a Resident Mellon Fellow at CUNY Graduate Center.
Details on full schedule of Spring 2010 seminar sessions:www.kyoolee.net/faculty-seminar-in-asian-american-studies.html
Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center. Her books and anthologies include Thinking From the Underside of History co-edited with Eduardo Mendieta (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2003), Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), Feminist Epistemologies co-edited with Elizabeth Potter (Routledge 1993), Real Knowing (Cornell 1996), and Identity Politics Reconsidered co-edited with Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya Mohanty and Paula Moya (Palgrave, 2006); and Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader co-edited with Mariana Ortega (SUNY 2009). www.alcoff.com
Terry Hong is media arts consultant for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institution; she served as the project director for the 2003 Smithsonian Korean American Centennial Commemoration. She created and maintains BookDragon (http://bookdragon.si.edu/), an extensive book blog for the Smithsonian. Terry taught for two years in Duke University’s Leadership in the Arts, a performance and public policy program based in New York City. She writes frequently about theater, books, and film. Publication credits include American Theatre, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Dallas Morning News, The Bloomsbury Review, AsianWeek, aMagazine: Inside Asian America, among others. Terry co-authored two books, Eastern Standard Time: A Guide to Asian Influence on American Culture from Astro Boy to Zen Buddhism and What Do I Read Next? Multicultural Literature. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Yale University.
David Henry Hwang is a playwright. His work includes the plays M. Butterfly, Golden Child, Yellow Face and FOB; the Broadway musicals Elton John & Tim Rice’s Aida (co-author), the revised Flower Drum Song and Disney’s Tarzan; and the operas The Voyage (music by Philip Glass), Ainadamar (Osvaldo Golijov – two 2007 Grammy Awards), The Silver River (Bright Sheng) and Alice in Wonderland (Unsuk Chin). He is a Tony Award winner and three-time nominee, a three-time Obie Award winner and a two-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Gary Mar is a Professor of Philosophy, specializing in logic, philosophy of religion, and Asian American philosophy, at Stony Brook University. In 1997 Gary Mar was the catalyst for the donation of the Charles B. Wang Asian American Center, which was at that time the largest donation in the history of the public education system in New York State., and he continues to serve as the founding director of the Asian American Center Bridge. Gary Mar is currently a member of the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission, a member of the community advisory board for public TV station WLIW21, VP of education for Organization of Chinese Americans, a member of the executive board for the Council on Prejudice Reduction, and Chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies. Gary Mar has won numerous awards including the President’s and Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, a fellowship with the Academy of Scholar-Teachers, and the Outstanding Professor Award from the Alumni Association.
Gary Y. Okihiro is director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. He is author of several books in U.S. and African history, most recently of THE COLUMBIA GUIDE TO ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY (2001), and COMMON GROUND: REIMAGINING AMERICAN HISTORY (2001). He is the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the American Studies Association, and is a past president of the Association for Asian American Studies.
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has also taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne in Switzerland and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and has held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, and NYU. His most recent book is Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton 2007). He is also the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993) and is co-author of the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2003). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (1993) and co-edited (with Pheng Cheah) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000 and is presently on the editorial board of boundary 2. He is co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on Immanuel Wallerstein. His current research is on versions of cosmopolitanism.
John Kuo Wei (Jack) Tchen is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific /American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University, NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America in 1979-80 where he continues to serve as senior historian. In 1991, he was awarded the Charles S. Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities (renamed The National Medal of Humanities). He is author of the award-winning books New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, 1895-1905. And he is co-principle investigator of “Asian Americas and Pacific Islanders Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight” with The College Board. Most recently, he co-curated MoCA’s core exhibition: “With a single step: stories in the making of America” in a new space designed by Maya Lin. Jack is now working on a book about New York City – focusing on the unrecognized tradition of the intermingling of people, creativity and improvisation of everyday residents.
