An Asian American Experience: One Year in India
Ravi Kulkarni discusses his year-long experience in India, and thoughts on what AAARI can do for CUNY faculty and students.
Fall 2001 – Spring 2002
An Evening of Asian American Poetry
Asian American poets Meena Alexander, Regie Cabico, Luis Francia and Kimiko Hahn share their latest work.
Introduction to Agama Sutra: The First Buddhist Scripture
The Mahayana school of Buddhism in China often emphasized the role of altruism and disparaged self-salvation. Its sutras were considered to be the first sermons by the Buddha whose profound ideas were too difficult for the ordinary people to understand. To cater to their level, it was said that Buddha then delivered the Agama Sutra for the less intellectually endowed. For more than 1500 years after it was translated into Chinese, Agama Sutra has been ignored by Chinese Buddhists mainly because of this prejudice. More recently, Master Yin Shun has vastly expanded the research started by Lu Jing, and has written many volumes of texts to clarify the origins of Buddhism. This lecture will be based mostly on writings by him and his disciples.
Re-mapping the Other: Cultural Translation in Asian/Pacific and Caribbean American Writing
Beginning with a quote by Michel Foucault, Prof. Tricia Lin explained how transnation and translation were used as cultural survival strategies. The audience asked questions that explored the issue of post-colonial island literature and its impact. “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near … Read more
Diabetes and Glucose Biosensors
Diabetes is the Nation’s 7th leading killer based on a 1998 statistical survey reported by Center for Disease Control showing 15.7 million Americans (5.9% of the U.S.A. population) afflicted with diabetes mellitus. Diabetes mellitus is classified as two main types, Type I and Type II. Type I is insulin-dependent and often occurs during childhood or … Read more
East of the Sun (West of the Moon): The Harmonic History of Islam Among Asian and African Americans
Professor Bayoumi’s talk will begin with an overview of Islam, from its beginnings in seventh century Arabia through its rise into Asia and Africa. He will detail several important concepts to Islamic thought, including the five pillars of Islam, the idea of “tawheed” or the one-ness of God, and the notion of “taqwa” or God-consciousness.
The lecture will then trace the rise of Islam in the United States, from its beginnings in the Atlantic slave trade through the early history of Asian immigrants in the twentieth century to the rise of Malcolm X in the 1950s and 1960s. Opposing the dominant narrative of Islam among African American communities as a stance of rejection and exclusion (as seen through the history and thought of the Nation of Islam), this talk instead will seek to build a counter narrative of universal belonging that was developed with historic connections between African American and Asian American Muslims.
Although later eclipsed by the media success of the Nation of Islam, this community of Muslims, which was largely a multi-racial and pan-ethnic movement, was the major Muslim community in the United States roughly between the years of 1920 and 1950.
Many of these Muslims were at the forefront of the be-bop movement of jazz in the 1950s, and through an examination of this cultural connection the lecture proceeded to argue that conversion to Islam was particularly attractive for African Americans since it offered participation in a religion of both universal belonging and particular racial pride (in a kind of Afro-Asiatic identity). Thus, Islam, as shared between Asian Americans and African Americans, became a way of apostatizing against the defining and demeaning racial logics of the United States and opened a system of belief that viewed the racial and national divisions of the world as contemptibly parochial.