Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
In her new book Leading While Muslim (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Dr. Debbie Almontaser examines the lived experiences of American Muslim principals to determine whether global events, political discourse, and the media coverage of Islam and Muslims post-9/11 have affected their leadership and spirituality. Leading While Muslim is intended to help readers gain an understanding … Read more
Forty-five years after film legend Bruce Lee’s sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee’s life. An authoritative biography, Bruce Lee: A Life features dozens of rarely seen photographs of Lee, who made martial arts a global phenomenon, bridged the divide between Eastern and Western … Read more
Based on her 2015 book, Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular, Prof. Midori Yamamura will discuss Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama and Jewish art dealer Leo Castelli, who both launched their careers in New York’s 1950s multicultural downtown scene, where immigrants from diverse backgrounds converged after the Second World War. By the early 1960s, Kusama was exhibiting … Read more
This interactive session will introduce research exploring second generation, Vietnamese American perspectives of the Vietnam War. Examining these narratives provides an opportunity to engage with those stories, identify different spaces of learning of Vietnamese Americans, and provides tools to critically analyze who has the agency to construct and/or shift the national consciousness. By exploring narratives, … Read more
In recent decades under runaway neoliberalism, “foreignized” and unauthorized immigrants have increasingly made political inroads by way of grassroots community activism and by sidestepping the need for formal political channels and, at times, even dismissing them. By way of nearly four years of ethnographic observation, 49 in-depth interviews, and extensive document analysis, Prof. Nadia Kim … Read more
Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with Korean American immigrant rights organizers, and the Black and Latinx organizers with which they attempt to build solidarity, this presentation explores how the aforementioned tensions unfold in activists’ daily interactions as they attempt to build an interracial solidarity movement at a moment of intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy-making.