Fall 2020 – Spring 2021

Small Business, Big Losses: The Impact of the Covid Crisis on Asian Small Business in New York City

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Asian American small businesses made up 20 percent of New York City’s businesses before the pandemic and were the fastest-growing segment of small businesses in our city. However, they were devastated by the Covid crisis, with over half the owners reporting losses of 75 percent or more in revenue in 2020. Yet, very few of these Asian small businesses received the help they needed from the institutions set up to serve them.

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The Brown Asian American Movement: Advocating for South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Filipino American Communities

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In this presentation, Dr. Kevin Nadal will discuss the history of the “Brown Asian American Movement” as a way of contextualizing historical power dynamics that have been pervasive in Asian American communities since the 1960s. Dr. Nadal also provides recommendations as to how current Asian American leaders, activists, and policymakers can be mindful of ways that colorism and privilege impacts invisibility and community dynamics.

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TIGER: A Sustainable Model for Building LGBTQ AAPI Community

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This presentation, based on an article by Prof. Glenn Magapantay, studies local LGBTQ AAPI organizations over the past twenty years. It reveals the constituent elements that have allowed them to survive and thrive. While they continue to face internal challenges in building their organizations, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), a federation of LGBTQ AAPI organizations, has helped them expand their capacity and longevity. A sustainable model of infrastructure that builds local LGBTQ AAPI community is needed. That sustainable model is where organizations balance the social and, political, as well as peer-support and educational programming. Prof. Magpantay dubs this practical theory a “TIGER Analysis” or “Typography of Intersectional Gender and Sexual Empowerment and Resistance.”

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The War Still Within: Poems of the Korean Diaspora

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Part historical imagining of Japan’s so-called “comfort women” during World War II, part personal claiming of her own experiences with immigration and motherhood, and part exploration of identity across two languages, The War Still Within weaves together two cultures and gives voice to generations of Korean and Korean-American women.

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Black-Asian Solidarities and the Impasses of ‘How-To’ Anti-Racisms

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Building on a broader body of work that has critiqued liberal anti‐racisms for detracting from abolitionst struggles against racialized injustice, this presentation based on an article by Prof. Elizabeth Hanna Rubio specifically frames the limitations that “how‐to anti‐racisms” place on transgressive multiracial coalition building. Through ethnographic analysis of discourses and practices that move through various sites of contemporary Black‐Asian American activist encounters, Prof. Rubio builds on Black and radical women of color feminist theorizations of solidarity to show how “how‐tos” destabilize coalition building by overdetermining resolutions to conflict.

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ILLEGAL: The Chinese Immigrants of Angel Island

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Skyler Chin will present on Illegal, a poetry-rap-rock musical based on his grandfather’s immigration documents from when he was detained on Angel Island in 1923. The lyrics are inspired by poetry carved into the walls by Chinese Angel Island detainees. Chin wrote Illegal to give voice to Asian Americans like his grandfather whose stories had been left out of history, and to convey the fighting spirit of the people who began to define what it takes to become American.

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