Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond

Our Laundry, Our Town (Empire State Editions, 2022) is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng’s growing up in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood of that singular universe that was New York City in the 1970s. As a theatre practitioner and professor, Alvin discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder’s seminal Americana drama, Our Town.

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The Asian American Education Project & Movement for Asian American History in K-12 Curricula

Stewart Kwoh will introduce the Asian American Education Project, formed in 2021, and widely regarded as having the most comprehensive K-12 Asian American history curricula. Stewart will be joined by Sophia Bae, Raghav Joshi and Lynn Lin from the New York chapter of Make Us Visible (MUV), formed in 2021 in search of long-term solutions to anti-Asian American violence through building curriculum and advocating for the integration of Asian American and Pacific Islander history in K-12 classrooms.

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Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims

Portrayals of Muslims as the beneficiaries of liberal values have contributed to the racialization of Muslims as a risky population since the September 11 attacks. These discourses, which hold up some Muslims as worthy of tolerance or sympathy, reinforce an unstable good Muslim/bad Muslim binary where any Muslim might be moved from one side to the other. In Tolerance and Risk, Mitra Rastegar explores these discourses as a component of the racialization of Muslims—where Muslims are portrayed as a highly diverse population that nevertheless is seen to contain within it a threat that requires constant vigilance.

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Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation

Bringing together grassroots organizers and scholar-activists, Contemporary Asian American Activism presents lived experiences of the fight for transformative justice and offers lessons to ensure the longevity and sustainability of organizing. In the face of imperialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and more, the contributors celebrate victories and assess failures, reflect on the trials of activist life, critically examine long-term movement building, and inspire continued mobilization for coming generations.

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