Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Family Amnesia (Daylight Books, 2025) is a visual tribute and love letter honoring author Betty Yu’s Chinese American family roots in the United States. The art book explores her family’s multi-generational resilience and resistance through mixed-media collages, her grandfather’s photographs, and own captured images and archival material.
Prof. Aleah Ranjitingh will present her research on Chinese-Caribbean immigrants in the United States, and the ways in which they understand self in terms of race and ethnicity.
Drawing on his role as a Cool Japan Producer for the Japanese Cabinet Office, Benjamin W. Boas highlights the need to shift from a government-branded “Cool Japan” paradigm to the more participatory, fan-driven “Your Japan.”
In Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community (Stanford University Press, 2024), historian William Gow argues that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles strategically used their performances in both Hollywood films and Chinatown tourist attractions to influence perceptions of race and national identity during the Chinese Exclusion Era.
Vina Orden will present on her essay in CUNY FORUM Volume 11:1, examining how narratives in popular media can perpetuate or challenge existing power structures and colonial mentalities.
Prof. Francisco Delgado will read and discuss his novella, On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD (TRP: The University Press of SHSU, July 2025).