Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
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 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
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.
Since the 1980s, as many as 200,000 mostly rural Chinese have migrated, legally and illegally, from the towns and villages outside the city of Fuzhou, on China’s southeastern coast, to New York’s Chinatown, bringing with them their religious beliefs, their religious practices and even their local deities. In recent years these immigrant laborers in Chinatown’s restaurants and garment sweatshops have established numerous specifically Fuzhounese religious communities, ranging from Buddhist, Daoist, Protestant and Catholic Christianity to popular Chinese religion.
This ethnographic study examines the central roles of these religious communities in the immigrant incorporation process in Chinatown’s highly stratified ethnic enclave. It also explores the transnational networks established between religious communities in New York and Fuzhou, including their role in transmitting religious and social constructs from China to the United States and the influence of these new US institutions on religious and social
relations in the religious revival sweeping southeastern China.
The Faculty Development Initiative Program (FDIP) in Technology at Bronx Community College is an initiative of the Office of Academic Affairs to help
faculty in applying appropriate technology to instructional activities at the College since spring, 1996. The presentation will highlight some of the accomplishments during the past 6 years including workshops, annual Instructional Technology Day, Notebook Loaner Program, Teaching, Learning and Technology Roundtable (TLTR) and development of distance learning courses, as part of CUNY Online.
The paper highlights key demographic trends and settlement patterns of Asian New Yorkers using sources including Census and Immigration and Naturalization Service’s data. Based on these patterns underscoring dramatic growth and diversity, and the settlement of Asians in “global” neighborhoods, the paper discusses findings based on a recent community survey conducted with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The survey findings highlight common concerns and issues which inform a community-based policy and research agenda for Asian Americans in NYC.