Lecture Series

East of the Sun (West of the Moon): The Harmonic History of Islam Among Asian and African Americans

By

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.

Read more

New Gods of Chinatown: Faith & Survival in New York’s Immigrant Community

By

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.

Read more

High Tech & Distance Learning in Higher Education

By

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.

Read more

Growth and Diversity of Asian Population in New York: Implications for Community-Based Policy and Research

By

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.

Read more

How Logic Can Help The World

By

In the last three decades Logic has emerged from the ivory tower and started to address problems of human concern, like how we think, how we vote and how we act. We will give a sampling of some recent insights.

Read more

Passing: A Thematic Approach to Literary Analysis

By

“Passing” as a thematic approach to literary analysis is a hot topic in today’s academia. In the the most general sense, it involves a person who belongs to one race, gender or group attempting to “pass” or be taken for a member of another. It also addresses, among other issues, Western literary and artistic renderings of Eastern motifs. Among the best-known popular examples are David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. In M. Butterfly, the Chinese opera diva Song Liling passes as a female who fascinates the French diplomat Rene Gallimard and successfully deceives him. Song’s success in their affair hinges on the Western mainstream stereotype of an Asian woman as the quintessentially meek, submissive, and loving animated object that the Western (male) society is so attracted to. Given this perception of Asian woman, many professional Asian women ironically play this role in order to live up to that identity so as to fit into a mold cast for them by western thinking. They do pass as such although many are fiercely independent, strong, and tough deep down. After all, these are the characteristics a female need to succeed in a male-dominated society. In this case, to pass is to survive–Asian women must hide that warrior inner soul to advance in a hemisphere where their counterparts are still struggling to combat similar stereotypes about women. However, Asian women are faced with a double whammy, when they struggle to fend off stereotypes from both western male and female.

Read more