Maneuvering Mixedness: Interpreting Dougla in the Caribbean Diaspora

The Dougla experience in Caribbean spaces and the diaspora provides an epistemology of mixedness, particularly as situated within an Indian/ African binary. Prof. Aleah N. Ranjitsingh centers maneuvering as a descriptive and explanatory tool that summarizes how Douglas contemplate their experience of mixedness outside of Caribbean homeland spaces—maneuvering defaults (Blackness), maneuvering ambiguity, and maneuvering privilege.

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Building Infrastructure for Asian American/Asian Studies & AAPI Communities across CUNY

The Asian American / Asian Research Institute is delighted to receive a $40,000 grant from the CUNY Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) to support our work. Over the next year, BRESI funding will support AAARI’s work to develop and institutionalize Asian American/Asian Studies (AA/AS) infrastructure at CUNY, as well to foster Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community-building and leadership among CUNY faculty, staff, and students. 

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Why Ethnic Studies is Pivotal Today

“Where do we belong in this unfolding story of America?” WITH THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC and the Black Lives Matter protests, I am powerfully reminded that Ethnic Studies remains more important than ever1 and that much more work still needs to be done. COVID-19 and the Civil Rights protests have underscored longstanding inequalities in the United … Read more

Unfamiliar Harbors: A Jamaican Chinese Archive of Intimacies from Kingston to Kowloon

How might Kingston be a port of call for the Overseas Chinese? And how might Hong Kong be an important metropolis of the Black diaspora? In this talk, Tao Leigh Goffe examines the intersections of the African and Asian diasporas in a journey from New York to Jamaica to the New Territories in Hong Kong where through the technology of photography and the internet she was reunited with Afro-Jamaican and Chinese family she had never knew existed.

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Is Yellow Black or White: Revisited

In my 1994 book, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, I wrote: “We are a kindred people, African and Asian Americans. We share a history of migration, interaction and cultural sharing, and commerce and trade. We share a history of European colonization, de-colonization, and independence under neo-colonization and dependency. We share a … Read more