Blurred Lines: The Pursuit of Superiority in the Vietnamese Diaspora

Focusing on microlevel social interactions in the homeland, this lecture explores the projection and achievement of superiority within the context of Vietnamese diasporic and transnational repertoires. As a country undergoing dramatic economic transformation for more than two decades, Vietnam is a site of contradictory new hierarchies with the increasing return of overseas migrants who encounter a growing new monied class. Prof. Hung Cam Thai examines the formation of these hierarchies in situations where individuals seek to establish themselves as “social betters” in determining criteria of worthiness.

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2019 CUNY Conference on Citizenship, Belonging, and Identity in the Age of White Nationalism

Taking into account considerations of immigration, race, gender, and diaspora, AAARI’s 2019 annual conference asks: What does the meteoric rise of Trumpian racist white nationalism say about the nature of systemic racism in our country today? Why is it now primarily and explicitly rooted in anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim nativist racism, and where do Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) — their diverse ethnic groups — fit (or not fit) in these citizenship orders? How has the higher education research community and the activist community collaborated and how can they continue to strategically collaborate together?

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Keeping Up with the Nguyens: When Poor Immigrants Return to the Homeland

This lecture focuses on the social and personal sides of monetary flows in the Vietnamese diaspora. With few exceptions, the private use of money has been considered too personal and too mysterious for migration scholars to tackle, unless they examine “development issues,” such as daily household expenditures. Prof. Hung Cam Thai will focus on low-wage … 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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Internet Hinduism and the North American Hindu Diaspora

Talk Cancelled Hinduism’s adherents, nowhere more so than in the United States, have displayed a marked tendency to turn towards various forms of digital media, and in particular the internet, to forge new forms of Hindu identity, endow Hinduism with a purportedly more coherent and monotheistic form, refashion our understanding of the history of Hinduism’s … Read more