Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Join this special lunch with Ava Chin—author, performer, and professor—as she performs and talks about her new in paperback book Mott Street (Penguin Books), about the impact of the country’s first immigration restrictions on four generations of her family in New York City’s Chinatown.
Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States and include approximately 50 distinct ethnic groups, but their stories and experiences have often been sidelined or stereotyped. Smithsonian Asian Pacific American History, Art, and Culture in 101 Objects offers a vital window into the triumphs and tragedies, strength and ingenuity, and traditions and cultural identities of these communities.
The entry of Cambodians in the United States was not simply a migration, but a crash-landing as refugees after an incredible loss of population, humanity, culture & arts, religion, and thinkers. How, then, do the diasporic inheritors of this history respond via cultural production? And how does artist-scholar Sokunthary Svay’s own work including her newly published memoir, Put It On Record, address this question?
Join Third World Newsreel and the Documentary Forum at CCNY to see this counter-narrative of pivotal moments in U.S. history and to explore the impact of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy on young Muslims who came of age after 9/11, and then hear from the director and cinematographer, Nausheen Dadabhoy, who made this film while simultaneously being a high in demand camerawoman of documentaries.
Dr. Khánh Lê’s talk draws from his doctoral project with Vietnamese American youth in the Philadelphia area. During Fall 2020, the youth participated in eight workshops to learn about their Vietnamese history, culture and language, as well as their history in the U.S. The eight workshops utilized the arts and storytelling to guide the youth to collectively narrate their experiences living in the diaspora. The careful examination of the youth’s narratives during the workshops helped him develop a theory of what he called “transtrauma.”
Stewart Kwoh will introduce the Asian American Education Project, formed in 2021, and widely regarded as having the most comprehensive K-12 Asian American history curricula. Stewart will be joined by Sophia Bae, Raghav Joshi and Lynn Lin from the New York chapter of Make Us Visible (MUV), formed in 2021 in search of long-term solutions to anti-Asian American violence through building curriculum and advocating for the integration of Asian American and Pacific Islander history in K-12 classrooms.