Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Much queer theory in America is based on white male experience and privilege, excluding people of color and severely limiting its relevance to third-world activism. Dr. Roksana Badruddoja visits paradoxes, difficulties, unity, and diversity by unraveling the lives of two second-generation gender-queer South Asian American folx.
Join AAARI, and the Committee on Institutional Equity and Diversity (CIED) at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, for a screening and discussion of the documentary, But You’re Not Black (2020), directed by Danilelle Ayow.
Betty Lee Sung, co-founder of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), Professor Emerita, City College of New York, and recipient of the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award, has established an endowment of $100,000 at the City University of New York to create a research fund under the auspices of AAARI, on Asian American topics. The fund is intended to support the research by providing funds for a research assistant, copywriter, research travel, acquisition or access to research material and similar costs so that the researcher can complete the project.
Author Dorothy Moss will present on Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands, a catalogue of the stunning work by the late contemporary Chinese American artist Hung Liu (1948-2021), who blended painting and photography to offer new frameworks for understanding portraiture in relation to time, memory, and history.
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.
Prof. Francisco Delgado’s current project examines how Chamorro poets reimagine the landscape of California as an extension of their home island. In particular, through a careful reading of works by Chamorro poets like Clarissa Mendiola and Lehua Taitano, both of whom are currently based out of California, he argues that the nature of Chamorro identity and community is as fluid and vast as the Pacific Ocean itself.