Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
In Disciplinary Futures, edited by Nadia Y. Kim and Pawan Dhingra, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies.
In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells the stories of Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women, finding that they are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country’s nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization.
Prof. Nadia Kim in her new book, ‘Refusing Death,’ chronicles how Asian and Latina immigrant women activists for environmental justice in Los Angeles—namely cleaner, more breathable air—redefine racism and classism as a result of their struggles with environmental racism and classism, and their specific social positionings under neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy.
The latest Fall/Winter 2019-2020 special issue, guest edited by Stephen Lee and Elizabeth Hanna Rubio (University of California, Irvine), centers on the experiences of Asian Pacific Islanders (APIs) and in doing so, contributes to a small, but growing body of literature within Asian American and U.S. immigration studies that explores what it means to be Asian American and living under the threat of immigration-related consequences such as deportation. The contributions in this volume of CUNY FORUM touch upon a variety of themes: Politics, Identity, and Social Movements.
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?
This talk will address how US racism pivots as much on nativist injustices – suffered mostly by Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), and Middle Eastern ethnics – as it does on injustices specific to Black Americans. Prof. Nadia Kim evidences the point by way of research on Latinx and AAPI immigrant activism, as well as an analysis of the rise of Donald Trump. Although sociology has certainly given a nod to nativistic racism, mostly in relation to the Latinx population, its core theories, frameworks, and methodologies have not centered “the citizenship line”; as such, it has not defined sociology the way the color line has. Yet, the racialized insider/outsider axis has long separated “us white Americans” from the brown brother, terrorist, war-time enemy, socioeconomic threat (e.g., academic threat), exotic seductress, anchor-baby maker, and maternity tourist. As this list of representations reveals, gender, class, and the body are also interrelated with race, and all are vital to the remaking of citizenship by the mostly Mexican and Filipin@ immigrant activists whom Prof. Kim studies in Los Angeles. Not only would a citizenship-centered sociology best grasp their efforts and the implications thereof, but, in my view, would have also predicted the arrival of the Trump era, the other focus of her talk.