Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
This symposium invites scholars of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and Cuba to critically reflect upon several historical events and discuss the impacts and legacies that both Spanish and US empires have left and continue to leave in their wake.
In her CUNY FORUM essay, writer Vina Orden discusses quincentennial commemoration of the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation across the Pacific to South America, and presents a critique of colonial Spanish and Filipino history, utilizing Luis H. Francia’s play, “Black Henry,” as a radical work of imagination and jumping off point to deconstruct colonial history.
The untold story of the Philippine Constabulary Band offers a unique opportunity to examine the limits and porousness of America’s racial ideologies, exploring musical pleasure at the intersection of Euro-American cultural hegemony, racialization, and U.S. colonization of the Philippines.
PANDEMIC BRINGS US TO PANDEMONIUM, not the center of Hell—Pandemonium in Milton’s Paradise Lost—but tumult, chaos, the upending of our quotidian lives due to the infernal virus, on which we have conferred the somewhat majestic title, Novel Corona Virus-19. Normalcy is a far-away country, and even with all its attendant and even discordant notes, seems … Read more