Asian American Studies at Northwestern 2005 Conference

Opening Comments: 12–12:15pm

Session 1: Harris 108, 12:15–1:45pm *U.S. Orientalism and Asian American Responses*
The first graduate panel showcases new Asian Americanist critiques of U.S. Orientalism. Thomas Kim outlines the idea of the Orient and its mass cultural appeal in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrating how the concept helped contain contradictions such as sequestering Asian immigrants in an age of human justice. Sarah Park surveys twenty-eight picture books that Korean or Korean American children take as their subject, explaining why the image of the perpetual foreigner remains salient in them. Wen Jin uses Yan Geling’s Fusang (The Lost Daughter of Happiness), a novel about a love triangle among a Chinatown prostitute, a Caucasian boy, and a Chinese gangster, to show the transformation of the novel’s main character into an embodiment of a new sexual politics and ethics that is not based on discriminatory identification.
	Shuji Otsuka, History, Northwestern University (moderating)
	Thomas W. Kim, English, The University of Chicago “The Oriental and the Modern in America”
	Sarah Park, Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “School Stories: Korean American Children in Picture Books”
	Wen Jin, English, Northwestern University “Excessive Femininity as Critical Mimicry: the Case of Yan Geling”

Session 2: Harris 108, 2–3:30pm *Conjoined Fates: Asian Americans and African Americans in the Postwar American City*
The second panel explores the relations between African Americans and Asian Americans in postwar urban America in terms of both lived social experience and cultural contructions about their respective racial position within society. Ellen Wu traces the historical construction of “model” Chinese American families to show how social scientists, the mainstream media, and government officials made explicit comparisons between Chinese American and African American households. By deeming the one to be exemplary to the other's pathology, Chinese in the United States came to be racially marked, yet definitively not-black. Shanshan Lan uses ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago’s Chinatown and Bridgeport communities to critique reified notions of racism based on a strictly black/white binary. She shows how working-class Chinese Americans sharing common inner-city spaces with African Americans have different understandings of racial difference than middle-class Chinese Americans living in the suburbs. Meredith Oda examines the post-war development of San Francisco’s Japantown. The city’s position within a reconstructed nexus of U.S.-Japan foreign relations facilitated the selective distillation of an existing residential mix of low-income whites, African Americans, and Japanese Americans. Celebratory references to its Japanese American residents created a desireable ethnically-identified community, “Japantown,” while contributing to ouster of African American residents into undesirable housing conditions.
	Stephen Mak, History, Northwestern University (moderating)
	Ellen D. Wu, History, The University of Chicago “’Chinatown Offers Us A Lesson’: Chinese Americans, Juvenile Delinquency, Family, and Race in Postwar America”
	Shanshan Lan, Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “Interpreting Chinese-Black Relations in Multi-racial Chicago”
	Meredith Oda, History, The University of Chicago “Building Japantown: Redevelopment, Japanese Americans, and African Americans in Postwar San Francisco

Opening Remarks: Harris 107, 4-4:30pm

Session I: Harris 107, 4:30–6pm
The Northwestern Hunger Strike: Ten Years Later

Ten years after the 1995 hunger strike, the Program has invited students, administrators, faculty and others involved to reunite for a commemorative panel. Panel participants and the audience are invited to discuss their respective roles in the situation then, to reflect on the place of Asian American Studies at Northwestern in the years since the strike — and in their subsequent careers and lives — and to offer thoughts on the direction and shape Asian American Studies at Northwestern should take in the next ten years and beyond.

Richard Morimoto, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology, Northwestern University (moderating)

Lawrence Dumas, Provost, Northwestern University

Robert Yap, Northwestern alumnus, attorney-at-law

Freda Lin, Northwestern alumna, teacher

Woodrow Lucas, Northwestern alumnus, M.Div. and MBA candidate, Vanderbilt University

Paul Igasaki, Northwestern alumnus, former member, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Board of Visitors

Opening reception: Harris 108, 6-7:15pm
Student Commemoration: “Relive History, Revive Legacy”

Keynote : Harris 107, 7:15pm
Amiri Baraka

Session II: Harris 107, 9:30–11am Cross-Racial Coalitions Inside and Outside the Academy
Although the lives and experiences of Asian Americans have intersected with and connected to the lives of other racial minorities, too often their experiences have been considered separately. This session highlights moments of cross-racial coalition — and disagreement — between Asian Americans and other racial minorities, particularly African Americans, and discusses the significance of such coalitions for African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Ethnic Studies.
	Darlene Clark Hine, African-American Studies, Northwestern University (chair)
	Scott Kurashige, History, University of Michigan
	Charlie Chin, independent artist/writer, member of A Grain of Sand
	Jacalyn Harden, Anthropology, Wayne State University
	Joy Ann Williamson, Education, Stanford University
	Dwight McBride, African-American Studies, Northwestern University (moderating)

Session III: Harris 107, 11:30–1:00pm Students’ Roles in Asian American Studies Programs: A Conversation
Students have played crucial and essential roles in creating Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies Programs in the late 1960s on the West Coast and in the 1990s in the East Coast and the Midwest. Yet turnover, graduation, and the absence of organized means for both current students and alumni to remain involved have resulted in little sustained student involvement in the subsequent running and development of programs. What roles should students (and former students) have within Asian American Studies programs? What specific forms might this involvement take? Is there a place for student activism within an academic program and within the university environment generally? Former student participants in the 1995 student push for Asian American Studies at Northwestern discuss these issues with students active in the Northwestern community today, reflecting upon and comparing their respective experiences.
	John Park, English, University of Illinois, Chicago (moderating)
	Prajwal Ciryam, junior, Academic Vice President, Associated Student Government, Northwestern University
	David Hish, Northwestern alumnus
	Gene Kim, Northwestern alumnus, attorney-at-law
	Yaejoon Kwon, junior Asian American Studies minor, Northwestern University
	Grace Lou, Northwestern alumna, attorney-at-law
	Rosa Nguyen, junior Asian American Studies minor, Northwestern University
	Eric Salcedo, Northwestern alumnus, Assistant to the Attorney General on Asian American Affairs, Illinois
	Susan Wu, Northwestern alumna, pediatrician, Childen’s Hospital, Oakland, CA
	Sarah Yun, senior, Northwestern University

lunch (on your own)

Session IV: Harris 107, 2–3:30pm New Directions in Ethnic Studies: Interrogating Diasporas
Ethnic studies has become increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse as scholars have turned to different theoretical and analytic frameworks to address the changing nature of their subjects and the questions they asked of them. Many ethnic studies scholars have adopted the notion of “diaspora” as a way to move beyond the borders of the United States and the confines of assimilationist or race relations paradigms and to consider their subjects from an explicitly transnational perspective. This turn toward diaspora has provoked intense and often heated debate. At the intersection of diaspora studies with African American, Asian American, and Latino American Studies are profound tensions between a focus on analysis of race and racial structures and a focus on trans/international connections. This session lays these tensions out for examination, explores the benefits and disadvantages of both approaches, and considers the possibility of constructing a new approach that combines both ethnic and diaspora studies perspectives.
	Harvey Neptune, History, Northwestern University (chair)
	Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University
	Sandhya Shukla, Anthropology and Asian American Studies Columbia University
	Ramón Gutíerrez, History and Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
	Michael Hanchard, Institute for Diaspora Studies and Political Science, Northwestern University

Poetry Reading: Experimental Writers, Harris 108, 3:45–5:15pm
A reading by four “experimental” Asian American writers, whose work, each in its own way, challenges us to think and re-think our assumptions, notions and expectations of the category “Asian American literature.” Their innovative writing breaks new ground both formally and conceptually and is certainly among the most exciting work being produced by contemporary American writers.
	Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
	Tan Lin
	Brian Kim Stefans
	Max Yeh

Keynote: Harris 107, 8pm
Helen Zia

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Session V: Harris 107, 9:30–11am Asian American Studies: A Critical Enterprise in the Academy
What is the difference between “Asian American Studies” as a field of critical intellectual inquiry and any academic studies that take “Asian Americans” as their subject? Proponents of Asian American Studies have faced this question since the inception of the field in the 1960s, and the question remains crucial to the establishment of Asian American Studies as a legitimate field of inquiry. This session addresses dual aspects of Asian American Studies as a critical enterprise in the academy: 1) tracing the intellectual directions of the field and its connections to other fields, and 2) discussing strategies for establishing AAS within the academy, that is, for implementing the vision embodied in the intellectual enterprise of Asian American Studies.
	Gary Okihiro, Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University (moderating/comment)
	Catherine Ceniza Choy, Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Edith Kreeger-Wolf Visiting Scholar, Northwestern University
	David Eng, English, Rutgers University
	Dorothy Wang, English and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University
	Ji-Yeon Yuh, History and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University
	Karianne Yokota, History and American Studies, Yale University

Keynote: Harris 107, 11:30am–1pm
Ishmael Reed, “American Poetry: From Totems to Hip Hop”

Closing Remarks: Harris 107, 1–1:15pm

Conference Program

Graduate Student Pre-Conference

Asian American Studies at Northwestern:
Activism, Ethnic Studies, Diaspora, and Beyond

Conference Program

Graduate Student Pre-Conference

Asian American Studies at Northwestern: Activism, Ethnic Studies, Diaspora, and Beyond

Asian American Studies at Northwestern:
Activism, Ethnic Studies, Diaspora, and Beyond