Aaari Audio Podcast Feed

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. Within the last three decades, chronicles from gay lesbian bisexual transgender intersex queer (GLBTIQ) communities within the South Asian diaspora in the United States have appeared, but the richness and contradictions that characterize these communities have been stifled. Too often, the limitations due to undertheorized South Asian American lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual historiescompounded by a queer canon overwrought with the East/West and tradition/modern equationsrender queer South Asian Americans as a monolithic homogeneous category with little or no agency.

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. Within the last three decades, chronicles from gay lesbian bisexual transgender intersex queer (GLBTIQ) communities within the South Asian diaspora in the United States have appeared, but the richness and contradictions that characterize these communities have been stifled. Too often, the limitations due to undertheorized South Asian American lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual historiescompounded by a queer canon overwrought with the East/West and tradition/modern equationsrender queer South Asian Americans as a monolithic homogeneous category with little or no agency.

How does racism influence the formation and development of organizational life in a racialized community? In this paper, Prof. Simon Yamawaki Shachter extends on Du Boiss concept of double consciousness to explain community organizations roles and development. Combined with the concepts of oppositional consciousness from social movements and decoupling from organization theory, Prof. Yamawaki Shachter builds a processual model of organizational life for racialized communities. He shows how the model explains the development of 19th and early 20th century Chinese organizations in the U.S., and describes how the community formed an incomparably large, sophisticated, interconnected, and politically-active organizational field at such an early point in U.S. history. The organizations that developedbased in historical Chinese migrant organizations that responded to anti-Chinese racismlooked different from past and contemporary Chinese or U.S.-based organizational fields. This case and theoretical model show the ty

Join Densho and the Localized History Project for a virtual workshop exploring the histories and stories of young Japanese Americans impacted by wartime incarceration. The workshop will share histories of schooling and resistance during Japanese American incarceration, the enduring legacies of this history in New York State, and how Densho utilizes oral histories to preserve, share and pass on this history.

Cherry Lou Sys debut novel Love Cant Feed You (Dutton, 2024) is a heartfelt and poignant exploration of love, sacrifice, and survival in the face of adversity. It follows the journey of a young immigrant woman from the Philippines having to navigate the complexities of a challenging relationship while grappling with the harsh realities of her life. As she faces the emotional and practical struggles of balancing her dreams and personal desires with the needs of those she loves, the story offers a raw and intimate portrayal of the ways love can both uplift and burden us.

This presentation examines survey results from three screenings of The Cost of Living (2023, Sixty First Productions), a documentary highlighting the financial struggles of three families in Flushing. The film is part of the Undo Poverty: Flushing (UPF) collaboratives efforts to combat poverty and reduce stigma through a narrative change approach. The three separate screenings featured subtitles in Chinese, English, and Korean, respectively. UPF also organized community organizing training sessions for local residents during the 2024 grant cycle. The presenter will discuss key findings from the surveys, including community perceptions of poverty, primary concerns, and proposed solutions for addressing financial hardship in Flushing. The presentation will also assess the impact of the community organizing training sessions.

Migrant workers have long been called upon to sacrifice their own health to provide care in facilities and private homes throughout the United States. What draws them to such exploitative, low-wage work, and how do they care for themselves? In Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis (University of Washington Press, 2025), Valerie Francisco-Menchavez centers the perspectives of Filipino caregivers in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2013 to 2021, illuminating their transnational experiences and their strategies and practices to help each other navigate the crumbling U.S. healthcare system.

Co-editors Nicholas D. Hartlep, Terrell L. Strayhorn, and Fred A. Bonner II will present on Belonging in Higher Education: Perspectives and Lessons from Diverse Faculty (Routledge, 2024), a new book that illuminates autoethnographic stories of belonging in higher education in the United States. These narratives celebrate diverse experiences and offer unique and useful insights about how to foster what foreword author, Michael Eric Dyson, refers to as, deep belonging. This critical volume is essential reading for researchers, faculty, administrators, and graduate students in Education, Sociology, Psychology, Student Affairs, African American Studies, and Asian American Studies. Additionally, it offers crucial insights for individuals who are key stakeholders in foregrounding policy that centers belonging for diverse faculty.

Co-curator Prof. Jayne Cole Southard will present on the exhibition, Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969-2001), an expansive survey of rarely-seen artwork and archival material by artists that constitute and exceed Asian American, a label denoting a cultural and national identity invented in 1968. Utilizing an interdisciplinary and research-driven praxis, Legacies uncovers how artists of Asian descent have historically negotiated identity in America as a set of situated practices and institutional structures amidst transnational diasporas, racial phantasms, and political imaginaries.

This panel presentation introduces an ongoing project to recover and translate the Japanese-language writings of the Issei novelist and teacher Ginko Okazaki (pen-name of Masue Shinozaki Orimo, 1895-1973). Ginko was part of a cohort of highly educated Japanese women who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s. Alan K. Ota, nephew of Ginkos daughter, will present on how the study of Ginkos life and work may offer insights to aspiring artists, activists, and teachers as they confront new forms of oppression and ultranationalism in the 21st century. Andrew Way Leong (UC Berkeley) will present on the ongoing work involved in bringing Ginkos work to a contemporary English-language readership. Talk will feature a pre-recorded reading by Sophie Oda, great-granddaughter of Ginko Ozaki, of a short excerpt from Soil of Salinas.

Prof. Christine Balance, the 2024 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, will present ongoing research and writing from her book project, Making Sense of Martial Law. In it, she studies what the diverse and contradictory poetics of Philippine martial law (1972-1986) perform and reveal about authoritarianism and cultural memory, as illustrated by both U.S.- and Philippines-based performances and productions. Making Sense of Martial Law also aims to illuminate important facets of the relationship between art and politics in dictatorships across the globe.

Join the Asian American / Asian Research Institute, and the Committee on Institutional Equity and Diversity (CIED) at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, for a screening of the documentary, But Youre Not Black (2020), directed by Danilelle Ayow. Following the screening will be a discussion with our guest scholar speaker Dr. Aleah N. Ranjitsingh (Brooklyn College), moderated by Dr. Yung-Yi Diana Pan (Brooklyn College).

Popular discourse around British Muslims has often been dominated by a focus on Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. Dr. Fatima Rajina takes a different angle and focuses on Muslim men, examining how factors like the global war on terror influenced and changed their sartorial choices and use of language. Rajinas new book denaturalises the ubiquitous and deeply problematic security lens through which knowledge of Muslims has been produced in the past two decades.

Author/professor Aruni Kashyap will read from his new story collection, The Way You Want to Be Loved (Gaudy Boy, 2024).

For October, Filipino American History Month, the Asian American / Asian Research Institute is excited to uplift the voices of student researchers and activists. During this interactive workshop, attendees will hear from Gabriela Sagun, a Ph.D. Student at Duke University studying Security, Peace, and Conflict, with a focus on conflict-related violence against women in the Philippines. Gabriela will speak on the entanglements of U.S. Empire in the Philippines and Filipino-American nurses. We will then hear from Mariah Iris Ramo, Marissa Halagao and Brix Kozuki from the Filipino Curriculum Project, a youth driven activist project in Hawaii. Their course, "Filipino History Culture," is now approved by the Hawaii Department of Education (HIDOE) and will be taught in schools in Fall 2024. Attendees are encouraged to ask questions and engage with the speakers' works, and will get a chance to look through the student curriculum.

Prof. Manu Bhagavan will present his biography, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Penguin, 2023), based on eight years of research and using material in five languages from seven countries and over forty archives. Pandit the most remarkable woman Eleanor Roosevelt had ever met, was a pioneering politician and diplomat celebrated internationally for her brilliance, charm and glamour.

Representatives from Seneca Insurance Company, the Hartford Insurance Company, and director of the Columbia University Masters in Insurance Management program, will discuss careers in the insurance industry and how they are not only an intricate part of everyday life, but also an exciting and rewarding career path for CUNY students.

Catherine Chung and Johnny Nguyen (Asian Women For Health), and Preston Dang (Western University-College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific), will discuss their current collaborative two-year research study project, ACCESS-PD: Advancing Comprehensive Care & Enhancing ServiceStandardsin Parkinsons Disease among Asian Americans.

Poet and editor Russell C. Leong will read from MothSutra, based upon drawings and poetry about an Asian delivery man who rides a bicycle throughout Manhattan as he cycles through his life from East to West. Leong hopes to evoke the inner lives, meditations, hopes and dreams of persons generally invisible to those who order takeout. MothSutra was first read at the Bowery Poetry Club, the University of Hong Kong Black Box Theatre, and the City University of New York. He will be introduced on video by the late Chinese American labor historian, Peter Kwong. A bilingual Q&A session will take place afterwards in English and Chinese.

Born 1941 in Oakland, Californias Chinatown, William Gee Wong is the only son of his father, known as Pop. Born in Guangdong Province, China, Pop emigrated to Oakland as a teenager during the Chinese Exclusion era in 1912 and entered the U.S. legally as the son of a native, despite having partially false papers. 'Sons of Chinatown' is Wongs evocative dual memoir of his and his fathers parallel experiences in America.