2013-2014 AAADS SPONSORED EVENTS
OCTOBER 15th, 2013
A public forum, 15% and Growing: The Civic Engagement of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in California, was held on the civic engagement of AAPIs in California, featuring insights from policy scholars and community leaders on the ways to forge a new path forward.
OCTOBER 17th, 2013
A historic convening of nationally recognized community leaders Karen Kai, Dale Minami, and John Tateishi gathered in honor of the 25th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned by the United States government during World War II. The speakers touched on policy priorities of Japanese Americans in health, education, and the environment, as well as what it will take for AAPIs to play a more central role in civic life and politics in California.
OCTOBER 24, 2013
AAADS co-sponsored, with the Center for Korean Studies, a panel on 1970s South Korean Literature, Film, and State-sponsored Visual Art. Panelists included Youngju Ryu, Assistant Professor of Modern Korean Literature and the University of Michigan; Ji Sung Kim, who recently received her doctorate in Film Studies at UC Berkeley; and Yuri Chang, a graduate student in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University. Elaine H. Kim was the moderator.
Beginning with the example of the work of poet Kim Chi Ha, Professor Ryu explored the changing place of committed literature in the ongoing struggle over the meanings of South Korean modernization. Dr. Kim discussed the experience of neoliberalism from the vantage point of post-IMR South Korean cinema in films like The Host. Ms. Chang addressed the politics of representation of power and memory in public space by examining cultural exhibitions as attempts to manipulate traumatic historical memory with a spectacle of capitalist success.
The event was held at the YWCA on Bancroft Ave., across the street from the Pacific Film Archive.
NOVEMBER 4th, 2013
Phil Yu, better known as the Angry Asian Man, came to UC Berkeley to talk about his influential and popular blog, AsianAngryMan.com.
AngryAsianMan.com is a nationally acclaimed API blog that provides commentary on the latest in API issues, community, histories, and culture. Yu has been quoted and featured in many newspapers and shows including The New York Times and CNN. He founded the blog in 2001 when he was a student at Northwestern University. He started blogging to discuss the racist ways Asian Americans are represented in the media and popular culture.
In his talk Yu covered some of the history of yellow face and racist portrayals of Asians in film and television before discussing the dearth of Asian Americans with leading roles in media, as well as several recent instances of racism in American culture. One of these instances Yu discussed was the infamous Youtube rant by UCLA undergraduate Alexandra Wallace about the Asian American population at UCLA that was full of deragotary language and insensitive remarks. Yu was immediately contacted for his thoughts as the video went viral.
Yu ended his talk on an optimistic note, hailing the recent flux of Asian Americans in leading roles and imploring students to “stay angry” and “stay bold” with their desires to see more socially conscious portrayals of Asian Americans in popular culture. You can follow Phil and his efforts to “inform, entertain, and activate” people about the Asian American experience at
http://blog.angryasianman.com/.
NOVEMBER 8th, 2103
Korea Peace Day: Call for Peace on 60th Anniversary of the Korean War Armistice.
The first part of the event was a special lecture by Charles Hanley (Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist) titled “No Gun Ri: No Reconciliation Without Truth” about the lack of transparency surrounding South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that has investigated more than 200 alleged cases of what it categorizes as civilian massacres committed by U.S. soldiers during the Korean War, a war that has yet to be ended with a peace treaty. The lecture was followed by a film screening of “Memory of Forgotten War” (A film by Deann Borshay Liem and Ramsay Liem) and a panel with Paul Liem (Korea Policy Institute), Sarah Sloan (ANSWER Coalition), and Stephen McNeil (American Friends Services Committee).
NOVEMBER 12th, 2013
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University, talked about her latest book, “Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era.” Studies on global feminism have critiqued the disproportionate power and the misperceptions of white middle-to-upper class women from the “West” in shaping these international alliances. Wu examines instead how “Third World” women, both those from the global South as well as racialized women in the U.S., fostered and deployed female internationalism during the “long” decade of the 1960s.
FEBRUARY 4th, 2014
The first of the API Public Health Forum series was Taunu’u Ve’e’s talk: “We are the Ocean – The Journey of the Pacific People!” Taunu’u VE’e is the Racial and Equity Program Manager at the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum.
FEBRUARY 18th, 2014
Part II of the AAADS Public Health Lecture Series, featured guest speaker Anni Chung. Anni Chung is the president and CEO of Self-Help for the Elderly, and talked about how her organization has expanded to five counties and over 35,000 seniors per year.
FEBRUARY 26th, 2014
Disabling the American Good Life: Minor Literatures & the Human Right to Health
Crystal Parikh, Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, gave a talk that covered literature by Asian American and Chicana authors through the notional aspirations of a “right to health” and the rights of persons with disabilities, as they have been expressed in international human rights documents.
MARCH 4th, 2014
Franklin Odo, Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Program and Acting Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress, discussed his book, “Voices from the Canefields: From Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai’i.” The book speaks not only to scholars of ethnomusicology, migration history, and ethnic movements, but also to a general audience of Japanese Americans seeking connections to their cultural past and the experiences of past generations.
MARCH 11th, 2014
Michael Liao, Director of Programs for the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition gave a talk on problem gambling and how it affects the Asian American community. Liao is Director of Programs for the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition, a San Francisco-based public-private-community partnership of more than 30 health and human service organizations.
APRIL 7th, 2014
Bhangra and Belonging: South Asian Music in the Diaspora
There was book talk by Falu Bakrania, author of Bhangra and Asian Underground: South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain. There was also a discussion with Vicki Virk, co-founder of Dholrhythms Dance Co. and Non Stop Bhangra.
APRIL 7th, 2014
The Militarism in Asia Speaker Series kicked off, featuring several distinguished speakers over the course of three days.
First, was Professor Daryl Maeda, Chair of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His talk was titled “Putting the Martial into Martial Arts: Bruce Lee and Cold War Militarism.” Bruce Lee is most often imagined as a Chinese kung fu artist who broke through to become a global superstar. This talk focused on how militarism and neo-imperialism created the conditions under which Lee and others constructed hybridized forms of martial arts during the Cold War.
APRIL 8th, 2014
Next in the series was Professor Robyn Rodriguez (Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis), Melissa Roxas (Poet/Abduction and Torture Survivor), & Jeanelle Abiola (Co-Chair of the Cal-Nev Philippine Solidarity Task Force) formed a panel, “Witnessing: Poets, Academics, and Community Members Speak on Militarism in the Philippines.” They discussed the ways by which scholars, community members, and writers come together to investigate and articulate the Filipino people’s struggle against militarism in the Philippines – both in the homeland and in sites of migration.
APRIL 9th, 2014
Finishing off the Militarism in Asia Speaker Series was Professor Jodi Kim, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC, Riverside, who spoke about “Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise.” Her talk formed a conceptualization and analysis of post-World War II U.S. militarism in the Asia-Pacific. It interrogated how and why U.S. militarism is animated through a variety of literal and figurative debt regimes and how U.S. liberal military empire is linked to liberal settler colonialism and turns to Asian American cultural forms for critical imaginaries that gesture beyond militarism.
APRIL 18th, 2014
Curating Race and Indigeneity in Public Culture: Museums, Representation, and Community Engagement
AAADS, along with Chicano/Latino Studies, and Native American Studies hosted a speaker panel featuring Eduardo Diaz, Director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, Sven Haakanson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Curator of Native American Anthropology, Burke Museum, University of Washington, and Konrad Ng, Director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.