Forum 2

THE WEE KINGDOMS OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES SEEN FROM HIGH ABOVE IN THE TATTERED AIR BALLOONS OF THE ARTS, OR: SOME WAYS THE SMITHSONIAN APA CENTER AND AALR RE-SEE THE WORK, AND HOMES, OF THE FIELD

Mimi Khúc, Editor, Asian American Literary Review

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Curator, Smithsonian Institution, Asian Pacific American Center; Editor, Asian American Literary Review

 

This session begins with a pop-up wellness space co-created and run by attendees, with several stations drawing from past APAC and AALR arts interventions, 1 station collectively designed onsite by participants. The pop-up will lead into a conversation theorizing the hows and whys and wheres of interventional work. Examining APAC and AALR practice, as well as participants’ own experiences, we will ask how arts work can bridge academia, organizing communities, and arts communities while navigating and often subverting institutional structures. We will think through the nuts and bolts and ethics of building participatory, community-curatorial structures as the work of Asian American studies.

 

GUIDING QUESTIONS

  • Who do you want to reach but feel unable to?
  • What are your central Asian American studies commitments? How do you, or how might you, engage those commitments in public spaces?
  • What do you consider your usual “terrain” in your work, and how might the arts expand the limits of that terrain, dissolving existing boundaries?
  • Where in your particular contexts do you locate the most urgent social injustice, and how can artwork be a means to engage it?