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ANTI-ASIAN RACISM UNDONE

RESOURCES

Lectures/Talks

• Anti-Asian Violence and Black-Asian Solidarity Today with Tamara K. Nopper

Watch Tamara Nopper's lecture examining the alarm and growing discourse regarding “anti-Asian violence,” currently circulating in mainstream and social media among pundits, celebrities, and Asian American community organizers across the country. The lecture will examine the merging of fighting “anti-Asian violence” with the promotion of “Black-Asian solidarity” in the context of COVID-19. This lecture calls for defunding the police and for abolition.

• The Diseased Horde: Anti-Asian Racism from the 19th Century to COVID-19

Speaker: Ali Na, Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University

Anti-Asian discourses during COVID-19 are nothing new. Rather, they are media representations that have been repeated in the US and Canada since at least the 19th Century. Through these continually reemerging formations, Asians and Asian North Americans have been depicted as a diseased horde. Collapsing ethnicity and nationality, these images have sutured animality and impurity onto Asianness. Just as these racist imaginings have been “naturalized” through dominant cultural code, they have also been mobilized to spread hate through a public fear of contamination. From 19th Century print to 20th Century film and 21st Century digital culture, Anti-Asian sentiments have been fomented through eating taboos, charges of sexual aberration, and exotification. Trope frames North American culture, making new discourses appear true for both conservative and liberal members of society alike. Asians “as vectors of disease” resonates across society, creating the ideal conditions for both structural and interpersonal exclusions.

• Imagining Cop-Free Communities: An Asian American Feminist Teach-in

Speakers include: Dr. Vivian Truong, Mon Mohapatra, Will Depoo (DRUM NYC), Jason Wu (GAPIMNY), Shahana Hanif, and Kalaya'an Mendoza.

A virtual teach-in on responses to anti-Asian violence without police and organizing strategies for NYC

• Coming up on June 9th 2021! A Teach In: Envisioning Abolition in Our Local Asian-American Communities by the NYC Chinatown Art Brigade

Featured speakers include CAAAV Organizing Communities, Asian American Feminist Collective, Red Canary Song, 18 Million Rising, GenForward, and many more.

• Asian American Melancholia & Disassociation - from the Asian American Writers' Association: Academic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han first met in the mid-1990s when they were brought together by their collective sorrow by a spate of student suicides at Columbia University. Don’t miss this special discussion of their new book, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation (Duke University Press 2019), which explores the psychic trauma of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y who they associate respectively with melancholia and dissociation. Through critical race theory and psychoanalytic theory, Eng and Han explore the loss of migration, displacement, and assimilation, as well as Asian American tropes such as coming out, transnational adoption, and model minority stereotypes.

Readings

• Resources for non-Black Asians on Anti-Blackness (a public Google Doc)

• "The 'Asian exception' and the Scramble for Legibility: Toward an Abolitionist Approach to Anti-Asian Violence" by Dylan Rodriguez

• "What the Pandemic Means for Chinese Canadian Art Communities" by multiple artists and organizers in Canadian Art

• "Addressing Anti-Asian Racism, A Resource for Educators" by the Toronto District School Board and the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario

• "We Will Not be Used" from Where Is Your Body? by Mari Matsuda

• "Yellow Peril Revisited: Impact of SARS on the Chinese and Southeast Asian Canadian Communities", a report by Carrianne Leung

• Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 by Kay J. Anderson

• The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe

• Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics by Lisa Lowe

• Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America by David L. Eng

• Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

• Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms by Sherene Razack

• Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms by Frank B. Wilderson

• On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition by Rinaldo Walcott

Art

• Chinese students strike against segregated schools - Poster and essay by Clare Yow  

• 360 Tour of the 1907 Anti-Chinese Race Riots in Vancouver

• Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention

• Mass Capture - a web project on the Chinese head tax and "the making of non-citizens"

https://masscapture.ca/

• “We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril'' is a multimedia project inviting Asian-Americans to participate in reclaiming, and reasserting our own narratives, through telling our families’ stories of immigration, labor, discrimination, and resilience.

http://www.bettyyu.net/wewerehere

Film

• Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama (2009)

MOUNTAINS THAT TAKE WING features conversations that span 13 years between two formidable women whose lives and political work remain at the epicenter of the most important civil rights struggles in the US. Through the intimacy and depth of conversations, we learn about Davis, an internationally renowned scholar-activist and 88-year-old Kochiyama, a revered grassroots community activist and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize nominee's shared experiences as political prisoners and their profound passion for justice. On subjects ranging from the vital but largely erased role of women in social movements of the 20th century, community empowerment, to the prison industrial complex, war and the cultural arts, Davis' and Kochiyama's comments offer critical lessons for understanding our nation's most important social movements and tremendous hope for its youth and the future.

Completed through a post-production residency award at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Quan and Griffith co-edited the film with Paul Hill. 97 MINS, QUAD PRODUCTIONS 2009

• Abolition, Not Assimilation: A Retrospective of Christine Choy, presented by Third World Newsreel (Scroll to bottom)

• Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987)

Organizations

• Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network

https://www.butterflysw.org/

• Sign Butterfly's "Stop Bill 251" petition to resist anti-sex work legislation being pushed through in the guise of anti-human trafficking. https://www.butterflysw.org/stop-bill-251

• Sign the statement "8 Calls for Justice"in support of justice for migrant workers to honor the 8 murdered in Atlanta. https://www.butterflysw.org/8callsforjustice

• Check out Butterfly's online art exhibition, "5+ Years of Grassroots Power with Butterfly" https://www.butterflysw.org/online-art-exhibition

• Asian Canadian Labour Alliance

http://aclaontario.ca/

• Asian Canadian Women’s Alliance

https://acwa.ca/

• Chinese Canadian National Council-Social Justice

https://ccncsj.ca/

• Chinese Canadian National Council, Toronto Chapter

https://www.ccnctoronto.ca/

• National Association of Japanese Canadians

http://najc.ca/

• Tsuru