VAAAM | Asian American Art Activism Relational Map The Virtual Asian American Art Museum (VAAAM) is a multi-year, inter-institutional digital humanities project initiated and led by the following major partners: the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Libraries, Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian Institution, Bowdoin Art Museum, San Francisco State University, DePaul University, Tome, Artl@s/BasART, and Japanese American Service Committee in Chicago. Co-curated by Yvonne Fang and Alexandra Chang, the Asian American Art Activism Relational Map is an ongoing project to visualize the interconnections and collaborative nature of Asian American art movements and the ongoing landscape of Asian American art activism. Learn more and see the map at this link. If you’d like to add a resource to this map, fill out the survey here.
Feeling Asian | Asian-American Studies 201 Feeling Asian is a weekly podcast hosted by Youngmi Mayer and Brian Park, two Asian Americans with plenty of feelings about sex, dating, survival, self-worth, and everything in between. Named a top podcast of 2021 by CNN and featured on Apple and Spotify’s homepages, Feeling Asian offers a healthy and compassionate space for Asians, Asian Americans, and Asians in America to be themselves without feeling as if their time is a fleeting moment. New episodes are released every Wednesday. This episode features guests Dr. Russell Jeung (Professor at San Francisco State University, Founder of Stop AAPI Hate) and Anuradha Vikram (Curator and Faculty at UCLA, Co-Founder of Stop DiscriminAsian), who speak to event or timeline in Asian American history that has become misunderstood or revised along the way.
Digital Projects on the Black Experience Please view below a list of digital projects on the Black experience: Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History University of North Carolina https://vimeo.com/stonecenter The Black Bibliography Project https://blackbibliog.org/ eBlack Champaign Urbana http://eblackcu.net/portal/ Digital Black Bibliographic Project https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/175142 Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman in live motion https://www.upworthy.com/frederick-douglass-harriet-tubman-in-live-motion Civil Rights Movement Archive https://www.crmvet.org/ Digital Harlem http://digitalharlem.org/ Digital Schomburg https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/schomburg/digital-schomburg Black Past Digital Archives https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/digital-archives/ Mapping Police Violence https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ Digital slave voyages https://www.slavevoyages.org/ ASALH Digital Projects listed in Fire! https://www-jstor-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/stable/10.5323/fire.4.1.0134#metadata_info_tab_contents Digital Black History https://digitalblackhistory.com/ One million truths https://www.onemilliontruths.com/ Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/slavery-abolition-emancipation-and-freedom Black Stories Matter https://www.tmiproject.org/blackstoriesmatter/ Penn State Digital Projects and Exhibits https://digblk.psu.edu/ https://libraries.psu.edu/about/libraries/special-collections-library/digital-projects-and-exhibits Digital Archives in the Black Past https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/digital-archives/ Black Craftspeople Digital Archive https://blackcraftspeople.org/ Colored Conventions Project https://coloredconventions.org/ The Black Press http://blackpressresearchcollective.org/ Howard University – Black Newspapers https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/02/27/howard-university-digitize-archives-black-newspapers-history/6882445001/ Clark Atlanta University https://www.cau.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/doctor-philosophy-humanities/The-Center-for-Africana-Digital-Humanities.html University of Nottingham https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/c3r/research/digital-projects.aspx The digital abolitionist https://www.thedigitalabolitionist.com/ Las Vegas http://digital.library.unlv.edu/aae Center for Black Digital Research https://digblk.psu.edu/ Umbra Search: University of Minnesota https://www.umbrasearch.org/ Digital Projects Amistad Research Center https://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/digital-projects James Baldwin Digital Resource Guide https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/chez-baldwin/digital-resource-guide The Project on the History of Black Writing https://projecthbw.ku.edu/
NYT Op-Docs | MINK! — My Mom Fought For Title IX, but It Almost Didn’t Happen Fifty years ago, on June 23, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX, the 37-word snippet within the Educational Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex “under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” As the first woman of color elected to Congress, Ms. Mink — and her path to office — was influenced by the discrimination she experienced in her personal and professional lives. Many doors were closed to her as a Japanese American woman, and she became an activist and later a politician to change the status quo. In “MINK!,” Wendy Mink narrates her mother’s groundbreaking rise to power and the startling collision between the personal and political that momentarily derailed the cause of gender equity in America. After Ms. Mink’s death in 2002, Title IX was officially renamed the Patsy Takemoto Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.
SAADA | Social Media Creators Workshop On May 21, 2022, the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) brought together fourteen social media creators at HAPPYMONDAY Studio in NYC to engage with the archive and create new content based on stories from SAADA. Learn more here. We wanted to highlight more amazing content that our creators developed since SAADA’s Social Media Creators Workshop in NYC in May!Take a look on IG here: https://t.co/V54A8pCYRf pic.twitter.com/kmbuhte8Ca— SAADA (@SAADAonline) August 12, 2022
Hmonglish Hmonglish is a podcast that explores the intersection of Hmong and American culture. Co-hosts Chef Yia Vang and news anchor Gia Vang have lived their entire lives processing their Hmong-American identities. This program provides a space for them to explore this dual heritage while also educating the populace on Hmong culture with the help of guests and other members of their community. Listen to the podcast HERE or wherever you get your podcasts
Scene on the Radio | Seeing White Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it’s an old story. Why? Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for? Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. See the trailer below and listen to the entire series HERE
Asian Feminist Writing Workshop | Writings In 2021, the inaugural Feminist Writing Workshop was organized by Kundiman in collaboration with the Asian American Feminist Collective to foster a safe space for writers to explore the unique history of Asian American feminist writing and how it influences their own work. Kundiman is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American Literature. The Asian American Feminist Collective engages in intersectional feminist politics grounded within our communities, including those whose backgrounds encompass East, Southeast, and South Asian, Pacific Islander, multi-ethnic and diasporic Asian identities. Through public events and resources, AAFC seek to provide spaces for identity exploration, political education, community building, and advocacy. The Workshop’s syllabus, assigned readings, and curriculum are available online at this link. Following the Workshop’s conclusion, the cohort published To Us & Ours: An Asian American Feminist Collection. This collection of writing is available for download at this link. See below for the table of contents. Table of Contents: Dandelion Spell (For Safety), Ching-In ChenWakashu and Lost Traditions, Sam NakahiraTo the Daughters of War, Victoria HuynhFig Tree, MATNightswimming in August, Alyssa Mae CruzMasturbation, Pleasure & Feminist Politics, Fatema HaqueTo May, Linda Sachiko MorrisWe Have Names, danny ryuI’m a Public School Teacher and I Spent $500 to Take a Bath and Cry, Shivani DavéWork at TheCompany!, Anne Cong-HuyenPreserves, Amanda NavaUndoc Letters, goeunRain Pollen Fossil Record, Aishvarya AroraUntitled, Jas PerryLife & Pain, A Compilation, Erme MaulaPandemic Diary, Joy ChenMy Brother Tells Me Why I Love Q-Tips, Ashna AliEverything Beautiful, In Its Time, Hairol MaFlowers for the Living, Flowers for the Dead, Promiti Islam
AAAJ-Atlanta | #RememberingMarch16 Collective Statement & Toolkit This March 16 will be the one year anniversary of the murders of eight people, including size Asian women massage workers at spas in our metro Atlanta community. As the organization that led the rapid-response efforts to directly support victims, survivors, and their families, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta invites individuals and partner organizations to join in solidarity on march 12 for a day of remembrance, and to observe Wednesday, March 16 as a sacred day for quiet reflection. Sign-on to our collective statement by Wednesday, March 9. The statement will be released on on Saturday, March 12 and organizations who have signed on will be listed as co-signers. Observe, join, or organize solidarity events on March 12, 2021 in your local community. In Atlanta, AAAJ-Atlanta is co-hosting a community remembrance event with the Asian American Advocacy Fund alongside co-sponsors: Raksha, CPACS, Korean American Coalition, and New Georgia Project. Please share our solidarity day invitations with your networks. Use this community toolkit to uplift AAAJ-Atlanta’s 5-part art collaboration series dedicated to the one year remembrance.
EPIC | Pasifika Art Gallery: Reflection, Revival, (R)evolution Pasifika Art: Reflection, Revival, (R)evolution is a multimedia project grounded in the Samoan cultural practices of talanoa and teu le vā, meaning talk story and to care for the space that connects us. EPIC understands the critical role that art plays in articulating the realities of our communities while also creating space for dreaming of radically different futures Reflection has a duality that speaks to the need for PI’s to be seen and be in critical dialogue about our roles in social justice movements. Revival speaks to healing and the renewed energy that elders and youth are feeling in response to the pandemic and racial justice uprisings. (R)evolution is both a call to action and a meditation on the changes our communities have undergone due to colonization as well as the conscious decisions younger generations are making about what parts of culture to preserve and evolve. What We Heard The EPIC team crowdsourced responses to prompts issued through Instagram asking: Can you envision a world without police/prisons? Who or what makes you feel safe? WE TAKE CARE OF US. When asked what makes them feel safe, respondents told us about sisters, siblings, prayer circles, parents, friends, and family. Hundreds of times they named people and not systems. It’s clear that the abolition we want will require deep relationships that center community and connection. THE FUTURE WE WANT IS POSSIBLE. Though a strong majority of our respondents want abolition, the current state of the world has made it feel unattainable. We want to illustrate that it’s not only possible, in many ways it is already here. TOGETHER, WE HAVE THE POWER. This message and framework comes directly from Culture Surge’s The Storytellers’ Guide to Changing Our World. We disrupt traditional notions of power that are exploitative and instead inspire movement building towards a collective power because we know that liberation will require all of us. Click here to view the Art Gallery, including film screenings, commissioned artists, and an art contest.